Examination of Witness (Questions 149-159)
23 JUNE 2004
MS VANESSA
DAVIS
Q149 Chairman: Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen. The Committee is in the course of a service delivery
to minority ethnic people inquiry and we welcome this morning
a witness from Disability Alliance, Vanessa Davis, who is Director
of External Services. Vanessa, thank you for coming.
Ms Davis: Thank you for inviting
me.
Q150 Chairman: Thank you for your written
evidence which was very helpful. I know that your organisation
has been particularly helpful to the Committee in terms of trying
to get access to some of the client groups, which are quite hard
to reach and that is part of the problem and part of the reason
for the inquiry, because the system finds it difficult to get
face-to-face contact with some of the people that the Department
for Works and Pensions is seeking to serve, so thank you for helping
us do that. Perhaps you could set the scene yourself, say a little
bit about your own work, and what Disability Alliance thinks about
this important area, then we have some technical areas of questions
which we would like to put to you, if we may?
Ms Davis: Thanks for inviting
me to come and talk today. To give you a little bit of background
briefly, we are a registered nationwide, charity, who have been
around since 1974 providing advice about social security benefits
and obviously latterly tax credits to disabled people, carers
and families. We noticed quite some time ago that many individuals
from black and minority ethnic communities were not accessing
our benefits and services and we found that out from the statistical
information we were collecting because we monitor calls that we
get and the services that we do, so about eight years ago we decided
we needed to do something about that and find out why people in
those communities were not accessing our services and that has
grown over the last eight years. We have had four different projects.
The first started off resulting in a publication called the endurance
test which was evidence from black and minority ethnic elders
about their experience of claiming attendance allowance, and there
is lots of information around that if you ever want to see it.
Also, we have done projects which I guess you might call outreach
projects where we have gone out to community groups and particularly
BME community groups, to find out how they could better access
our services and what we needed to do about that, and one of those
was projects was training advisers in small BME community groups
so they could give correct advice to their client groups. I guess
probably the most important project was the one we did which resulted
in the Out of Sight report, which was a national project.
It was mainly based in London but we did some work in Bristol
as well, and that was talking to advice agencies who support advocacy
services to BME communities about how they could access our services
but also broadening it out. Why were they not able to get the
advice they needed from either their own community groups or from
the Department for Work and Pensions? That became very interesting
because then we started to get lots of important information which
is what this report was all about and that is why I am here today—to
talk through the questions arising out of this report.
Q151 Chairman: Thank you for that. You
are quite right—it was obvious to us in the earlier stages
of the inquiry that lack of monitoring is really an issue. What
do you think are the consequences of the Department's part failure
really to grasp the significance of monitoring and establishing
just exactly what the position is? What are the direct consequences
as your organisation would see it?
Ms Davis: There are a number,
and I guess the one that screams the loudest to me is the fact
that the Department has a responsibility under the Race Relations
Amendment Act now to fulfil its compliance, if you like, and comply
with making sure that the services, advice and everything that
is provided are following all the standards that have been laid
out in the Race Relations Amendment Act. I guess the biggest fear
for me is that unless monitoring is carried out, and I will talk
a bit more about that in a minute, I cannot see how the Department
for Work and Pensions are going to be able to truly fulfil their
responsibilities under the Race Relations Amendment Act, because
if you do not know the make-up of the people using your services
you cannot measure whether or not you are going to reach the,
as you have called them, harder-to-reach groups. So that is one
of the priorities. Then, from that consequence everything else
goes pear-shaped because if you cannot monitor and measure, then
you are never going to be able to measure the standards that have
been set and the new initiatives that I know the Department for
Work and Pensions have laid out in their race equality scheme.
There is no way of measuring that without doing ethnic monitoring,
so that really is the overall consequence—that you are not
going to be able to measure it—and then all the people who
need to be able to access those services are going to have limited
access to the services, as is the case now for many people. Obviously
not everybody but many are not able to access the services for
a range of different reasons, so it is really about making sure
the monitoring is done to find who are the people you are not
reaching and why you are not reaching them, but until that monitoring
is done you have not got a baseline to work from.
Q152 Chairman: Do I take from your answer
the fact that you are not optimistic that the situation is going
to improve in the foreseeable future?
Ms Davis: I would like to say
that I am and personally, because I have been with the Department
for fifteen years, I have a strong sense of loyalty to the initiatives
and the efforts that are being made and I can see there are many
efforts being made. We very much welcome the race equality scheme.
Our experience, however, is that there is a big separation between
high level policy officials and what they are intending to do
and what happens on an operational frontline basis. That is my
own personal experience and also our experience through all the
projects we have done—that policy makers will say "This
is what is going to happen and this is what we want to do"
but on the front line the message is being watered down. I could
probably talk for ages from my own experience about why that happens
but that is not why I am here today. I am cautious and concerned
and not convinced that some of the measures that have been laid
out in the race equality scheme are going to reach the front line,
because that is the most important thing.
Q153 Chairman: Finally from me, have
you got any hard evidence that would suggest that take-up is more
difficult for ethnic minority disabled people than from the general
cohort of the rest of the population? I think everybody understands
that disability living allowance, particularly as a benefit, is
hard of access for the generality of the population. Are we just
assuming that ethnic minorities have more trouble, or do you have
hard evidence that demonstrates that proposition?
Ms Davis: It is a difficult question
to answer without actually referring to some of the work that
other people are doing. I guess that is probably the best way
to go. We collected statistics from our own advice lines about
the amount of people who access our services and tell us about
the benefits they are claiming or need to claim, and I could not
provide the actual figures but I know for a fact that we have
hard evidence that says that the majority of our service users
are white, middle class people—that is the evidence we have.
The evidence that we collected from over 70 organisations who
were involved with this particular report told us the same thing—that
they are having difficulty reaching their own communities let
alone people coming in and using their services—and essentially,
unless the Department has got some figures it is very difficult
to assess whether that is true, apart from the anecdotal evidence
we have had from other organisations. I know that the TUC have
done some recent reports on what is happening with New Deal, and
New Deal have been doing monitoring, and there is some evidence
from them that black and minority ethnic people are not benefiting
from New Deal in the same way that their white counterparts are,
and I think those figures are definitely worth looking at. I have
brought one of the reports today and New Deal and Race,
number 53 in the TUC welfare reform series, gives a range of different
figures and one of the figures that jumped out at me was risk
of poverty by ethnic group of head of household which for the
white group it is 17% but for Pakistani and Bangladeshi it is
58%, so there is some evidence that is probably worth looking
at there, and I know this is not about disability benefits but
I would imagine it would be transferable.
Chairman: That is a helpful reference,
which we will have a look at.
Q154 Andrew Selous: I would like to focus
on accessing the benefit system. In your evidence you said that
some of the information available from the Department for Work
and Pensions is not always accessible or reliable. What would
you like to see the Department doing about that?
Ms Davis: I would like to say
that I think the Department is making great efforts to try to
address this problem and in the meetings we had as part of our
project people were very keen for the Department for Work and
Pensions to listen to us and find out what it was that we had
trialled that had worked with the community groups we were working
with, and that is very positive. However, much of the information
that is produced is produced in information leaflets that are
done in community languages, and good as they are there are so
many different problems surrounding those. For example, there
is a high level of illiteracy amongst many of the groups that
we are trying to reach, the people we are talking about. There
is quite a strong reliance on people's children to be able to
provide the information that they may have to understand from
a leaflet which might have complex issues, and that for children
is very difficult to get the messages across. The biggest problem
is that people do not know what they do not know, and so in order
for somebody to be able to perhaps come to a Benefit Agency office
or a Jobcentre Plus office, or go to a Post Office and get an
appropriate leaflet they need to know what it is they are looking
for, so it is the step before the provision of information that
for this particular client group causes the problem.
Q155 Andrew Selous: But would you have
any specific suggestions? Are you suggesting the Department for
Work and Pensions should send people out to talk by word of mouth?
Ms Davis: Absolutely. What we
did with our projects, and it is small scale but it gives a flavour
of what we were doing, is we decided that we would go out to community
groups and ask them what would be the best way to get information
to particular client groups, and we worked with Asian women to
see if we could reach those because many Asian women tend to be
out in community centres or out at Jobcentre Plus offices less
than perhaps their male partners or other people in their communities,
so we specifically targeted that particular group to see if we
could reach them. What we found was that people very much shared
information with each other within the community, so as we went
out to the community group there would be people in mosques where
they had women's days, people in other religious centres, in doctors'
surgeries and community centres who they would be going to and
sharing information, so we went to them and asked them what the
best way was. A range of different suggestions were made and we
tried some and some did not work so well, so some people said
that what we ought to do is provide information to somebody in
the community who everybody goes to to get their information from,
and that came out so many times from the community groups we had—that
there is perhaps an elder in a particular community that people
go to almost like an oracle to get the information from. We have
hesitations about that because then you have word of mouth problems
and you have a problem with information changing and perhaps that
person is not being updated, but that is what we were told was
the best way to get information out. The other version that we
tried was to do things on videotape and that worked very well.
We had video tapes with three Asian actresses, and they were not
doing it as an information video, if you like, it was a conversation
between three Asian women very much as if they were in somebody's
front room, saying "Did you know that my aunt is disabled?"
and "Did you know she could get DLA?" and people had
more faith in that because it seemed more close to the kind of
thing they were used to.
Q156 Andrew Selous: Do you have any feedback
on whether that has been successful? Has the video gone out to
ten people, or how many?
Ms Davis: Yes. We sent the video
out to about 15 organisations and we gave evaluation forms to
the advice workers who were working in those advice agencies and
asked them if they could fill out the evaluation forms or if they
could help their clients to come in and watch the video there
and lend it to them, and the feedback we got was that the videos
were very useful and that people learned stuff that they had no
idea of before, and that had it not been shown to them in that
way they might not have been able to access the system. We only
covered benefits for carers, DLA and attendance allowance, and
obviously we could do a whole lot more but certainly the feedback
on those videos was that the most important thing was where was
it going to be shown, and was it going to be updated regularly,
and were people going to be invited in to watch it, because that
was one of the problems that we picked up from the community groups—that
you have to get the hard-to-reach groups, or go to them. It is
not necessarily that they are harder to reach; it is perhaps that
we are not looking in the right places.
Q157 Andrew Selous: Just getting back
to the traditional means of providing information through leaflets
and posters and so on, have you come across many instances where
there has been a lack of these leaflets? Some people who have
given evidence have said there have not always been enough available
and they have been tucked away and not accessible. Is that something
you have found?
Ms Davis: Yes. I had somebody
from Jobcentre Plus interview us about the leaflets, and a whole
range of questions came up about whether the information was useful
or too much, whether you needed to have less information or more,
where they needed to be, and the conclusion we came to was that
it was keeping the stocks up to date but more importantly making
sure the information in them is appropriate and not too detailed,
and making sure that the information is updated at whichever outlet
it has been placed. The suggestion we made was a bit like vending
machines on tube stations, in that you will have somebody going
around and filling them up all the time who is responsible for
that particular job. If you have a Post Office that is full of
leaflets, whose responsibility is it to make sure the correct
leaflet is in there and has been replaced? I think that is one
of the problems, who is taking responsibility for ensuring the
information out there is up-to-date and there is enough of it?
Q158 Andrew Selous: That is useful. What
about the range of languages that leaflets are translated into?
Have you detected many gaps?
Ms Davis: I think there will always
be gaps. We have learned from our experience of producing publications,
and we will get phone calls from schools saying "Can you
translate this in up to 35 different languages?" that there
are always going to be gaps. The key is not to focus too much
on language leaflets; that is one of the problems. The Department
seems to think, from the experience we have had and our evidence,
that language leaflets are the way forward. Yes, it is better
to have them than not, there is no doubt about that, but the problem
is that language leaflets are only useful for people who know
they are there and who know which leaflet they need to get hold
of, and it is the step before that where the gap is. It is not
that the leaflets are not okay; but if you know what you need
and you have somebody who can either translate it for you or can
explain the information in there if the person has literacy problems,
then you are okay but it is the step before. How do people know
what it is they do not know?
Q159 Mr Goodman: Disability benefit claim
forms are obviously long, complex and difficult to access—all
the criticisms that you have made—and for groups like my
ethnic minority Pakistani Kashmiri voters in High Wycombe, 5%
of the population, they are going to be even more formidable.
Just playing devil's advocate for a moment, would the Department
not say these benefits are of an intimate character and you have
to do a lot of examination to get the results and find out whether
you are eligible or not, so the Department might say, "There
is a limited amount we can do to ease the problems of groups for
whom English is not the first language, or indeed a language at
all". What would you say to that? What do you think the Department
can do? Does it consult sufficiently with the groups who are disadvantaged?
Ms Davis: No, I do not think they
do consult enough with groups that they need to consult with.
There is consultation; it does go on, but you need to consult
on a local level. National approaches to local problems are not
the answer because, as you know from your own area, there will
be a different make-up in each area and thus you have different
needs in terms of information provision, so local approaches and
if possible local budgetary autonomy for initiatives that are
appropriate in a local area clearly seem to me a better way forward.
In terms of the Department's claim about the claim forms being
long and there is little that can be done, I sympathise with that.
It is true—disability benefit claim forms are long and complex,
but if they are not accessible to everybody then you have to see
that there is a problem, and I know there have been a range of
different pilot exercises looking at new claim forms; for attendance
allowance they have reduced some of the information that people
need to fill in there, and there are at the moment pilots going
on for the DLA claim forms. I am not saying there are not any
but I have certainly done the research on this and I am not aware
of any consultation on the new DLA forms that specifically looks
at access to those particular benefits through the claim forms
with BME groups. So there are all these missed opportunities where
people can be using the pilots already taking place to find out
what is wrong with those claim forms for these client groups.
It will be different for every client group and that is going
to be a problem but it has to be addressed because of the Race
Relations Amendment Act. You could break it down and look at it
as simply as that. Those services have to be accessible to people.
It does not mean that the claim form has to be changed and be
one sheet with just a couple of questions on because to assess
disability benefits obviously that is never going to be enough,
but there needs to be the consultation with those groups to find
out how we can make this more accessible, how we can explain the
complex nature of these benefits and the assessment processes
and the evidence we need to provide to groups that may never have
considered themselves to be disabled. For instance, in some languages
there is no word for "carer". How do you get across
that barrier if there are communities who would not even understand
they were a carer? For them they are doing what families are doing,
they look after each other and do not consider themselves to be
the carer. The language barrier, the claim forms themselves and
the complexity of the benefits system anyway is always going to
be a barrier but you have to address those problems because you
are not going the reach the client groups, and I am always going
to go back to the Race Relations Amendment Act because you have
to reach them. We have legislation now to cover that.
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