Select Committee on Work and Pensions Minutes of Evidence


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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