APPENDIX 3
Memorandum by Lancashire County Council
Welfare Rights and Social Inclusion Services
Summary of Contents:
- Commitment and financial investment
- Staff and training
- Comprehensive benefit checks
- Record keeping
- Forms completion
- Information for customers
- Partnerships with BA/ES
- Access to the Gateway, including home visits
- Vulnerable customers
- Administrative and adjudicative functions
- Information functions and advice functions
THE SINGLE WORK-FOCUSED GATEWAY
Lancashire County Council Welfare Rights Service
was established in 1987 and exists to serve the 1.1 million residents
of Lancashire. Our purpose is to ensure that all those who need
advice and help to obtain Social Security and local authority
benefits to which they are entitled are able to get it—and
we have offices, satellite outposts, telephone advice services,
and the facility for home visits, throughout the County to achieve
this aim. We have extensive benefit casework experience, with
annually approximately 60,000 advice transactions. We also assist
with around 2000 plus Social Security appeals. It is with this
background that we welcome the invitation to contribute to the
joint inquiry into the Single Work-Focused Gateway. Our response
is based on an analysis of the proposals contained within the
Green Paper.
1. The Single Work-Focused Gateway will be a radical
change to the way that claimants of working age access the benefits
system. If it is to capture its full potential for improved service
and administration, it will need a commitment to delivering a
high quality service, as well as a substantial financial investment,
to stand any chance of success.
2. The quality of the staff responsible for the implementation
of the Gateway will be crucial to its success and there will need
to be considerable training to help them move from the old culture
to the new. This training would not only need to cover all aspects
of Social Security and local authority benefits, but also an awareness
of the effects of various mental and physical disabilities. The
latter would be particularly important for registration staff,
since it is they who decide whether a person is ready for a work-focused
interview. Additionally, there needs to be an investment in the
provision of ethnic/cultural awareness training to enable staff
to sensitively and accurately determine a person's readiness for
work—at all stages of the Gateway process.
3. The initial registration process should incorporate
a comprehensive benefit check, with customers being informed of
all the benefits to which they may have a potential entitlement.
This would, therefore, need to include advice on claiming the
non-Gateway benefits—e.g. DLA and Industrial Injuries Disablement
Benefits. In our experience partial information can be unhelpful
and lead to problems. It would be interesting to see if evidence
emerges from the pilot projects that customers are receiving comprehensive
benefit advice.
4. In our experience, full benefit checks can be
difficult and time-consuming to deliver. Adequate time should,
therefore, be allowed at the initial point of registration to
obtain a full account of a customer's personal and financial circumstances.
We say this despite having at our disposal a state of the art
IT package which is custom built for advisers and based upon laptop
technology. We would be happy to demonstrate the package. (Delegates
from advice services in all parts of the country are attending
a seminar demonstrating the package in Preston on 7 May 1999.)
5. Detailed record keeping is also essential to ensure
that all parties are clear on the advice that has been given,
and any action taken—eg claim forms sent out or completed.
This would be even more essential in the transfer of a case from
registration staff to a personal adviser, and in pilots involving
the private and voluntary sector.
6. Customers should also be given some form of written
summary of the advice that they have been given—for example,
a "Gateway Passport" (perhaps something similar to the
current Jobseekers Agreement booklet) that could record an individual's
route through the Gateway process and the advice and directions
given. This would also allow customers to seek redress in situations
where incomplete or wrong advice has been given. Paragraphs 19(4)
and (5) of the Social Security (Claims and Payments) Regulations
allow a benefit claim to be backdated for 3 months where someone
was given "information by an officer of the DSS or of the
Department for Education and Employment which led the claimant
to believe that a claim for benefit would not succeed". It
is easier for people to establish this if they have some written
evidence of the advice given.
7. Pilots operating in partnership with the private
and voluntary sector will need to insist that a written summary
is given to customers to allow them to take advantage of the above
provision on backdated benefit. Advice from non-DSS/Employment
Service staff must be in writing for these Regulations to have
effect.
8. Time to help with forms completion needs to be
built into the Gateway process. DSS research has repeatedly shown
that form completion remains a major problem for people, and also
causes significant processing problems due to delays as a result
of incomplete or wrong information. Document verification (e.g.
birth or marriage certificates, mortgage details) has also been
identified as a cause of delay. Clear and constructive policies
are needed in this area.
9. Even in the best conditions for quality advice
transactions, and sound adjudication, difficulties will arise.
Customers, therefore, not only need to have clear information
as to what is expected of them at each stage of the Gateway process,
but also clear information as to their appeal rights if something
goes wrong. There should also be a duty on the Gateway staff to
ensure that the customer understands these rights and duties.
10. There will also need to be consistency of service
provision (especially in terms of quality of service) in areas
where the BA or ES are working in partnership with the local authority
and/or private and voluntary organisations. All will have their
own practices regarding, for example, access and record keeping—which
could cause inconsistencies in service delivery within the same
local area. Detailed partnership agreements will need to be drawn
up, with regular reviews built in, to reduce the risk of this
occurring. These should also include the setting of challenging
qualitative standards, in addition to the usual quantitative target-setting
relating to number of customers interviewed or processed.
11. Partnerships are also a two-way process, and
obviously need a commitment from both parties to work. As a local
authority advice service, we have made consistent attempts over
the years to achieve satisfactory liaison arrangements with various
departments of the Benefits Agency and Employment Services (particularly
over casework issues) and these have met with a very mixed response.
Across Lancashire we have experienced considerable variations
in standards and performance.
12. Access to the Gateway process should be as flexible
as possible, and take account of the personal circumstances of
certain groups of claimants who may have problems attending BA
and ES office-based interviews—eg carers, people with disabilities,
and those living in areas with poor transport facilities. From
our experience, comprehensive benefit checks by telephone are
possible (and are hopefully one of the options being looked at
in Phase 2 of the pilot programme)—but this is obviously
not an alternative option for everybody. A commitment to home
visiting in all appropriate cases needs to be made. In our experience,
there are currently wide variations in local BA office policy
regarding home visits—in some areas they only seem to be
possible when linked with particular benefit activities (e.g.
to investigate potential fraud cases). Research has demonstrated
the efficacy of home visits, and adequate resources should be
provided from the outset.
13. Early identification of "vulnerable"
customers (eg people with mental health problems or learning difficulties;
people whose first language is not English; people with literacy
problems) should be a priority. Staff attitudes, in our experience,
are an important factor here. We also know that vulnerable customers
often do not immediately present themselves as having problems
at the initial point of contact. It is, therefore, hoped that
the "good cause" provision that exists for JSA claimants
who fail to attend compulsory interviews will also be built into
the Gateway process to protect their benefit entitlement.
14. Finally, there needs to be transparency in the
structures relating to points of departure from administrative
functions and adjudicative functions. Claimants need to be clear
at all times what purpose is being served when being interviewed
or when providing information. If there are not high levels of
confidence in this the positive elements of the Gateway will soon
be eroded.
15. This is also true, and it is a point of even
greater importance, in relation to the functions of information
provision and advice provision. There is a vital distinction between
the two, but earlier BA/DSS work on one-stop services did not
demonstrate the distinction was understood, In a word, advice
giving places obligations on the advisers to assist if the advice
is unproductive. Equally, advice giving requires a different kind
of relationship to the customer, and in our view the qualities
of independence and confidentiality are essential. Are there really
going to be structures and safeguards which can guarantee these
characteristics? If so, it will also be necessary for Gateway
advisers to develop a relationship with the external market of
benefit advice agencies.
Paul Burgess
Head of Service
Lancashire County Council Welfare Rights and Social
Inclusion Services
28 April 1999
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