Memorandum submitted by Wolverhampton
Citizens Advice Bureaux
DELIVERY BY THE DEPARTMENT OF WORK &
PENSIONS OF SERVICES TO PEOPLE FROM BLACK AND MINORITY ETHNIC
COMMUNITIES
1. Wolverhampton CAB is one of only a handful
of CABs to have remained open continuously since September 1939,
and therefore predates many of the civic policies and structures
it works within—including the welfare state, local authority
boundaries and social services—and this has enabled the
CAB to build up considerable experience in assisting the steady
development of local services.
2. The CAB here is also notable for an unusual
approach of employing its own solicitors alongside traditional
volunteers and advice workers, thus extending its range of services
routinely to litigation over many years, including the occasional
Judicial Review. The city itself has known particularly acute
debates on the needs of its ethnic communities, perhaps most famously
during the later period of Enoch Powell's time as a constituency
MP, however the dominant trends (as we hope to show in evidence)
have been solidly towards deep and solid cohesion between communities,
including the introduction of asylum seeker dispersal (indeed
CAB currently has asylum seekers volunteering as advisors).
3. The mainspring of CAB funding recognition
has always been through the City Council and its predecessors.
Today the CAB is decentralised and sustains a relatively high
number of personnel—102 volunteers and 46 employees—who
together respond to some 26,000 enquiries annually from approximately
18,000 individuals, of which at any given time about 600 enquiries
are pursued as "live" legal cases funded by the Legal
Services Commission.
4. Appendix 1 shows that against a national
average of 9.2%, Wolverhampton's population is 22.2% BME (2001
Census), however we would urge the committee to pay attention
to Appendix 3. This is an ethnicity survey of the current school
population, showing that over 30% of school pupils at present
are BME, thus giving us a belief—taken together with other
indicators—that the city population will continue to alter
towards a still greater BME profile.
5. The present CAB workforce as a group
is in fact already 37.9% BME (2004) and the CAB's clients are
currently 44% BME overall. During 2003 the ratio of BME clients
visiting Wolverhampton CAB's main city centre office became a
majority for the first time ever (Appendix 5 is a review of BME
client ratios at CAB over the past three years).
6. The Select Committee for the Department
of Work & Pensions has asked for evidence on the delivery
of services (by DWP) to people from Black and Minority Ethnic
(BME) communities locally. In complying we have sought to firstly
contextualise the CAB's experience of DWP services—how many
enquiries we answer from DWP originating clients, and how these
rank in comparison to other enquiries for social policy concern—and
to benchmark these trends over time.
7. Secondly we analyse in more detail the
nature of the few cases which have caused us concern and compare
these to the national CAB evidence on these issues already submitted
to this Committee. A notable concern is when asylum seekers are
reclassified refugees and instantly become DWP customers.
8. Thirdly we go on to predict where we
think further improvement and planning needs to be made by DWP
and other public service delivery agencies (especially health)
in key urban areas concerning services to BME clients; in particular
we suggest that Leicester, Wolverhampton and Birmingham could
become the first cities in the UK where BME populations become
a majority in our lifetimes, and the interesting implications
this would bring about.
9. Fourthly we describe Wolverhampton CAB's
recent experiences—which are highly impressive—where
DWP staff are already pursuing exactly the kind of improvements
we are suggesting in partnership.
10. A suite of appendices illuminate where
we are drawing this evidence and speculation from. This evidence
has necessarily been prepared in haste due to the late notification
of the Committee's visit, but we could over time elaborate more
concretely on these themes.
B COMMENTARY
11. In the 12 month period 2003-04 enquiries
at Wolverhampton CAB with an origin from DWP type services amounted
to roughly 9,000 or 40% of the workload of our agency. Compared
to five years ago this is a modest decrease. We have already stated
that 44% of CAB's total clients are currently BME and there is
no significant difference in this ratio when applied to the DWP
subject area, although recently we notice clients of Indian origin
have exceeded the long term trend of African Caribbean clients
being the predominant BME users of CAB services.
12. Our starting point in discovering answers
to the Committee's questions was to check through the most notable
social policy cases encountered at Wolverhampton CAB in the 18
month period of January 2003 to June 2004. These amounted to a
total of 65 and Appendix 4 is a brief summary of them all. In
essence this is the chamber of horrors—the resident evil—detected
by our agency locally. Exactly 44% of those profiled were from
BME clients. We find however that only six (9%) relate directly
to DWP services (they are indicated by a first column dot) although
another six relate to NASS (first column cross) and these should
be considered in relation to paragraphs 22-24.
13. Of the six DWP cases only three relate
to BME clients (cases 18, 24 and 54) and of these in our view
only two could be construed as having ethnicity as a probable
factor (these are cases 18 and 24).
14. Case 18 concerns a West African refugee
with a significant disability whose Disability Living Allowance
book had to be recalled for adjustment and then returned to him.
In the event it was sent back to a Post Office for him to collect
but DWP never informed him. By the time CAB had become involved
to help trace the loss he had lived six weeks without payments.
In our view DWP's tardy conduct had combined with a refugee's
understandable lack of knowledge about UK civil service methods
to produce an unacceptable situation.
15. Case 24 concerns a pregnant schoolgirl
of Asian origin who felt unable to continue attending school.
As a consequence her mother lost Working Family Tax Credit and
Child Benefit and DWP stated that they could not replace these
benefits until the child was born—at a moment of real financial
need the family was reduced to an income of £600 a month.
The ethnicity of the girl may be a factor in the decision against
her continuing schooling due to a perception of stigma, however
Wolverhampton has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in
Europe and the interpretation by local DWP staff of national benefit
regulations is neutral—it could therefore be argued ethnicity
was not a dominant factor here, but we thought the case was very
typical of Wolverhampton's character.
16. The other four cases—two with
white clients and two telephone clients without profiling—concerned
poor decision making (case 19), DWP actively misinformed bailiffs
(case 23), another major delay in returning a DLA book (46), deductions
from benefit without informing the client (54) and an incorrect
calculation (56).
17. At this point I compared our findings
with the Citizens Advice national evidence already submitted in
May 2003 to the Committee, and to my surprise found many close
parallels. The main themes in that evidence were a lack of assistance
in form filling by DWP staff, poor communication problems, a lack
of interpreter supply for tribunals, a lack of cultural awareness
(particularly on language barriers) and the needs of NASS clients
transferring to mainstream benefits claims.
18. Therefore my findings in Wolverhampton—a
relatively low number of seriously problematic DWP cases and about
half of these emerging from BME clients—matched the intuitive
feelings of a wide range of local CAB staff I interviewed this
week. Their views were that DWP in general were not significantly
poorer at offering services to BME clients when compared to other
local public service agencies.
19. However, there were three echoing key
areas of consistent concern:
(a) a lack of assistance in form filling
support;
(b) lapses and losses in communication between
DWP and other agencies (which cause acute financial snags for
customers); and
(c) the specific needs of refugees after
the NASS involvement.
The variable overlay of language barriers—which
will affect certain BME clients little at all, but for others
can be immense—simply makes all of these issues more complicated
if there is a lack of interpreting services.
20. More interestingly, whilst this conversation
had been stimulated by the Committees questions on BME clients,
the CAB staff went on to develop a strong belief that the dominant
issues of a lack of support for customers needing to fill in forms,
and the communication lapses causing clients to lose benefit for
worrying spells, were generally common for clients of every ethnicity,
and the Basic Skills needs of many white clients using CAB services
in Wolverhampton almost paralleled the linguistic barriers facing
some BME clients when form filling or communications were the
topic. The commonalities in cases 18 and 46 seem to bear this
out.
21. The current lack of affordable supply
of interpreting services to voluntary sector providers in Wolverhampton
tends to give an unnecessarily longer time involvement and perhaps
complexity to some BME client enquiries being dealt with at CAB.
So regular is this need that Wolverhampton CAB does not usually
file social policy evidence about it. Moreover, we are aware of
imminent local improvements (see paragraph 28) however this does
not minimise our wish to advise the Committee that a lack of affordable,
accredited and available interpreting services nationally is an
avoidable complication in both the lives of thousands of clients
and hundreds of agencies in cities across the UK. Appendix 6 is
a study of language needs in Wolverhampton in 2002—we suggest
this could echo many other areas.
22. The needs of asylum seekers who become
refugees and/or switch to mainstream benefits are another matter
we wish to emphasise. Although case 18 illuminates this to a degree,
CAB staff have seen a large number of such clients for relatively
minor but (for these clients) tremendously inconvenient matters.
These can range from trying to acquire a National Insurance Number
or passport, Child Benefit claims and the paperwork needed to
open a bank account or drive or attend a job interview. Again,
CAB does not routinely file social policy evidence on such matters
but there is a consistent need area here that DWP could improve
on. (We are pleased that positive decisions as asylum status since
April 5 2004 do now provide an NI number in the same letter.)
23. Examples of solutions might be repeats
of the kind of NASS and local area "Welcome to Asylum"
type information packs being produced which could in fact be enhanced
by a subsequent "Welcome to Refugee status" packs, combined
with a specialisation or mainstreaming of awareness training at
inter-agency and DWP levels. Some kind of rapid synchronisation
of acquisition of the crucial bits of paperwork and knowledge
for a client making this transfer of status would be good for
all involved.
24. Why is this a growing need for this
committee to accept? Our understanding in Wolverhampton is that
the asylum dispersal plan caters for a ceiling of 1,204 asylum
seekers resident locally via full NASS contact. Because of the
longevity of the dispersal technique and Wolverhampton's relative
success in managing this need, the number of refugees in the area
is rising and will in future be substantially greater than this
official ceiling number of asylum seekers. This means DWP will
be dealing with more people in this type of need than NASS, hence
the need to accept that this specialised client group is a future
DWP responsibility.
25. This brings us to certain future thoughts
about the kinds of planning DWP and all public agencies should
be making regarding how they shape and organise their services
in urban areas of the UK where "BME populations" are
developing and changing rapidly. We refer heavily here to Appendices
1, 3, 5 and 6. In Appendix 3 the secondary school total of Wolverhampton
pupils with some form of Black (African) origin is over 9.5%.
This is not one housing estate or school district; this is the
city as a whole. This is probably one of the highest African descent
ratios in the static population of any European city north of
Marseille, and there is particular growth in people of mixed race
origin. The health knowledge implications alone of long term care
for such a population are important—recently we have heard
phlebotomists from the sickle cell detection agencies locally
remarking that for the first time they have found sickle cell
trait in "apparently white" people who nonetheless must
have Mediterranean/African heritage "forgotten" in their
families. The Asian communities in Wolverhampton combine to a
higher total and, if time permitted, numerous other features can
be traced through these characteristics. Alongside these communities
must be added both the asylum seeker/refugee communities and the
likely European migrant workers, of whom a small number have already
enquired at Wolverhampton CAB in recent weeks. Appendix 6 does
record that at its time of writing (late 2002) there were 39 languages
being spoken in Wolverhampton.
26. These sort of beguiling complexities
mean the perhaps familiar concept of the "BME minority'
(my emphasis) needs updating. As we have commented, over 30%
of Wolverhampton school children are BME and in Birmingham this
is higher still; in Leicester we understand BME children are a
majority. It would be easy to underestimate how variable, panoramic
and transitory the knowledge bases of public agencies are going
to need to be if they are going to competently serve these remarkable
new populations into the future. With a current workload of clients
of above 40% from BME communities CAB has in some ways already
become used to this level of activity.
27. Areas in which DWP has made some encouraging
progress recently have included improvement of forms—particularly
pensions—and we approve of this, especially where a single
tick can prevent endless further ticks. Also there has been some
work to appoint multi-lingual staff to outreach or sedentary work
in communities and some awareness raising of DWP services by deploying
certain DWP staff in temples, mosques, gurdwaras and other BME
venues. We wholeheartedly support this, including DWP Wolverhampton's
support for CAB's initiatives doing the same. Our only reflection
of concern over this is that high a turnover rate seems to occur
with these valuable DWP staff locally, and we feel a lengthier
period of attachment is needed to win new confidence and recognition
from communities who need proven brokers to dissolve the keenly
felt barriers of perception or practice that have taken years
to ossify.
28. Finally we wish to describe an example
of impressive work being undertaken by DWP which the committee
may already have learnt of today. This is the Wolverhampton Interpreting
& Translation Service that is being rapidly created to garner
a large pool of interpreters and translators from the area to
become uniformly trained and accredited as ethically qualified
suppliers. A considerable amount of development work via the Local
Strategic Partnership, a Task Group and a suite of working groups
have been ongoing for two years. Although this was originally
an idea pursued from the Legal Service Commission's CLSP it has
been warmly embraced by local agencies and the voluntary advice
sector and the DWP—through a senior officer—has been
a mainspring of resource to achieve this success. We would like
to highlight our appreciation of this new style of DWP activity
and see this as a first step on a long road of astute partnership
work. For those CAB staff who have very long memories, this is
exactly where they dreamed agencies like the DWP would arrive
at in decades gone by.
C SUMMARY
29. The summarised evidence on this topic
from Wolverhampton CAB suggests that:
— DWP services to BME clients are not
a major concern locally when compared to other agencies and practices
detected in the city recently.
— We echo the findings of national
Citizens Advice evidence in 2003 that DWP lack of support in form
filling and communication difficulties are common areas of concern,
aggravated by language barriers or lack of cultural awareness.
— We particularly recognise that the
lack of available interpreting services affects both BME clients
and all agencies (including DWP).
— We believe DWP needs to think through
the needs of customers who were asylum seekers and who now claim
benefits.
— In the future a greater BME population
with as yet unmapped long term needs is likely to be apparent
in numerous UK cities in the Midlands and DWP ought to consider
these implications.
— We welcome a number of recent DWP
efforts to improve forms and outreach and especially in Wolverhampton
the serious work on developing a capable local supplier of interpretation.
Wolverhampton Citizens Advice Bureaux
30 June 2004
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