universal credit childcare costs directly to childcare providers. This would take the burden away from parents and give providers a more certain incomes. Frank Field said, "It's not just driving parents into despair and debt and creating problems for childcare providers – it's also actively working to prevent the government achieving its own aim of getting more people into work." The High Court ruled in January 2019 that the DWP "wrongly interpreted" regulations covering the calculation of Universal Credit payments in cases where working claimants' paydays fluctuated. The DWP's interpretation had meant receiving a salary a few days early because of a weekend or bank holiday "vastly reduced" one's universal credit payment, a situation the judges described as "odd in the extreme" that "could be said to lead to nonsensical situations". The DWP had defended this anomaly by saying that changing its automated system would be expensive. The Child Poverty Action Group said the anomaly had caused "untold hardship, stress and misery" and forced one of the working single mothers in the case to rely on food banks, despite requiring fresh fruit and vegetables due to pregnancy. In February 2019, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Amber Rudd, conceded that "there were challenges with the initial roll-out of universal credit. The main issue which led to an increase in food bank use could have been the fact that people had difficulty accessing their money early enough". Rudd went on to explain that "We have made changes to accessing universal credit so that people can have advances, so that there is a legacy run-on after two weeks of housing benefit, and we believe that will help with food and security". Direct payments to tenants Direct payment of the housing component of Universal Credit (formerly Housing Benefit) to tenants has been the subject of controversy. Although Housing Benefit has long been paid to most private sector tenants directly, for social housing tenants it has historically been paid directly to their landlords. As a result, implementation of a social housing equivalent to the Local Housing Allowance policy, which has been present in the private sector without comment for over a decade, has widely been perceived as a tax on having extra bedrooms, rather than the tenant making up a shortfall in the rent arising from a standardisation of their level of benefit. The Social Security Advisory Committee have argued that the