Examination of Witnesses (Questions 400
- 419)
WEDNESDAY 7 MARCH 2001
ANGELA EAGLE,
MP, MR STEPHEN
WATSON, AND
MR CHRISTOPHER
EVANS
400. But does your low paid administrative assistant
consider that to be part of his or her remit at that stage, to
give that advice?
(Angela Eagle) I do not think the Benefits Agency
would offer advice other than about the Social Fund system and
the way it works. They are not financial advisers in that sense
of the word. They may, if they know, say, "Why don't you
try particular voluntary organisations or the local authority",
but there is no training or guidelines or expectation in the system
that they should.
401. Is the Department, because it always keeps
everything under review all the time, reviewing the prospect of
turning some of these loans into grants?
(Angela Eagle) We do keep things under review all
the time and we have been looking at how the system could be reformed.
We have reformed the Budgeting Loan system in a significant way.
We have also put more money in. I would not sit here and say that
we would not look at any suggestions to create grants, but the
grant system was not that good either in that, as I said earlier,
17 per cent of the likely recipients who were eligible because
of the benefits they were on got 80 per cent of the money. So
even under the old system where you had grants rather than loans,
what tended to happen was a minority of people got them and large
swathes of people who would have been eligible did not get anything.
So I am not certain that even the old system met the need there
was. If you have grants for specific things, that means sometimes
if somebody does not come under that particular grant specification
you might not be able to help them, whereas in the system now
you can. So there are advantages and disadvantages to moving into
a more grant based system away from a loan system. There is also
the issue of the money available in a loan system, when it is
repaid it gets recycled and can therefore help more people.
402. We picked up some evidence, and it is anecdotal,
that some of the welfare rights workers were of the view that
some of the staff were directing people more towards loans and
away from grants. Have you got any view on that? Would that concern
you if you felt it was happening?
(Angela Eagle) It depends why they were doing it.
If they were directing people who they knew would fail to get
a Community Care Grant because they were not eligible, they were
not on the appropriate benefits, to try a loan instead, that might
just be saving them time. If they were doing it as a matter of
course, then that would worry me.
403. It is not a matter of policy?
(Angela Eagle) No, it is not a matter of policy. Benefits
Agency staff who know the system will try and direct people to
the right part of the system, fitting in with their circumstances
as they know them. That, I think, is legitimate, but what is not
legitimate is to prevent anybody from applying for any of the
grants. If you look at the reasons for refusal in the annexes
at the back of the evidence we have given you, one of the largest
reasons for refusal of all of these grants is that people simply
are not on the appropriate benefits to be eligible for them in
the first place.
404. There were changes made to the system for
budgeting loans in 1999 to make it simpler and quicker, but the
refusal rate is now worrying. The figure is 647,000 refusals,
and 40 per cent of the applications are now being refused. Does
that not concern you?
(Angela Eagle) The issue there is actually that that
is not a reasonable comparison with the old system. The new system
is much simpler to the extent that if you are on particular benefits
and you do not have any debt in the Social Fund, you can get a
loan. It essentially turns the Budgeting Loan system into a little
bank. However, if you are at the £1,000 limit of your loan,
you cannot get another loan until you have paid half of that off,
which stops people topping up their loans and allows the money
to be used for people who did not access it before. 82,000 more
people got loans in the new budgeting system, it is faster, it
is simpler to understand, it does not ask people what they want
to use the loans for. When we came into Government and looked
into it, I felt very strongly that if the money was going to be
paid back why should poor people have to explain why they wanted
to borrow it and what they were going to spend it on, so the new
system is much faster in the way it works. It does take account
of existing Social Fund debt as one of the criteria for giving
further loans, and there are some examples of how that works if
you want to see it. We suspect there was a debt hangover from
the old system and from monitoring the system this year there
is a 40 per cent fall, I believe, in refusals for existing debt.
So I suspect that people have realised what the new rules are,
have paid off the loan and are beginning to apply only when they
know they will qualify. It is impossible to tell but I think it
might have been a transitional issue in the move from the old
to the new system.
405. When we talk about net expenditure on loans,
in what circumstances typically are loans not recovered?
(Angela Eagle) If people disappear into work and we
do not have a benefit to take it out at source. If they just leave
the system then we often cannot trace them to repay the loan.
We write off an amount of loan money which is irrecoverable every
year. However, if they were to appear back on the system with
their national insurance number, we could pick it up again. When
Working Families Tax Credit was introduced, it meant we were not
taking money off Working Families Tax Credit recipients to repay
loans, so we had to make other arrangements with them. So there
have been some changes there but it is really when they disappear
into work, or disappear.
Dr Naysmith
406. I want to stick with loans and repayments
but a slightly different aspect of them. According to Elaine Kempson,
who gave us evidence, and other witnesses too, claimants claim
that they have no idea why they are successful or not successful
when they apply for grants.
(Angela Eagle) Is this Community Care Grants?
407. For loans, not grants, sorry. They say
that afterwards, they do not now why they got it or they did not
get it. The same applies for fixing the amount of repayment, they
do not know how that is arrived at. Do you have any views on that?
If so, do you think this could be remedied in some way?
(Angela Eagle) The Budgeting Loan system now is very
simple and people ought to be able to understand more than the
old system why they have either succeeded or failed. They have
to be on benefits for six months—
408. If I can interrupt you, I think what they
were saying was that are not told, they do not have an interaction
with the staff.
(Angela Eagle) The application forms make all of this
clear, and the three application forms we have now are much clearer
and easier to understand, and one would hope that staff could
answer any questions they might have about a decision. There are
some here if you want to have a look.[6]
There are fairly extensive notes explaining, I hope in crystal,
clear, plain English, how the systems work. Certainly with budgeting
loans it should be easier now, because it is just your level of
debt and your time on benefits whether you get a loan or not.
On crisis loans, the issue is mainly whether your health and safety
is at risk, and whether you need an immediate payment. The reasons
typically are alignment, if money has been stolen and sudden disaster.
If you are refused a loan, you can always ask and I would hope
our staff would be able to explain it. I do not think there is
in any bit of the population, those who use the Social Fund regularly
or those who never come into contact with the benefit system,
much understanding of how it works in detail and why it does things,
which is one of the reasons why we are trying to develop the personal
adviser process, so we can have a more robust dialogue and hopefully
engender more understanding as to how the system works and why
it has come up with a particular decision.
409. Is it something the staff would expect
to have to do, to explain how a decision had been arrived at?
(Angela Eagle) Certainly if a claimant asks, our staff
are trained to respond and try to have a dialogue which will allow
the claimant to understand, especially after the introduction
of decision-making and appeals, which fosters much more of that
kind of dialogue at the front-end, if you want to call it that.
410. Repaying a Social Fund loan takes a claimant's
income as much as 15 per cent below the official poverty line.
What is your view on the current levels of deductions from benefits
to repay those loans?
(Angela Eagle) I was not aware there was an official
poverty line. There are different ways of repaying loans and which
level of repayment you end up on depends on your existing indebtedness.
411. That is one of the things which is not
explained; what I was talking about earlier. Even so, what we
are doing with some of the poorest people in society is taking
them further into poverty by asking them to repay a loan.
(Angela Eagle) We have just done some research which
I can let you have a copy, of into the financial services which
are available to the low paid, and they take out loans anyway.[7]
At least the Social Fund loans are interest-free and available
in circumstances which can be of assistance to them. If there
was no Social Fund, they would still take out loans but they probably
would take them out with organisations which are charging large
amounts of interest. Which is why, for example, I am very anxious
to do much more work with the credit unions and look at PAT 14
which is about the provision of financial services to the low
paid and financial exclusion, because there is more we can do
to keep people out of the hands of loan-sharks.
412. I absolutely agree with you. I am very
much an advocate of credit unions in all sorts of ways, but two
or three times in taking evidence people have said that people
who are applying for loans and applying to the Social Fund would
not be members of credit unions because they were not able to
keep up the initial payments in order to access a loan when they
needed it, so we are talking in some ways about more desperate
people here.
(Angela Eagle) Yes. I think the way the loan repayments
works does offer choices. If you already have existing debts,
then the repayment rates are 5 or 10 per cent, not 15 per cent;
if you have no existing debt it goes up to 15 per cent. If your
circumstances change for the worse, you can get rescheduled debt,
and I think 42,000 loans were rescheduled for lower repayments
as a result of changes like that last year.
413. This is one of the things given in evidence
that people do not know about. They are not told they can reschedule
their debts.
(Angela Eagle) You cannot if you feel like it. You
can if your circumstances change for the worse, and I would hope
that the advice bureaux and our staff would make that knowledge
available. It is available in the leaflets, I cannot force people
to take account of it, but we would be happy to participate in
any extra work to try to make that knowledge available. I am sure
the Citizens Advice Bureaux and all the usual voluntary organisations
know about it.
414. We have talked already about the advantages
of the present system offering loans rather than grants under
the old system, but returning to what I said at the start, some
of these people cannot really afford to pay loans back at all
and in those circumstances would grants not be better than crisis
loans for buying cookers and things like that?
(Angela Eagle) There is a discussion to be had about
the appropriate balance of grants and loans, with the inflexibility
that some grants introduce in the way in which the money is spent.
We have a certain balance at the moment and it is perfectly possible
for the Committee to think we have the wrong balance. I personally
think we have got a reasonable balance, but I am not complacent
about the real need and hardship there is out there. I do not
think the Social Fund is the only way of dealing with it, which
is why I made the statement I made at the beginning of evidence.
It is important that we do not get fixated on the Social Fund
as the only way of handling this, there are other structures we
can put in place as a Government, and I hope in our welfare system,
to help move people past these events when they are stuck on very
low incomes and give them assistance to make progress in their
lives and get out of that situation. I think it is important as
a Government that we concentrate on that as well as the Social
Fund itself.
Ms Buck
415. Setting aside the pounds and pence element
of this, which is what we have concentrated on so far, the evidence
we have had from charities, from the Child Poverty Action Group,
local government and other bodies on the ground, was really quite
devastating as a criticism of people's interaction with the service.
As I am sure you will know, we actually had a panel of people
who themselves had been clients of the Social Fund at different
stages, and there does seem to be quite a serious gulf, which
is by no means this Government's fault, but a serious gulf between
the perceptions of users of the service and the perceptions of
almost everybody who is delivering it at different stages. One
of the things which worried me most in that was the extent to
which when people do get access to a competent specialist advice
service, their chances of getting a result are dramatically increased.
That comes back to a number of different points which have come
at you recently, which is about the quality of staff and the quality
of advice. Does it worry you that if people are able to get hold
of a CAB adviser their chances of getting a result are exponentially
increased? If so, what does it tell us about what we need to do
about staffing?
(Angela Eagle) I think it is an issue which you could
extend far beyond the Social Fund in the welfare system.
416. Indeed.
(Angela Eagle) We have a complex system, it is a mature
system from that point of view, it has got lots of linked benefits
and it is very complicated. Some of the answer will lie in the
kind of simplifications we have introduced in respect of the budgeting
loans system, which is much simpler and easier to use than the
old one used to be. However, I think other bits of it rely on
us moving away from the unwritten assumption which always used
to be the case prior to 1997, that somehow there was perfect knowledge
of the benefits system out there which could be assumed on the
part of claimants, therefore it was the claimant's job to do all
the work within the system to get out of it what their entitlements
were. I think we have changed that assumption in introducing personal
advisers, in trying to have much more open access to the system,
introducing a personal adviser capacity. This is in particular
respect to working age people and pensioners at the moment but
needs to be extended throughout the system, to get the case and
for us to take it round the system and deal with an individual's
needs in that way. It takes a long time to change a system which
we inherited which was the other way around to that. It does worry
me that you have to have a degree in benefit rules in order to
access the system. That is a bit of an exaggeration. Our staff
do the best they can, I think, but we do need to try to strengthen
the ability of the system itself to take up somebody's circumstances
and needs and make sure they get access to everything they are
entitled to.
417. I accept all that and I think the whole
personal adviser approach is a really good one, but the people
we are talking about here are the people for whom everything else
has failed, and that is the difference in the system. They hit
the Social Fund when everything else has gone pear-shaped. When
do you foresee a time when somebody approaching a time of special
need or crisis will actually, through the Social Fund, first meet
a personal adviser who will help them? At what point can you say
these people, the neediest of needy, are going to get their personal
advisers?
(Angela Eagle) I think as personal advisers come into
the system more, as the system tries to co-ordinate within itself
via the ONE process, via the working age process, any of that,
this will increasingly be taken up, but there are no immediate
plans to apply personal adviser services to the Social Fund individually
and separately from everything else. I think it will come as part
of the transformation of the process as a whole.
418. If that is not on the agenda then at the
moment, we are not going to provide a holistic approach to people
in this category—
(Angela Eagle) I hope we are but—
419. Well, not this year.
(Angela Eagle) There have been no decisions taken,
for example, as to whether the Social Fund sits in the Working
Age Agency—how it sits in the transformation and the decoupling
in the welfare system of the Pensions Directorate and the Working
Age Agency. We are still examining all of that as part of our
plans to transform the service in that way. It will happen as
the service is transformed, it will not be left out on its own
like some sort of left-over.
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