Ministers have urged local authorities to help implement radical welfare reforms by drawing on existing pilot schemes to shape the flagship universal credit (UC).

Addressing a Local Government Association (LGA) event on 20 July, Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) minister, Lord Freud, said the Government was seeking to engender radical social change and to help people, ‘trapped and infantilised' by the current welfare system, to develop self-reliance and independence.