Amid all of the sound and fury surrounding the government’s attempts to change the UK’s benefits system, sight of the grand strategy of entitlement reform was lost this week.

First, a recap. The dramatic interventions of the House of Lords put paid to a couple of the cabinet’s initial skirmishes; plans to cap the benefits that can be claimed by a single household to £26,000pa were stymied by an amendment which has caused child benefits to be excluded, essentially rendering the policy pointless (as the £26,000pa cap is impossible to reach without child benefits being a factor). In a further incursion, the Lords blocked a plan to make single parents pay for the right to claim child support from their absentee coeval. Earlier, the Lords had also dispatched some of the more egregious depredations planned for the Disability Living Allowance in the aftermath of the Responsible Reform (“Spartacus”) Report (pdf). All in all, it’s been a series of bloody defeats for the government in the House of Lords.

Taken individually, you could quite justifiably suggest that the government was acting in a manner that was arbitrarily and deliberately malicious to single mothers, the disabled and the unemployed. Of course I couldn’t possibly comment.

But these individual battles do take place in the context of a wider war. The government wants their benefits to carry a smaller price tag, and are unrepentant about the fact that this will require a reduction in the overall levels of benefits paid out. However, the endgame also features a few policies with real value, including a promise of the holy grail of benefits reform.

Firstly, it’s important to look at the idea of the Universal Credit (£) as a principle. In short, the Universal Credit rolls most existing benefits – including income support, jobseeker’s allowance, disability living allowance, child benefits and housing benefits – into a single means-tested benefit.

This isn’t a massively new idea. The DWP has been pushing the benefits of a universal credit internally since the end of the Major government, and it has been the recommendation of most benefits-focused think tanks and organisations at some point over the last two decades. The reason why it doesn’t exist already owes a lot to the nature of politics in the UK. One of the main criticisms levelled against the last Labour government was that it failed to take the Work and Pensions brief seriously. This was symptomatic of the way that Blair in particular organised his cabinets: positions were often allocated on the basis of loyalty rather than expertise, and as a result the position of Secretary of State in what became the DWP was treated as a political stepping stone rather than an office with an actual function. Part of the problem is that Work and Pensions is not one of the sexy Offices of State – it lacks the glamour of the Foreign Office, or the power of the Home Office or the Chancellery. The benefits portfolio is massive – accounting for by far the largest portion of government spending – and one that it is almost impossible to succeed in.

Whatever criticisms can be levelled against Iain Duncan Smith, however – and there are many – he is the first Secretary of State that the DWP has had since well before Thatcher that both supports the premise of a benefits structure and possesses a practical interest and knowledge in its workings. He is not a careerist – he has lead his party and has no aspirations. That alone is important for one reason: the continued presence of an interested Minister means that, for the first time in decades, there is a genuine interest in reform.

The shift to a Universal Credit comes with some positive and negative consequences, but responses have split – as everything does, these days – along strictly tribal lines. So before we go too much further, this needs to be said: the idea of a universal credit has held a position of logical necessity for almost every expert in the field of benefits reform for nearly thirty years. The specifics of implementation are important and worth more rigorous consideration, but the raw benefits and disadvantages of a universal credit go deeper than political ideologies.

First, pros. The administration of a single universal credit scheme would be massively more manageable than the bloated manpower infrastructure and costs generated by the DWP, which is something like the fifth largest employer in the UK today. If the government has to cut costs then this is an unambiguous win – every penny that can be saved in benefit administration is a penny that doesn’t have to be cut from the benefits themselves. A massively detailed pdf by Gareth Morgan suggests that those who require benefits for a single reason would find themselves better off under the scheme. More will be done on a sliding scale, meaning that benefits can be more flexible to recipient’s needs, rather than the currently rather inflexible scheme that sees millionaire pensioners automatically receiving bus passes. Finally, the single universal credit has the big advantage of removing the delineation between different types of benefit, and thus the attached stigma that comes with specificity.

Then there are cons. While the recipients of single benefits would on the whole be better off, those who claim multiple benefits – child support and disability living allowance, for example, will find their net benefits decreased, although they will also find the process of applying for the single benefit more straightforward than the current melange. On that subject, however, means testing is controversial. That dispute is also varied in quality – some assert that it is a way of bullying recipients into accepting less, some claim that it’s a more direct way of objectively evaluating and eliminating scroungers – but either way, it is indisputable that means testing results in lower payments overall. Importantly, given the government’s recent record of aggression towards claimants, a wholesale switch in systems can be used as a trojan horse to sneak benefit cuts in through the back door. And finally, while the operation costs of a universal credit are much lower, the implementation costs are high. The Chancellor is reportedly relaxed about this, but there are reports that some of the more extreme attacks on existing benefits levels are being added at his behest, so it is unclear whether the calculus will change for him if the Lords continue to work in exclusions.

Finally, the risk of any change to the benefit system is the accompanying rhetoric. Whatever happens, expect more fulminating about scroungers.

So the devil remains in the details. On balance, a universal credit’s benefits outweigh its depredations – any negative impact on overall benefit levels can be counteracted from the massive stack of money that will be saved from operation costs. Whether you trust the current government to pass a policy that works as benignly – or think you can count on the House of Lords to stand in the way of the worst excesses – is another issue.