THREE YEARS ago, Dawn Primarolo (the Paymaster General) and I appeared together on Question Time on BBC One. The programme was being filmed, weirdly, in an agricultural hall with a tin roof. As rain began to hammer down, we felt as if we were sitting under a giant pneumatic drill. It was extremely distracting, though doubtless the microphones were positioned so that viewers at home could not hear what we were hearing.

Ms Primarolo performed pretty lamentably from the start. But at one point, she completely lost her thread. “I’m sorry, it’s raining,” she explained rather lamely. Afterwards she was distraught at how badly she had done. Presumably she feared that her new Labour bosses would fire her for the ultimate sin: poor presentation.

Today she deserves to be fired for a far greater sin, though it is not clear that her bosses recognise it as such. Shockingly, particularly for a Labour minister, she has presided over a system that has condemned hundreds of thousands of our poorest citizens to great anxiety and distress and, in some cases, virtual penury.

Ms Primarolo cannot claim she was not warned. Ever since the tax credit system was mooted, experts have predicted that it would be too complex both for claimants to understand and for the Revenue to administer.

What is more, awards are made entirely automatically by computer, with no human oversight, which was bound to lead to large numbers of undiscovered computer errors. The recipients — hardly educated to tax accountant level — are expected to spot the mistakes for themselves. But even when they do, the Revenue is so woefully unprepared for human communication that helplines are constantly engaged, letters go unanswered and calls unreturned. The helpline advise rs, when they do answer the phone, are not even able to call up the claimant’s whole history on screen or to look at their tax credit awards.

Worse, when the Revenue calculates the wrong level of credit, any overpayments are clawed back later by the computer, sometimes drastically reducing the income of people who rely on the money to make ends meet. Often these people have rung the helpline several times to say they were worried that the payments were too high, and have been reassured that they were correct.

All these problems could have been foreseen. And the consequences are heart-rending. Two devastating reports this week, from the Parliamentary Ombudsman and Citizens Advice, contain case studies that make you want to weep at the callousness and ineptitude of the system.

Here is one story of a woman whose working tax credit was wrongly terminated and not restarted for three months: “It has caused me financial difficulty for three months: rent, gas etc. Also the stress has caused me to have violent headaches and become very depressed. I have had to borrow money to pay my rent as the landlord was threatening me with eviction — at which point I broke down in the local tax office. It has caused me so much stress and depression.”

Another claimant had given up her job to care for her severely disabled daughter. “I am at my wit’s end,” she says. “I have tried for over a year to ensure that the Revenue have the correct information. Each time I telephone, I speak to a different person. All confirm they will correct whatever error has been made and each time an award notice arrives it contains another error. I have provided correct details at least ten times. My life has been turned upside down . . . I am now told that I have been overpaid by over £5,000 and that I have to repay it from this year’s award. I have become ill through this worry.”

One woman tried 77 times to contact the helpline to alert officials to a computer error but was unable to get through. She then sent a recorded delivery letter, which was not acted upon. Eventually, five months later, she managed to talk to a helpline operator who told her that she would only be paid £11.53 a week instead of the correct amount of £64. This caused severe problems as she could no longer afford her children’s nursery fees.

The trouble is that, while all these delays take place, the claimants’ credit is being cut, often to levels well below the poverty line, on which they simply cannot subsist. The ombudsman believes that at “a very conservative estimate” there have been at least 250,000 families who have been overpaid because of Revenue errors and are having the money clawed back.

This process may even be illegal. Richard Drabble, QC, an expert in public law, believes that to recover overpayments automatically, without first assessing whether the Revenue was at fault and the claimant could reasonably have thought their award was correct, is unlawful.

And the human cost is terrible. The two reports tell of people who have been forced to stop work because they could not pay for their childcare, of people whose homes were repossessed because they could not meet their mortgage payments. Was this anti-poverty measure really designed to tip people out of a job and out of a home? No, Gordon Brown, its architect, was determined that it should “make work pay” and give people a “seamless” and predictable stream of income through the year. For many claimants it has done exactly the opposite.

The Chancellor was allowed free rein with his tax credits, even though No 10 always had its doubts about their cost and efficacy. And he has resisted repeated attempts by the Prime Minister to demote Ms Primarolo, who is clearly not up to her job. As well as being incompetent, she has also proved astonishingly complacent in the face of repeated complaints about the system.

If Mr Brown is still shielding her from the sack, he should examine his conscience. Which does he care about most? The plight of the poor? Or the plight of a time-serving, over-promoted, inept ministerial supporter?

maryann.sieghart@thetimes.co.uk

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