Examination of witnesses
(Questions 280 - 299)
WEDNESDAY 29 JULY 1998
DAME ANN
BOWTELL, DCB
and MR STUART
LORD
280. Will they stay on site there but be
managed by the Inland Revenue?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) That would be my expectation.
Clearly, one does not know what will happen in the long run, but
the immediate intention is that they will take over and run those
units as they are now.
281. What have you identified as the main
problems or challenges in the year ahead, as you prepare for the
changeover?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) One of the difficulties is
to make sure that we do maintain all the links that we have now,
because clearly the Family Credit and the Disability Working Allowance
are embedded in the whole family of social security benefits.
Both we and the Revenue think it is very important that all of
those connections remain. A lot of them will be things like information
exchange, information to the public and so on. It is identifying
where all of those links are, which is the work we are engaged
on at the moment, and then seeing what arrangements will be necessary
in order to put those into place so that we keep the links we
have now and do not lose the benefits of the links that there
have been between those benefits and other benefits.
282. Can I briefly touch on the issue of
fraud again but in relation to this issue? I put down a parliamentary
question some weeks ago about fraud and Family Credit and received
a helpful letter from the chief executive of the Benefits Agency
who said that there had been a brief study of fraud in connection
with Family Credit. It was a small study and it had been discontinued
because of the policy decision to switch to the Working Family
Tax Credit. I have written to him again and asked for more detailed
information about that, but could you talk around this issue?
What lessons have been learned in relation to fraud and Family
Credit that could be factored into the design of the Working Family
Tax Credit and how it is administered?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) I am not sure I have any detail
on Family Credit itself. What I am sure about is that the Revenue
will be as anxious as we would be to see that Working Family Tax
Credit has built in all the lessons that we have learned about
Family Credit and fraud. We will certainly have fraud as one of
the items on the list of things that we need to settle and how
they are going to organise that: whether they want to use our
fraud people at all or what sort of arrangements there will need
to be between us. Clearly, there will need to be a lot of information
exchanged between us. I suspect we need to take stock of what
the Revenue are going to do before we plunge ahead on the Family
Credit side. Certainly fraud is one of the things that we have
flagged up as something that is very important.
Ms Stuart
283. I have been singularly unsuccessful
in eliciting an answer to this question either from Martin Taylor
or from the Chancellor of the Exchequer. How do we ensure that
Family Credit will continue to be properly paid to the self-employed
once it becomes a tax credit?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) I am not sure I understand
why it should not be.
284. Because the self-employed do not receive
a weekly wage packet on a regular basis.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) What will the delivery system
be?
285. That is right. To what extent do you
feel that you should have a continued interest in that, even if
it is now administered by other people?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) My understanding is that people
will still need to apply for the Working Family Tax Credit. The
arrangement that people will have to apply for it will still obtain.
I assume that the self-employed will apply for it just as anybody
else would. The only question therefore is what will the delivery
mechanism be and I am afraid I do not know whether the Revenue
intend to continue to pay them directly or whether they are going
to have some way of netting it off their tax. One would think
it would be possible but I do not know. There will still be some
people paying directly because, as you know, they are maintaining
an option for the non-working partner to ask to have the benefit
paid direct.
286. I see from previous evidence we were
given that some 1,400 people are employed in the administration
of Family Credit. I also understand they are mainly based in Preston.
Will that cause you any administrative problems in integration
with the Inland Revenue or will they have to move?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) I do not think there will be
a problem. I think the Revenue will just take the unit over, lock,
stock and barrel.
Chairman: Can we turn
to some of the private/public partnerships? We are particularly
interested in some of the principles surrounding ADAPT and PRIME
and ACCORD that we can discuss in terms of project objectives
and timetables.
Mr Leigh: May I declare
an interest? I am a consultant to Pinnacle Insurance plc.
Miss Kirkbride
287. I wonder if you might tell us a little
more about it in general first as it is one of the more obscure
elements of your department's work?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) Private finance in general
or ACCORD and ADAPT in general?
288. Both.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) Let us start with private finance
in general, shall we, and the way in which we try to use it? We
have had quite a lot of big projects using private finance. There
has been the PRIME project, NIRS 2, the payment card contract
and now the beginning of ADAPT and ACCORD. The way in which we
are trying to use it really is to bring in the private sector
expertise where we think they can help us and, in particular,
with some of these big computer things, which tend to be the biggest
things that we do. They are not the sort of things we can do on
our own anyway. We have to have the private sector in there, so
it is just a different way of coming at some of this. If I can
start with the ACCORD project, ACCORD as it is currently is a
procurement exercise in order to find us a partner with whom to
work to develop the new IT systems which we need to update the
IT that we have now. Because what we want to do is very big and
very complex, we want to select a partner and then work with them
to develop a solution because we think that if we try to start
with a solution we shall not get the right answers. The process
which is going through now is the process of choosing a partner.
We are down to three consortia who are interested and, in the
rest of this year, I hope we shall be choosing a partner. What
ACCORD is trying to do is to take the social security systems
which were built during the eighties on separate bases. What we
have is a lot of chimneys. We have 13 different chimneys and they
have connections between them but basically they are different
chimneys and the data in them are in slightly different forms,
depending on what individuals have had to tell us at the time,
although the same individuals will be on lots of different systems.
What we are trying to do in ACCORD is to build one database so
that, once somebody has given us a bit of information anywhere
in the system, it registers everywhere else. All the things which
are common rules which run throughout benefits will be in that
same system and then you can develop things special to each benefit
to hang off the basic system, as it were. If we can get that,
we have an enormous prize in terms of the kind of IT we can make
available to our staff, because they are working with very antiquated
stuff at the moment, the kind of service we will be able to give
customers and the kind of security which will be attached to the
thing. Obviously, if you can run a piece of information right
across the system and you hold the same information right across
the system, you are much more likely to get it right. That is
the prize. That is what we are trying to do and that is what ACCORD
is about. What we hope to do is to carry out the procurement in
the course of this year; then, once we have a partner, we will
begin to do specific pieces of business. What we are going to
build first is something on CSA and income support because those
two things we are increasingly trying to connect together. We
have made a lot of progress now in the Benefits Agency and the
CSA working together on cases, so that the Benefits Agency does
some of the initial work for the CSA, which is actually proving
enormously effective in beginning to get the CSA's business done
faster. When the Benefits Agency goes to see you, they also give
you a CSA form. We want to build on that so you can begin to deal
with the things together. We have a prototype running in our Camden
area which I do not think the Committee has seen. If you have
not, I think you would find it very interesting. We are taking
claims to child support, income support and housing benefit over
the phone, taking them together, and we have a piece of kit, which
is not rollable out as a whole system unfortunately, but it connects
on a small scale to our existing systems, so that the person at
the end of the telephone can take you through those three benefits
and move on from there. That is where I would hope to be everywhere
once we have got ACCORD through.
Mr Flight
289. From what you are saying, is there
not an argument for ACCORD being integrated with Inland Revenue
information as well and are you working on that?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) We need to be able to talk
to the Inland Revenue and exchange information with them. The
notion that we could build one giant government database I would
feel quite nervous about. It has taken us several years to get
ACCORD to this stage. It is hugely difficult and hugely complex.
If you tried to say, "Let us throw that away. Let us put
all the Inland Revenue stuff on" which overlaps with ours
to some extent but not totally, I think you would never get it
off the ground, to be honest. What is very important is that we
should get the government systems so that they can talk to each
other. I am not sure that necessarily means you have to have it
all in one, but it is certainly something we are working with
the Revenue on and we need to make them close to each other and
be able to communicate. In a sense, with this sort of thing, either
you move forward or you have this huge design and you worry that
you will never get there. The only way of doing these things is
to have a vision at the end of the day but actually move there
in steps. I think it will be a huge achievement if we can get
all our stuff onto one thing.
Miss Kirkbride
290. What timescale are you looking at or
do you not dare put one on it?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) The timescale of getting a
partner on board is that we would hope to have someone towards
the end of this year. We would hope by then to let the first bit
of business. I would hope that we would really have something
on the ground perhaps in 2001. It will take a couple of years.
291. All the benefits or just the first
tranche?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) Probably for CSA and income
support, but income support is a very big chunk of the system
because it is very complicated.
Chairman
292. When you roll it out, will you be rolling
it out on a benefit specific basis and geographically or are you
just going to do it piecemeal? How will the thing evolve? How
will the implementation evolve?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) You are probably taking me
further than we can currently see. The reason we are getting a
partner on board is so that we can develop this with them, but
the way we see it at present is that we would begin to build the
thing up by taking the information from one benefit at a time.
We will start with the information from income support and child
support and use that for those benefits. Then you would bring
retirement pension or something in and you would add that information
and make sure that was compatible with what you had. In that sense,
it would be benefit by benefit.
293. You are aware, I hope, that the people
in the front line are hideously hidebound. Work-around sheet 155
was seen in an area office that I was in recently and to ask staff
to do these things and get machinery to do things it was never
designed to do I think is ludicrous in the extreme.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) I do agree. What I would hope
is that while we are doing the big thing—and we must not
rush that—we will be able to do more to help the staff at
the front end. If you go and see what we have at Camden, (I do
not think we can roll that out as it is because, for technical
reasons I do not understand, it is not rollable out generally)
but I hope we will be able to do more to put some better front
ends on the system to help the staff. We are going to look at
that alongside developing the big new database.
294. We were going on to PRIME and ADAPT.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) ADAPT connects most closely
with ACCORD so let us start with that. In ADAPT, we are also trying
to develop a partnership arrangement and we have had three consortia
working with the Benefits Agency over the past year in different
areas to get themselves to really understand the Benefits Agency
business so that they can begin to identify where they might be
able to add value and we can begin to see what sort of value they
might be able to add. The current situation on that is that they
are beginning to put forward some ideas but the Benefits Agency
is not yet at the stage where it can see exactly how it is going
to use them and where. Of course we will need to see that whatever
we do fits in with ACCORD because we must not do things at the
sort of local end, as it were, at the front end, which do not
map on to the big ACCORD project, so actually bringing those two
things together is what we will be trying to work out during this
summer. Basically ADAPT is more about the sort of business end
of this. It is more about how do you do particular bits of business
in the Benefits Agency and it might be about work management systems
or particular areas of that kind, but whatever you do, you would
have to make sure that eventually it bolts on to the big benefit
database.
295. Before we move away from that, and
I know Gisela has a question about ACCORD and ADAPT, what really
worries me more than anything else about both of these programmes
is that you described them at the beginning as procurement issues,
that they are being considered as the kind of things that area
offices might bring on-stream if they thought that their area
would benefit from them, but I would like to think that both of
these projects, if they are to succeed at all, are an absolutely
fundamental, integrated part of the structure of the new development
of the benefits system.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) Absolutely.
296. And if they are not built in in that
kind of way with a project-managed introduction, then I do not
think you will get any benefit from them.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) No, I am sorry if I have given
the impression that that is not so. These are very much projects,
both of them are part of our—we have got a sort of departmental
portfolio of the big future-looking projects which will form the
future shape of the Department. ACCORD and ADAPT both are right
up there and it is just that ADAPT, because it is about the Benefits
Agency management processes, is actually in the first instance
run by the Benefits Agency, but all of these things are overseen
by the departmental board on which all the agencies sit and that
is where it is driven from. So, no, the ADAPT process that is
going on now, it is simply that the process of actually looking
to see where the best and most value might be added that the Benefits
Agency wanted to start off by getting the private sector to look
on the ground to see actually what happened, but then it is going
to come back and the decisions will be made by the Benefits Agency
centrally and by the Department centrally when the Benefits Agency
decide what they want.
297. Because the potential in both of these
programmes is to release trained professionals to go out actually
and be the case-workers and the gateways and the personal advisers.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) Yes, absolutely.
298. And there is a huge opportunity where
if we get this right, it could quite literally transform the way
that services are delivered.
(Dame Ann Bowtell) Absolutely, yes, I do agree
and that is what we are trying to do.
Ms Stuart
299. The "benefit chimneys", if
I can quickly take you back to that, and you said there were 13
of them, we were quite struck last year when we went to see the
Benefits Agency and the Contributions Agency and it seemed to
me that there was tremendous investment and willingness to invest
in IT in the Contributions Agency and we were actually getting
very good at collecting money, but that the IT investment, as
far as the Benefits Agency was concerned, was always terribly
isolated in only implementing one ministerial edict at a time,
but they lacked, or so it appeared to me, an overall commitment
to have substantial investment in information technology and updating
the way benefits are delivered. Now, I detect a change in attitude
when I look at the various projects which are in place. Am I right?
(Dame Ann Bowtell) I think you got the Contributions
Agency at a time when they were in the middle of putting in NIRS
2, so that would have been right at the top of their agenda and
you got the Benefits Agency at a time when we were struggling
with the idea of ACCORD and how we would develop it, so you got
them at different times, I suspect. The ACCORD project is the
new basis of the new way in which we will manage benefits and
I think you will find it different now that we have actually got
ACCORD more visible and that because we were struggling with the
idea of how we would take it forward, it probably was not so visible
to the management on the ground that you talked to, but that is
the way forward and the Department is strongly committed to doing
that.
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