Universal Credit (2013-2016)
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The public conversation around Universal Credit (UC) has understandably focused on the political and human impact of cuts to benefit levels. But behind this, there’s a largely untold success story about iterative user-centred ways of working. UC is a rare example of turning around a huge programme that was “heading for nowhere but the rocks.”
A reset of the service design and delivery approach moved away from a typically linear, waterfall major programme to a much more Radical How. The results were striking.
UC was the biggest reform of the UK benefits system since 1948, combining six working-age benefits into one and comprehensively overhauling the technological, operational, and policy underpinnings of welfare provision. It was the Coalition Administration’s flagship domestic policy. Yet after three years, the programme had spent £425 million, gone through five Senior Responsible Owners, and had not delivered a working service to a single claimant.
To begin the turnaround, a brand-new team was set up, independent from the existing programme and incumbent suppliers. This team was initially very small—no more than 15 people—and located in a different building to the rest of the 1,500-strong programme team. There was no attempt to reset within the existing programme structure; doing so would not have been possible.
Outcomes over outputs
A crucial moment for the new team was the Secretary of State saying to them: “I want you to deliver an intervention that means we support more people to find more work, more of the time, while protecting those who can’t work.”
Note the difference between this and: “I want you to deliver Universal Credit.”
The Minister set a clear outcome for the team to achieve, not a named policy for them to deliver.
The clarity of intent and focus on outcome over output set a marker for what the team would be held accountable for. It equally made clear that the ministerial role was not to opine on the details of implementation based on assumptions and hunches. This new approach combined accountability for outcomes with autonomy for the team in determining how to deliver them.
Multi-disciplinary teams
The team set itself up differently.
Rather than separating the policy, technology, and operational delivery functions (which were even based in different parts of the country), the new team brought those disciplines together in one, co-located team. Physical co-location was thought to be essential in pre-pandemic days. Since then, the experience of similarly successful and geographically spread teams like the Vaccines Taskforce has shown that while some physical co-location is hugely valuable, new tools and ways of working make highly effective dispersed teams a practical possibility.
The team included people with digital and technology skills, including service design, user research, content design, product management, and internet-era technology. Day-to-day, it was led by a triumvirate of policy, product, and operational experience. Most of the early team were full-time public servants, but some were from suppliers. External staff were fully integrated into the team, so that you couldn’t see the joins.
Test-and-learn approach
The test-and-learn approach was designed to maximise the amount of learning about what would and wouldn’t work in reality, at pace.
Universal Credit was initially tested as a complete end-to-end service with a pilot group of just 100 claimants in a single postcode area in Sutton, south London. This area was carefully selected to test whether the assumptions the team had made about the core proposition were correct. Doing so revealed unanticipated challenges within weeks, such as how payments information was displayed to claimants, or what the definition of a ‘couple’ was (a semantic point that had meaningful policy consequences). Over time, the team tested the core proposition with larger groups. Next, the team started to test assumptions about how that proposition could be scaled nationally.
That small team eventually replaced the first unsuccessful version of the programme. It then scaled up by adding more teams, each focused on specific tasks or problems.
Today, Universal Credit serves over five million households across the UK. It has become a world-leading example of how to build successful user-centric public services at scale. It was a dog that didn’t bark during the Covid-19 pandemic; despite a sudden ten-fold increase in demand, the service stayed standing when it was needed most. That would not have happened without that fundamental reset in 2013 and the application of a Radical How thereafter.