Examination of witnesses (Questions 220
- 247)
THURSDAY 21 MAY 1998
MR PETER
MATHISON, MR
STEVE HEMINSLEY
and MR TONY
EDGE
220. But you cannot provide any feedback
to the MP?
(Mr Mathison) I understand, the rules, the policy
we operate under, I am not quite sure whether it is legal, I can
follow that up, that we are not allowed to disclose individual
information, information that is personal to that individual.[10]
Ms Hewitt
221. If I may, just one question on this
point. At the very least, it must be possible to say to the Member
of Parliament, "Thanks very much. After several months of
investigation, we have referred the matter to the Crown Prosecution
Service", if that is the case; because if a prosecution is,
in fact, brought, that is in the public domain?
(Mr Mathison) I would need to check whether, in
those circumstances, we can, because if somebody is prosecuted
that is generally reported in the public domain; so I need to
check up on what circumstances we could, if that were the case,
where it is in the public domain, but, apart from the law, I am
conscious it is a very sensitive area about protection of the
individual. We obviously get some allegations which are unfounded,
because people see things happening and believe the person is
defrauding us, and by the very nature of the complexity of some
of our benefits they are not.
Mr Wicks: But I find
that, virtually in all other domains, even in more sensitive areas,
if I write a letter or make a phone call, the education department,
social services department, the police, will come back and there
will be some feedback, often, on a confidential basis; but here
you write, you get the standard reply, which sometimes does not
even address the issue you have raised, to be blunt, and I have
no confidence that the thing is being followed through. Now it
may be that it is being followed through, but I would really ask
you to look at the law and take some guidance on this, to see
whether or not, in the future, you might not give some feedback.
Chairman: Actually,
as a law-man in another incarnation, I can understand the difficulties.
I watched this programme, Malcolm, I was put under quite a bit
of heavy pressure. There were admissions made on that programme,
this was not a question of people—it was somebody saying,
"I am deliberately and calculatingly defrauding the system,
I know I am doing this and I am not going to stop." In spite
of the persuasive powers of the Member for Croydon, they maintained
this position throughout the entire programme, and I cannot see
that that can possibly be in the same category as the kind of
cases that you are dealing with, which I understand have to be
dealt with really quite carefully.
Mr Goggins
222. It is to do with fraud; the first question,
of two, might be a bit naïve, but the Benefit Integrity Project
inquiry we did has taught me not to leave anything to chance when
it comes to fraud. When you say £2.3 billion is the target,
goal, for the year, that does not double count fraud that has
been uncovered in the previous year, or does it; it is completely
fresh, new, newly discovered fraud?
(Mr Mathison) Yes; but I would not want to lengthen
this hearing by explaining WBS.
223. No; all I want to know is that the
fraud you uncovered last year is not being carried over and being
put to this year's achievement?
(Mr Mathison) No; it is the fraud that we identify
in a particular period of time, and that is what is evaluated
in that.
224. Thanks for that. The second question
is, in that figure of £2.3 billion, how much DLA fraud is
built into that figure?
(Mr Mathison) We do not set the figure on the
basis of benefits, we set the figure around the activities that
we are carrying out, so it is not set against a particular benefit,
it is set against the activities we carry out; so that stems in
part from the funding arrangements with Treasury, that it was
a `spend to save' package, so they asked for details of particular
investments which were expected to produce a return. So it is
organised around the type of activity we carry out, so new claims
visits has money provided by Treasury, under a total Security
Control package; within that there is this range of activities,
two pages of them, and each one has an expectation of what may
be detected through that work. Some of them have no fraud savings
out of it, one or two, they are things that we need to get into
the infrastructure, but the vast majority are on a `spend to save'.
225. Because, there was a `Spend to Save'
Initiative, in relation to DLA, based on this figure of the potential
£499 million of fraud; we found that that is virtually next
to nothing. We really need to know whether that kind of thinking
is built into that £2.3 billion?
(Mr Mathison) We can provide some information
to show how the £2.3 billion is broken down.[11]
(Mr Heminsley) Most of the Initiatives, just looking
at last year, are quite generic things, like DCI clean-up, investment
in the hot-line facility that we have for people to ring in, anonymously
or otherwise, investment in additional activity around the local
fraud teams, management information, in some cases; some of these
are quite small investments but they are important as enablers
for the broader work which should be going on within the benefits
themselves. So it is not a list of, "Here's a list of, benefit
by benefit, what we're going to do year on year."
Mr Goggins: It would
be interesting to have that information then, thank you.
Chairman
226. Would that be possible?
(Mr Mathison) Yes.
Mr Goggins: That is
very kind; thank you.
Chairman: I think
Patricia would like to just ask some questions about Benefit Payment
Card and then we have got some advice and information things that
Karen, I think, wants to explore.
Ms Hewitt
227. Just one question on the card. You
had a very small trial that started 18 months ago, and a somewhat
larger one that started 12 months ago; how are those trials being
evaluated, what are the early results, and when are you going
to publish the evaluation?
(Mr Mathison) I have seen the expression "pilot"
used; they are trials of specific releases of software. The overall
system is a huge, complex system, it involves the BA and the Post
Office, so there is development around the card aspects of the
programme and there is also development for the Post Office around
the counter side of it, and I cannot quite remember what they
call that project. So the trial is limited to a certain number
of offices, post offices, around release of the software, because
they are developing the software progressively; so the functionality
that is available in that release is limited and therefore cannot
be rolled out further. We had a further release from the initial
sort of very small number of offices, we had a further release,
I think, called 1C, there is a release scheduled for later this
year called Release 2, but then there is a further functionality
required beyond that to commence roll-out across the country.
228. So these are software trials, not service
trials, as it were?
(Mr Mathison) No, they are software trials.
229. In that case, can I ask one other question,
which is, is the Department considering or engaged in discussions
about moving away from the Benefit Card concept to a different
approach of trying to extend bank account usage amongst benefit
claimants?
(Mr Mathison) The Minister of State has talked
about social banking, but it is very, very early, in terms of
that. We are concentrating on ensuring that the next release of
software is available and that the Post Office is geared up to
starting roll-out. On the Benefits Agency side, we have been focused
on both (a) supporting that, but, more importantly, starting to
convert customer details from the individual benefit systems onto
what I called before Personal Details Computer System. In order
to make payments through the card, we need customer details held
once, not in five different systems. Child Benefit was the first
system; that is now fully loaded, and I cannot quite remember
how many records but there are many millions of Child Benefit
records, seven million records are now loaded, but they can only
be used in those particular post offices at the moment, because
of where the software is. Over Easter, we released a major release
on Income Support and we have started to bulk transfer Income
Support customer details onto PDCS.
230. Let me just stop you there, and I am
sorry, Chair, but just one more question. When and how are you
going to find out whether, for instance, paying Child Benefit
by Benefit Card gives you reduced fraud and increased customer
satisfaction, or not?
(Mr Mathison) The early indications from a limited
trial are that it does reduce fraud, in that we have picked up
a very limited, very few, less than a handful, I think, from memory,
cases where there was an issue about encashment. But we know,
from some work that has been done around customers, and staff,
actually, in terms of making changes, that they see benefits from
the card; in particular, it means that when there is a change
in the benefit rate we do not have to recall the order book and
then send a new order book out. That gets us in a real mess at
times, because the time elapsed overlaps and then we have to make
another—you know better than I do the problems; but it is
so small a sample of what we are doing that it is not sufficient
yet to validate that. The release of software is an early release
which does not cover all the things we would need to do when we
are paying 15 million people a week through 19,000 post offices.
Chairman: Can we turn
to advice and information. I think Karen has got some questions
on that important area.
Ms Buck
231. In the Business Plan, you emphasise
the aim to "improve the way we provide advice and information
focusing on the needs of the individual customer." Could
you tell us how you turn that very worthy-sounding aim into a
goal, how do we actually assess what is lacking in the service
at the moment, in terms of providing the right kind of advice
and information to people?
(Mr Mathison) Major work is around the thing we
are in the process of taking through. We have something called
Project Access, which was starting with a clean sheet of paper,
which was looking from the customer's end, the customer's perspective,
is what information do they need, how do they need it provided
and what alternative means are there of providing it; and we did
preliminary work on that, consulting with a range of people. In
December, we issued a letter and consultation paper to all Members
of Parliament, 20,000 community advisers, who are on our BA publicity
register, all Grade 7s in the Department, and had a cascade down
within the organisation against those preliminary ideas we had.
We have had responses from some of those consultation things we
sent out; fairly limited. We are doing further work on that. We
will be making a presentation at a national forum we are having
in June or July, and that is around presenting the information
from the customer's perspective, rather than what suits us. We
expect that the number of leaflets and advice things that we have
will reduce from around 120, of which quite a lot overlap and
duplicate, down to around 40, and that is the main plank of the
work we are doing; we will involve the voluntary groups, and particularly
the CABx I would want to involve, in looking through how we are
doing that. We are also looking at alternative ways we make that
information available, so it is not just in leaflets and the written
form. We have a Website, so it is available through Internet.
We have set up links with the CABx in Scotland, and I am anxious
that we extend some trials into the south of the Kingdom, around
a system we have, called IBIS (Integrated Benefits Information
System), which is an information system which has information
about all the benefits and also has information about better-off
calculations. So that instead of us developing information and
the CABx totally separate from each other, particularly the CABx,
we look at how we can work together to best provide that information.
232. So two follow-up questions. First,
what is the programme, what is the budget attached to these kinds
of advice improvements?
(Mr Mathison) I do not know the figure, offhand,
I will provide it to you. The timetable is that we will do further
consultation over the next few months, and we progressively start
it, from memory, start to do some of the things around the latter
part of this year. But I will provide a more detailed note on
that.[12]
233. We have actually looked at, or considered,
IBIS here, before, and discussed it, as part of the kind of advice
background to the Working Family Tax Credit, and I think probably
a couple of people from the Committee, certainly I have spent
some time in the local offices, looking at it. One of the things
that certainly concerned me was the extent to which a potentially
good package, there are some flaws in it, I think, but a potentially
good package, is there but simply not used as a matter of course
for most claimants, and there almost seemed to be the assumption
that people have to know to ask, to get access to that kind of
service. You have already made the point yourself about the difficulties
of one-stopping, but actually that is what we need, and, to a
certain extent, IBIS is one of the systems that can underpin that
kind of one-stop approach?
(Mr Mathison) Tony and Steve can probably come
in, but certainly I saw IBIS demonstrated in the early weeks I
arrived and was surprised, I did two different office visits,
and in one it was sort of in the corner, almost gathering dust,
and in the other one it was hot, it was used so often. When I
went back and asked about it, it was that the first office had
had the first release of IBIS and there had been some major problems
around it, so it had fallen into disrepute. We did quite a lot
of work around IBIS and we are encouraging staff to use IBIS.
There is a further development in the West Country——
234. When you say "encouraging",
what does that mean and how are you monitoring it?
(Mr Mathison) Steve.
(Mr Heminsley) I was going to add specifically
around the pilots I referred to earlier. In Lewisham, for example,
the third phase of the pilots in Lewisham is very much based around
getting advice right the way across the piece with staff from
the local authority and the Benefits Agency there, across Income
Support, Housing Benefit, Council Tax, and so on, and the IBIS
system, which has been enhanced for both the Lone Parent prototype
and this, to include more information around better-off calculations,
and so on, that, I think, is the way. If you incorporate the system
into the process by having the right number of bodies around,
or representatives from the bodies who are interested in that
person's circumstances, then the system becomes part and parcel
of the scene, as it were, and I think that is what we are trying
to do. Obviously, that is now a pilot, and in the future, that
is obviously not here today.
235. What would be helpful is to say maybe
in six months' time we actually get an indication from you of
how many people are actually passing through that assessment,
not just through the New Deal package but as a matter of course,
and having that on a sort of fairly regular——
(Mr Heminsley) Yes, and how useful they find it,
I think that is the key thing with having a pilot; unless they
are properly evaluated, when we ask people later on they may actually
say that the main benefit they found was having the people there,
face to face, and they found the system actually not so useful,
so, "a good idea; okay, we'll try another way of doing it."
So I think they will find the systems available that are useful;
but we will evaluate the pilot thoroughly at the end of this year.
236. I think that is an important point,
because I would make a guess that actually 20 minutes concentrated
attention from somebody who has some idea of what they are talking
about is what is helpful, and that the community package may or
may not be a useful back-up to it; but that is important and I
think it is important that we get a sense of monitoring how that
goes. But just a couple of other quick questions. Obviously, we
are all quite interested from the general point of view, but I
come from a constituency that probably is absolutely at the sharp
end, an inner-London constituency, and I believe that you have
done some research on literacy skills jointly with the DfEE, and
I understand that that joint piece of research showed that almost
half of all benefit claimants lack basic literacy skills, and
half of that group again, so I think we are talking well into
the millions of people, lack the functional literacy to fill in
Government forms. And I wondered what you were doing with that
research?
(Mr Heminsley) The pensions pilot, for example,
and also again on the prototypes, the facility to be able to use
a telephone to complete the form, or to call in to, increasingly
experimenting with the case worker type set-up, whichever is most
comfortable for you. For most people, the facility to make the
initial claim by phone takes about 25 minutes, even for a relatively
complex lone parent case, pop into the office two days later,
run through the form which the system has already completed, to
see you agree with it, sign it off there and then; the ability
to report changes of circumstances and other queries through to
a specific point in the organisation, to handle the queries. The
pensions pilot has already been running with this for people in
the London area, exactly that sort of system. So I think those
sorts of things are the things—people who do not have very
good skills in that area are often pretty good at using the phone,
so I think that that is probably the medium of today. I suppose,
even with the Internet you would still need basic literacy skills
to be able to use that; so probably the phone is, in this case,
a good answer.
237. I think that is great, but I suppose
what I was looking for is that there should be a corporate response
within the Agency to what looks, to me, like a piece of research
which has pretty massive implications, not least because the sub-group
that are at the heart of our problems, who have the greatest difficulty,
are also the most likely not to have a phone. You have still got
9 per cent of the general population, or something, do not have
access to the phone; they are going to be your claimants and they
are going to be the people in temporary accommodation, all that
kind of thing. So although that is an excellent project and we
look forward to getting the response, it is by no means the answer
to the whole problem, and I am just kind of looking for confirmation
that you are taking this seriously across the board. And the other
reason that I stress that point is that, when we went to Leeds
and discussed some of these issues, one of the things that came
out of that was the, to my mind, completely shocking information
that when letters were sent out, generated, to clients, confirming
that they were receiving a particular type of benefit, that was
done on a push-button basis, and the person who generated the
form would not actually even see the letter that was being sent
out, thereby creating an enormous sense of error. Now those forms,
I have to say, after 20 years in various aspects of public life
and two post-graduate degrees, I have no idea what most of them
are talking about, because they are computer-generated, they are
not coherent, they do not give people the kind of information.
I am looking for an assurance from you that, in addition to improving
through telephone access, whatever, at the access point, you are
looking as a whole organisation at all of those problems, from
form-filling to the letters that go back to people, confirming
their benefit, to the kinds of warnings that are given to people
about change; all that business?
(Mr Heminsley) Could I say something about the
IT side, because it is a particular nightmare for us, in that
when you have big IT mainframe systems that were built in the
late eighties, using that technology, I accept that a lot of our
outputs are not as intelligible or as user-friendly as they should
be. Unfortunately, and I am afraid it does sound a little bit
like jam tomorrow, the costs and complexity of simple amendments
to mainframe-produced forms is tremendous; mainframe cannot word-process,
for example, so what they have to do is select from a menu of
paragraphs or sentences, and for some of our benefits you might
have a few hundred choices from which to permutate, so you have
to go through all of that, and what you get is something which,
to the average reader, at times, is not perhaps the best solution.
Ms Hewitt
238. Gobbledegook?
(Mr Heminsley) It can read like that.
239. It does.
(Mr Mathison) Yes, it does.
Ms Hewitt: Paragraphs
contradict themselves.
Chairman
240. There is no conditionality about it?
(Mr Heminsley) So what I am saying is, we are
acutely aware that that is the situation, it is not simply a case
of throwing money at it. In order to deconstruct these forms,
you have to go into every bit of coding in the system, in some
cases. It is high on the priority list, as far as replacement
systems are concerned. We know it can be done better now. The
output handling equipment and modern systems will give you colour
output, if that is what you want, and different fonts at the flick
of a switch, and so on, which, to be quite honest, that side of
it was not available probably at the end of the eighties.
Ms Buck
241. No-one is expecting you to solve that
kind of phenomenally difficult problem overnight. All I am asking
is that what is a good motherhood and apple pie aim, that touches
on lots of different areas and some very serious problems, and
also where you are doing some very good work and some good pilots,
is just brought together so we do not lose sight of what we are
doing. I think it might be helpful for the Committee to have a
copy of, I think it was called, Adult Literacy in Britain, your
joint-funded report?
(Mr Heminsley) I am not familiar with it at all.
(Mr Mathison) I am not, so I am afraid I am not
familiar with it.
242. I have got a DSS letter, it was DSS/DfEE?
(Mr Mathison) I wonder whether it is a policy
one, which we have not been made aware of.
243. Right. I think it might be something
that we could have. I also understand that the Benefits Agency
sponsored some work a year or two ago with the Commission for
Racial Equality?
(Mr Mathison) CRE, yes.
244. I just wondered if you could tell us
a little bit about that, because, certainly in my constituency,
again, I am at the sharp end, there are 73 languages spoken in
our main comprehensive schools, I feel, from the office, that
people do a heroic job, under those circumstances, but, again,
there is not a sort of corporate response to that kind of complexity
of need?
(Mr Mathison) I meet with Herman Ousely probably
once or twice a year, and I met Kamlesh Bahl, specifically around
that, around a piece of research that was done and how we take
it forward; we are looking at what we can do about that and what
is effective research. We have, within the redevelopment of all
the computer systems, we are doing some work, and we picked up
some work that was done in the Health Service and in DfEE, around
gathering information on people who come to us, about their ethnic
background and how their cases are. I want some further work done
on that, because I understand that in some cases it has proved
difficult to actually get that information, that people have been
suspicious about why a Government body is asking for information
about their ethnic background. So, I cannot quite recall where
it is up to, I need to check up on it, but we wanted to do a bit
more work around the implications of that and what it would mean,
before we embarked on a big programme, to find that we had a small
proportion of the information available, which is probably dangerous,
of almost having nothing at all. But we do have standards set
down, in terms of the offices, around the contact with ethnic
minorities, and we need to recognise that. I am acutely conscious,
as an organisation, we deal with a wider range of people than
any other organisation I know. I made the point, at a presentation
I did to a European group on benchmarking, that our customers
do not have a choice, they have to deal with us, and we cannot
be selective, like them, on which customers they deal with. And
they were surprised by the extent to which we actually provide
information in a variety of languages, and everything else; they
did not realise they were excluding people, actually. Just one
wider point, I think, that there is an issue around the Benefits
Agency, around we became an agency, we operated at district level,
there is a strong identity, and that has brought a lot of benefits.
The Business Unit was defined as the District, and what we have
is a lot of energy and enthusiasm at districts, but we had a wide
variation in standards and performance, and there is this sort
of tension there about having a corporate approach to it which
is not stopping the local benefits office and the managers having
ideas and developing and taking them forward, but not having a
situation where people, on some things, can choose to do things
or not choose to do things; and there is a tension there around
the centre taking control and imposing. We are not planning to
do that, we do not intend to, it is about saying, "These
are the standards under which we want to operate and people should
get consistent service, no matter who they are or where they are
located." And that does mean, in some cases, we will have
to say, at the local level, "You have to do this." That
is the biggest issue for me, is the variation; it is not just
area of the country, it can actually be one district office to
another. And there are various reasons but they are not reasons
I will accept.
245. I think it would be helpful if you
could drop us a short note[13]
about what you have done with the CRE so far and where that work
has got to and what your further research plans are? Just a last
question. On the Integrated Service pilots, two points. Firstly,
just quickly tell us when they are going to be evaluated and when
that information is going to be available, on the outcomes; and,
also, is the plan, the work taking over all of the functions of
the Housing Benefit service?
(Mr Heminsley) In what sense, all of the functions;
it is basically the front end, face-to-face, taking claims, coming
back with evidence, whatever visits are necessary, and so on,
and setting the review arrangements. In the background there will
be mainframe systems and other people who do various indirect
things to support all of that.
246. Will you be involved in the rent restriction
process?
(Mr Mathison) No.
(Mr Heminsley) I do not think so, no.
(Mr Edge) I think, we just passport the benefits,
that is the key thing to it, it is Income Support passports Housing
Benefit and Council Tax Benefit, and that is the interface with
that.
247. When people make an application, it
is increasingly the case, or certainly encouraged to be the case,
that they seek advice about whether the Housing Benefit application
would be payable by Housing Benefit, or whether it would lead
into rent restriction; who will actually do that?
(Mr Mathison) I am not sure.
(Mr Heminsley) We can find out.[14]
I think the other thing about delivering these services is that,
inevitably, whenever you set up a pilot and you have all the rules
and you have worked it all through, when you get to the practice
somebody always comes out and asks the question that is not on
the dialogue, or whatever; so I am sure that the staff will be
pulled slightly into areas that the pilot is not intended to cover.
Now whether that is one of those areas on the margins, but I am
sure the objective should be not to create a new, "Well,
we do this bit", it's a much bigger bit, which still sends
you running backwards and forwards. We have called them prototypes
because we want to learn during the course of the process and
amend as we go along, rather than stick to a blinkered approach
for six months, evaluate and start again. So I have not got the
exact dates, but they are due to finish around October time, although
the phase three of Lewisham does not start until July and it depends
upon some IT; so around the end of the year you can expect to
see the results coming out of that, emerging findings somewhere
around Christmas, I would have thought, full reports and whatever
they plan to publish early in the New Year.
(Mr Mathison) I think it is important, from those
prototypes, that, as I said earlier, they test things to the limit.
We have to be careful because we have to operate within the law.
But I think one of the things that is likely to come out of the
prototype, if we approach it on the basis of from the individual's
perspective, is what service should be offered to them and what
are their needs. There are going to be some boundary issues which
emerge, and no doubt there are going to be some policy and legislation
issues which may get in the way of the real effective outcome
that is required. Now we cannot be in a position where we knowingly
have people who are ignoring the law, but we do need to test out
fully what the real outcomes are that are required, and what enablers
need to be put in place to allow those things to happen.
Chairman: You know,
I get more and more depressed when I listen to the conditions
under which your staff are obliged to operate. I hope that I am
wrong in thinking that you are just sitting there, as an organisation,
absorbing layers and layers of new legislation; and that is maybe
a problem for us, maybe here, we in Parliament, maybe the Committee
has got a role to play in trying to make this—I think the
Minister of State actually has got it logged on and clocked the
fact that workability and simplicity must, must, be key features
of any reform, in the longer term, for the new Labour administration.
I believe that that is so, I hope it is so. I hope, quietly, and
in your own ways, within your own regime, you are making loud
protestations to Ministers that you are working with mainframe
computers to generate letters, off site, to the constituents that
Karen has just been talking about; it is complete lunacy. And
I hope that you are not just saying, "Oh, well, we've got
another 25 per cent cut in the next Change Programme, well, we've
got another few redundancies and we'll just keep the computer
for another five years." I hope, and I do not expect you
to answer this, that you are making very loud noises, behind the
scenes, to try to get that changed, because if we do not this
thing is going to get an awful lot worse before it gets better,
and that is a matter of real concern for the Committee. Having
got that off my chest, can I say thank you very much, it is very
useful. We have set you some pretty stiff tests, in terms of some
of the bits and pieces of detailed information, I hope you do
not mind that, but we obviously do not expect you to carry all
this information in your heads all the time. It has been very
helpful to us. Thank you very much for your time and thank you
for coming.
10 See Ev p. 73. Back
11
See Ev pp. 73-74. Back
12
See Ev p. 73. Back
13
A note on this subject was not available at time of going to press. Back
14
See Ev p. 74. Back
|
