In truth, universal credit was doomed from the start.
The Right failed to see the poor as they were rather than as they wanted them to be. People are losing tenancies and going without food not only because universal credit is underfunded but because it imposes delays of five weeks or more before it pays anything at all to claimants.
The delays are a matter of deliberate policy. In 2010, rightwingers wanted poverty to be the result of chaotic lives, alcoholism, drug addiction and, above all, for this is was what got the religious right’s rocks off, the breakdown of traditional families. They blamed individuals, not the system.
A month’s wait for money would make the feckless pull themselves together and learn to live like members of the respectable middle class, who must wait a month for their first salary cheques when they take new jobs.
Leave aside, if you can, that much casual work isn’t paid monthly but weekly or daily, and that by definition if you don’t have money you don’t have savings to fall back on, and consider the lives of the actual poor. Alcoholics and other addicts are indeed chaotic, but the bulk of the working poor are hyper-organised to a degree that their more fortunate compatriots cannot imagine.
As Helen Barnard from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says, the mother who is running between childcare and serial part-time jobs, counting every penny in Aldi and watching every minute of her waking day lives a meticulously ordered existence.