The cost of delivering Iain Duncan Smith’s troubled Universal Credit scheme is £225,000 for each person on it, it has been claimed The project has already cost the taxpayer £612million and has been dogged by delays and IT blunders. Mr Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, had promised one million people would be receiving their welfare payments under the scheme by April this year. But figures show only 2,720 claimants have been transferred onto the Universal Credit so far - a cost of £225,000 per person. The universal credit bundles together the six main benefits - jobseeker’s allowance, income support, employment and support allowance, working tax credit, child tax credit and housing benefit - into a single payment. In September 2103, Mr Duncan Smith told Parliament it would be delivered “on time and within budget”. But the roll-out has been delayed three times and is now only available under a small number of pilot schemes. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/iain-duncan-smiths-universal-credit-3115946#ixzz2u3Wj7V9B Universal Credit: Government's welfare reform ‘may be scrapped after next election’ The future of the Government’s major £2bn welfare reform was thrown into fresh doubt on Wednesday night after it emerged that just a handful of claimants have been enrolled into the new system. The Department for Work and Pensions disclosed that only 3,200 people had been signed up to receive Universal Credit – a fraction of the original target – at a cost of nearly £200,000 per person. The figure emerged amid claims the next government could be forced to pull the plug on Universal Credit, which has already been seriously delayed following IT problems. The new credit, which combines six working-age benefits and credits into a single payment, has been championed by Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, as a way of ensuring the unemployed always have an incentive to find a job. Under his original timetable, 1 million people would be receiving the payment by April, rising to 1.7 million a year later. But the DWP admitted that only 3,200 had been enrolled for Universal Credit by the end of November, nearly all of them as part of a pilot scheme in four job centres in the North-West of England. The vast majority are young single jobseekers, the least complicated category of claimant. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/universal-credit-governments-welfare-reform-may-be-scrapped-after-next-election-9139458.html