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Mr. Derek Foster: If the situation is as the Minister says, why did the ombudsman draw particular attention in his latest report to the deterioration in the quality of service given and make the point that it was due to staff reductions? The ombudsman stated that staff numbers have so reduced that the service is not able to give the same quality of service, and he is receiving far more complaints.
Mr. Willetts: I have studied the ombudsman's latest report carefully and I cannot find in it evidence to sustain the assertion that appeared in the press notice. We take careful notice of anything that the ombudsman says, as he is an officer serving the House, but I do not accept the assumption that the way to measure the quality of output is by measuring the input. The challenge for the private sector is to improve the quality of service that it offers customers while not spending more on overheads and running costs. We should expect the same of the public service.
Mr. Rowe: I am sure that my hon. Friend would remove a miasma of anxiety if he were able to confirm that, if a private sector provider won the contract and made a horlicks of it in some way, the cost of making that mistake would not fall on the scheme but on the company providing the administration.
Mr. Willetts: I can give my hon. Friend the assurance that he seeks. Nothing in the proposals will in any way affect the benefits payable to civil servants. That leads me to the short speech from the hon. Member for Newbury (Mr. Rendel).
Mr. Rendel: If what I gather is nowadays described as a horlicks were made by the company concerned, that might include problems such as I mentioned in which somebody was paid very late. Does the Minister agree that late payment would affect the pensioner concerned?
Mr. Willetts: The hon. Gentleman, while he has protested great concern about this subject, does not seem
to understand the basic elementary points of what we propose. The proposals cover the administration of the scheme for current civil servants. That has nothing to do with the payment of pensions to former civil servants. The proposals in the order concern entirely the administration of the scheme for current civil servants and are nothing to do with Paymaster's function of paying out benefits and pensions to retired civil servants.
Dr. John Marek (Wrexham): I am sorry to speak now, but I honestly thought that one or two Conservative Members would rise to support the Minister. Alas, I fear that that is not the case. The right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (Sir E. Heath), in a well-meaning way, tried to put the Government back on the rails. I agreed completely with the right hon. Gentleman because he got to the nub of the problem. I dissent from the conclusion that he drew, because he was trying to guide the Conservative party to a line that would enable it to remain in office. As an Opposition Member, I cannot agree with that, but if the Government insist on continuing with their dogma--the word has been used on several occasions by different right hon. and hon. Members--it is likely that they will be turfed out at the next general election, whenever they have enough courage to call one.
The issue centres on providing service rather than profits. I concur with the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup because, for a substantive reply from some Government Departments--not all--I now have to wait not two or three months, except on rare occasions, but two, three or four weeks. In the Department of Social Security, for example, the time that civil servants have to give care to their answers and to work out the arithmetic about individual claimants is minimal, the result of which is that the number of mistakes made in that Department multiplies from day to day. That is a sorry state of affairs. The country should expect accuracy and efficiency from civil servants, and they should reply to letters in a reasonable time.
It is all very well having charters for this and charters for that, but if replies are not accurate, if the figures are wrong, and constituents have to go to their Members of Parliament, who then have to write again to the social security department or to the Secretary of State for Social Security, that is not good for the country or for my constituents, because of the extra work and administration.
That is the nub of the problem. I expect the civil service to be staffed sufficiently to be able to produce accurate, proper and quick answers to my constituents' questions. I fear that, during the past six or seven years, with cuts--another per cent. here, or another per cent. there--they have not been receiving that service.
The Minister made a glib speech. I hope that he will not mind my saying so--I do not mean this in any rude way--but he did not address the questions that the proposal raises. He talked about the civil service scheme and the fact that the benefits that civil servants receive would not be affected, regardless of whether the scheme was hived off to the private sector for administration
purposes. What he did not talk about--not once--was the effect that it would have on the taxpayer, the ordinary member who pays taxes in the United Kingdom.
If the scheme was hived off to the private sector and a mess--I do not want to use the word horlicks--of the scheme was made, and if the civil servants did not lose any of the pension entitlements as, rightly, they should not, the country would have to foot the bill. I am not sure that the computing system for the scheme is ready yet--there are questions about whether it is in place.
If the scheme were to be hived off, is the advantage anything other than saving money? If it is, when the market testing goes ahead, will the Minister set parameters that at least assure some hon. Members that standards of service will be met? The Minister did not mention that. He may not have wanted to. Some standards of service could be identified to ensure that the civil service pensioner will receive the same service as now, when the scheme is being administered by the civil service. I am talking, for example, about acknowledgements of a pensioner's letter by return of post, about substantive replies being given within two or three weeks and, more important, some statistics about the accuracy and helpfulness of those replies.
The simple straightforward question, which addresses directly the problem raised by the right hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup, is whether there is a possibility of marrying the desire of a private company to make profits for its shareholders with the ability to provide standards of service that can be guaranteed and in which civil service pensioners can have confidence when the specifications for the market testing are produced. I do not know. I rather doubt it. This is a matter of service as opposed to profit. Administration of the scheme should be left in the hands of those who have administered it extremely well over the past decades. That is an important question and I am sorry that the Minister has not answered it.
I come now to the second point--[Interruption.] Conservative Members are fed up with me. [Interruption.] Some hon. Members are not even in the Chamber. They should keep quiet or move into the Chamber, because that is the way in which we do things in the House of Commons. Half a million civil servants are interested in who will administer their pension scheme. It is a great pity--I see that my own Whip is now telling me to wind up my speech, but I shall make an important point before I do. It will not take long. If hon. Members pay attention, I hope that they will learn something, or at least have something to think about.
My second point is straightforward but important. In the private sector, there has recently been a spate of conversions of mutual societies to banks and so forth. People are balloted before any change is made in their mortgage arrangements and, following Maxwell, before any change has been made in the administration of private sector pensions, all pensioners have been balloted on whether they agree with the change.
My challenge to the Minister is very simple: is he prepared to ballot civil servants after the changes have been agreed, or recommended, to find out whether those who will be affected accept the changes? That is a straightforward, simple question. Unfortunately, the Minister has not answered it. There are two points there--[Interruption.] I am asked what the third point is, but there is no third point. We must get on.
First, there is the question of service. Can the Minister assure the House that standards of service will be set if the administration passes to the private sector? Secondly, will he have the guts, the decency and the respect for civil servants to ballot them before the provisions are enacted?
Question put:--
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