Iain Duncan Smith was midway through complicated reforms that he has struggled to make work. In office he displayed a reforming zeal that mixed Victorian morality with a determination to tear up the bureaucratic framework underpinning the Department for Work and Pensions. It has been a troubled department, with five ministers for disabled people in six years. Aside from accusations of unfairness, Duncan Smith’s reforms have often been characterised by incompetence in their implementation, and a failure to save the money promised.

Universal credit

Duncan Smith’s flagship policy project was designed to transform the entire welfare state, simplifying six benefit streams into one payment and ensuring that people were always better off in work.

For years, Duncan Smith insisted the project was on time and on budget, promising it would be complete by March 2017 despite news of tens of millions of pounds of wasted IT investment and deadlines repeatedly missed. The department now says the benefit will be fully operational in March 2021 – but the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts further delays. Originally UC was intended to be more generous to claimants, but cuts to how much recipients can earn before their benefits start to be withdrawn have reversed this. Last month, the public accounts committee said it was “disappointed by the persistent lack of clarity and evasive responses by the department to our inquiries, particularly about the extent and impact of delays”, adding “the lack of transparency surrounding a programme with such wide-reaching implications for so many people is completely unacceptable”. The Institute for Fiscal Studies predicted the introduction of the benefit would cut annual benefit spending by £2.7bn in total, but would leave working families worse off, on average, with an estimated 2.1 million families facing an average loss of £1,600 a year.

People protest at Maximus UK, the US firm that have taken over the work capability assessment from Atos. Photograph: Peter Marshall/Demotix/Corbis

Work capability assessment and employment support allowance

A Labour policy, still being piloted when the Conservatives were elected in 2010, that Duncan Smith rolled out to 1.5 million people, despite advice that it was not fit for purpose. The policy introduced a computer-led fitness-for-work test, overseen by the controversial French IT firm Atos.

This policy was designed to save money by redefining the nature of disability – aiming to reclassify around 23% of previous recipients as well. Suddenly thousands of people who were previously ill or disabled enough to qualify for benefits were found fit for work. Initially the test was so faulty that some people with terminal cancer and severe learning disabilities were told they had to find work. Huge suffering was caused to people with serious disabilities who lost their benefits, hundreds of thousands of people went to court, and tribunals were clogged up with expensive appeals. There was anger at Duncan Smith’s mantra that he was ending the “something for nothing culture”, and the subtext that people who tried to claim sickness benefits were skiving. Mark Wood starved to death after being found fit for work and losing his benefits. One woman was told she should attend “intensive job-focused activity” – unfortunately she was in a coma. In 2013, MPs revealed that 1,300 people had died after being told they should start preparing to go back to work.

After a vote earlier this month, many of those receiving the benefit will see their weekly payments cut from £103 a week to £73 a week from April 2017, losing up to £1,500 a year. The cut was opposed by 60 national disability charities, who did “not accept the government’s reasoning that cutting disabled people’s benefits will ‘incentivise’ them to look for work”. Duncan Smith voted for the cut.

Personal independence payments

Replaced the old disability living allowance, but with a built-in 20% cut to the budget, announced in 2010. Paid to people in and out of work, to help people meet the extra cost of being disabled.

After huge backlogs in the roll-out of the scheme left thousands waiting for payments, the public accounts committee said the launch of the assessment system was “nothing short of a fiasco”, and accused the government of letting down “some of the most vulnerable in society”. Despite the intention to cut costs, the IFS calculated that the less generous PIP had led to an increase in costs. The latest cuts, announced last week (which now look like they may not go ahead), are designed to raise £4.4bn by 2020, and could see 370,000 people lose £3,500 a year.

Demonstration against the bedroom tax in Edinburgh in March 2013. Photograph: Alistair Linford / Rex Features

Bedroom tax

Referred to by the government as the “removal of the spare room subsidy”, designed to make families in rented accommodation, paid for by housing benefit, downsize. It was meant to reduce the housing bill and “bring fairness” back into the system.

Because of a shortage of smaller properties, many families have found it impossible to downsize and have been forced to make up the difference in rent, pushing many into arrears and debt. The policy was found by courts to discriminate against children with disabilities. A DWP-commissioned evaluation of the policy published in December found that not more than 8% of those affected had downsized and that 75% of those affected by the tax had cut back on food.

Benefit cap

A cap on the total amount that working-age families can receive in benefits, so that no one receives more in benefits than the average take-home pay of a family in work.

Initially, benefit payments were capped at £500 a week, but the chancellor announced last year that this would be reduced to £23,000 in London and £20,000 outside the capital. Civil servants warned that at least 40,000 children would fall into poverty as a result of the cap’s extension. Lady Hale, the deputy president of the supreme court, warned: “Claimants affected by the cap will, by definition, not receive the sums of money which the state deems necessary for them adequately to house, feed, clothe and warm themselves and their children.”

David Clapson was found dead after his benefits were stopped on the grounds that he wasn’t taking the search for work seriously. Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Sanctions

The DWP has increased the use of sanctions – financial penalties, stopping benefit payments for a minimum of four weeks – for claimants who miss appointments or breach job centre rules.

When churches linked the rise in food-bank use with the rise in sanctions (over 1 million unemployed claimants were sanctioned in 2014), Duncan Smith responded by mocking the Anglican church’s “dwindling relevance”. The impact on recipients has often been catastrophic, with high-profile victims such as David Clapson, who died after he was sanctioned. There was almost no food in his house when he died and an autopsy revealed his stomach was empty. Officials advised Duncan Smith to review the use of benefit sanctions, warning that there was little evidence to suggest that the harsh policy was helping unemployed claimants into work.

The work programme

A radical £5bn payment-by-results initiative, contracting dozens of private companies – such as G4S and Ingeus – as well as a few charities, to provide what David Cameron promised would be the “biggest, boldest effort to get people off benefits and into work that this country has ever seen”.

The scheme is cheaper than its predecessors, but 70% of work programme participants are still not getting long-term jobs; the work and pensions select committee concluded in October: “We must do much better.” The scheme is not working well for people with “complex barriers to employment”, often those with mental health problems and disabilities. The DWP, however, describes the programme as a “real success” that offers better value for money than previous schemes.

Child poverty

Duncan Smith scrapped the legally binding child poverty target and replaced it with a new definition of poverty – a “life chances” indicator.

He introduced a new duty to report levels of educational attainment, worklessness and addiction, rather than how much money a family had (although, under pressure from Labour, the government had to back down and will still have to publish data on the percentage of children living below the poverty line). The DWP will still have copies of the Broken Britain reports compiled by the Centre for Social Justice, which Duncan Smith founded. Duncan Smith was convinced that poverty was about more than money – but rooted in “dysfunctional” families, who he said were growing in number “by nature of the fact they have high numbers of children, and their children go on to have high numbers of children, and early.” He introduced the married couples’ tax allowance, to encourage marital stability.

Often conflating poverty and neglect, he worried about the impact on children’s brains, basing his concerns on controversial science and using grainy pictures of brain scans to make his point. “There is a physical effect taking place in children growing up in abusive households, in places where they witness a lot of abuse, perhaps their mum having different, multiple partners. These children’s brains will develop physically at a rate which is quite different from those who are growing up in a normal, balanced environment.”