Examination of Witnesses (Questions 220-239)
MS CAROL
HABBERFIELD, MR
TERRY PATTERSON,
MR JIM
DICKSON AND
MS JANET
GURNEY
2 DECEMBER 2004
Q220 Chairman: Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen. Can I call the committee to order and first of all
thank our hosts for looking after us so well. The committee makes
a habit—indeed it is an important part of its work—of
taking evidence outside London, and we always get very good treatment.
Mrs Humble, who is a distinguished former member of this local
authority, has done us proud and made sure that everything has
been in order and we are really grateful to our hosts. Joan was
very keen that we came and took some evidence locally. We had
a very good session yesterday in Blackpool and Fleetwood. We are
in the middle of a pensions credit inquiry and we are joined this
morning by a set of expert witnesses representing the Local Government
Association and local county councils' Welfare Services. We have
with us Carol Habberfield, Senior Projects Officer at the Local
Government Association, and she is assisted by Terry Patterson,
who is a Social Security Adviser. We are also joined from Lancashire
County Council by Jim Dickson, who is the Head of County Welfare
Rights Service, and from Leicestershire County Council by Janet
Gurney, who is a Senior Welfare Rights Officer. You are all very
welcome. This is an important inquiry for us. We are coming to
our conclusion. We will be putting some questions to the Chief
Executive of the new Pension Service and the Minister on Wednesday
next week, and that will be our final oral session of evidence.
We have a series of areas that we would like to cover with you
but I would like to start by inviting you all to say a little
bit about how you see your work and how you see that work having
changed on the introduction of pension credit which has been in
place now since October 2003. From an operational point of view,
for the avoidance of doubt, David Hamilton has parliamentary duties
which will take him away quite soon, so if he leaves it is not
because he has lost interest or has taken offence at anything
which has been said! Without any more ado, Carol, can I start
with you?
Ms Habberfield: The LGA would
like to start by welcoming the fact that the pension credit has
come about. The LGA is certainly focused on trying to eradicate
pensioner poverty and sees central government's efforts in the
introduction of this new benefit as one of the ways of helping
the situation. Having said that, there are some things I would
like to say about the benefit. First of all, for the poorest pensioners
there is nothing additional in the fact that if they have no savings
and no occupational benefit then the overall rate of benefit has
not increased at all. The LGA would welcome though, with the introduction
of this new benefit, the higher focus on the take-up of benefits
overall by pensioners. That whole arena with the additional marketing
campaigns and the work that the LGA has been doing with the Department
of Work and Pensions has been very useful. In particular I would
make mention of the work with the black and minority ethnic groups;
the additional focus there has been very useful. When we are looking
at pension credit overall and the creation of the Pension Service
as a separate entity, which has helped to give pensioners a higher
focus regarding benefit overall, that has been a useful progression
and the creation of a Local Service within Pension Service has
been a useful attribution. When you are looking at the creation
of partnership working of the Joint Teams with these Local Service
staff from the Pension Service, at the present time there are
29 teams which are operational with 70% of local authorities signed
up for the creation of further Joint Teams. What the LGA want
to make clear is that these Joint Teams should be built on existing
partnership work because there is a lot of extra knowledge within
those local authorities where benefit take-up has been done extremely
well and local authorities have local contacts with their local
communities. Building on existing partnerships is one of the key
priorities; that should be stressed.
Q221 Chairman: That is very useful and
we will come back to some of these important issues that you have
put your finger on a little bit later on. Let us turn to our county
council colleagues. Jim, what is your perspective?
Mr Dickson: I am Head of the Lancashire
County Council Welfare Rights Service. The Welfare Rights Service
in Lancashire has almost two decades of carrying out take-up work.
Without wishing to appear arrogant, I think we do have some background
in doing take-up work. We currently deliver over 40,000 advice
transactions a year in Lancashire and generate in the region of
£26 million in cash benefits for people in Lancashire, so
we have some background in delivering welfare benefits advice.
We welcomed pension credit as a worthwhile benefit and the feedback
that we have had from pensioners has been extremely positive.
The fairer treatment of capital, for example, and the ability
to reach out to people who are capital rich but income poor, which
has always been a problem with various benefits, are extremely
welcome to us. I do not agree entirely with Carol that it has
not reached the poorest pensioners because there has been an increase
in the basic scale rates which has benefited the poorest pensioners.
I would say: great benefit; shame about the administration. The
problems that we have had with pension credit have been almost
entirely around the administration of the benefit rather than
the benefit itself, although we do have one or two points as regards
the benefit. The only way I can describe the perception of the
Pension Service is that they came to Lancashire almost as a colonial
power in that they arrived in the county with a very firm set
of views as to what pension credit was and how it would be administered
and they have been extremely inflexible in how they have administered
the benefit. Despite the fact, as I say, that we have been carrying
out highly successful take-up work for two decades in the county
there has been an almost complete failure to co-operate with a
lot of the existing work that has been going on in Lancashire.
In fact, we have found that some of our take-up work has been
derailed by the way pension credit has been administered, particularly
around the failure of the Pension Service to co-operate with our
service in some of the highly successful take-up work that we
do. I can contrast that with local offices, the predecessors of
the Pension Service. We enjoyed great co-operation from local
offices of the Department of Work and Pensions. Now that it is
being administered centrally we have had a dreadful two years
in trying to get any proper co-operation and liaison. As an example,
we have had liaison meetings going back many years with the Department
of Work and Pensions. In the last two years of trying to liaise
with Pension Service we have had six meetings at which over 30
staff have appeared from Pension Service at different times, but
there has been no continuity. Only four of those members of staff
have attended for more than two meetings, so it is very hard to
have a dialogue with the service. They are constantly chopping
and changing personnel.
Q222 Chairman: Is it getting better?
That is a pretty powerful set of criticisms.
Mr Dickson: Unfortunately, the
withdrawal of the Local Service, which is the latest development,
is causing yet more problems because we were just getting used
to Local Service.
Q223 Chairman: We are going to come on
to that a little bit later. This is a yes or no answer. Is it
getting better or not, that liaison, that relationship, that imperial
approach to life? Is that improving or are you still struggling
with it?
Mr Dickson: On balance I would
say no.
Ms Habberfield: Perhaps I might
come in there. We cover the whole country with the LGA, and certainly
on some of the issues that Jim has mentioned the contact has been
quite patchy. Where it has worked well it has worked very well
and primarily in the south west there has been a lot of active
engagement by the Pension Service with local authorities within
that arena, but unfortunately that has not always been replicated
across the country.
Q224 Chairman: Janet, what is your experience
from your own county council?
Ms Gurney: It is quite similar
to Jim's. Just to introduce myself, I am a Senior Welfare Rights
Officer with Leicestershire County Council. Again, we have been
an authority with welfare rights established for over 20 years
and I have worked there for over 20 years. We have two teams and
my team works with home care and residential care service users
only, who are largely old people. I have also been the lead person
from the city and the county responsible for advice and liaison
meetings with Pension Service and other offices of the DWP. Yes,
like Jim, we welcomed the introduction of Pension Service but
have found negotiating and liaison quite difficult. We have had
the experience at our liaison meetings, which have been going
for 20 years, of Pension Service refusing at one point to continue
to turn up and that being quite difficult to negotiate. We have
had difficulties with issues such as accessing claim forms and
with communication with them generally. The administration is
poor. There are lots of mistakes. We are having to work hard to
get improvements. It is improving but I would feel very uncertain,
if we were to lose our local Pension Service office, that we would
manage to maintain any sort of effective local liaison. It is
certainly hard going. It has been almost impossible for us to
negotiate partnership working. We started out having meetings
and then had the experience of Pension Service not attending a
meeting that had been set up to progress things and not responding
to communications since. For two meetings which they did attend
they sent a completely different group of staff to negotiate with
us, which was disconcerting. There has been a view that it is
one-size-fits-all. As Jim has said, things that we had in place
before were whipped away from us in terms of local agreements
and we had to start from scratch. There is a feeling that you
have to do things their way and they do not recognise local expertise.
For me there are particular problems around not recognising the
need to do take-up work with other benefits alongside pension
credit which is, I suppose, going to be a real stumbling block
for us in terms of progressing partnership working since Leicestershire
Welfare Rights has always taken a holistic approach to the take-up
of benefit.
Q225 Chairman: That is very helpful—actually,
it is not; it is very worrying. We will come back to a lot of
these things in detail, but on a much tighter basis I want to
check three very brief questions with you because we need to know
a little bit more about these for our own purposes. Has the move
to telephonic systems made a difference and are there problems?
Could two of you from your own local situations deal with it briefly?
Mr Dickson: I am sure telephone
advice works for many pensioners, perhaps the majority. However,
the problem with the abrupt change (and it was almost overnight),
from being able to access a claim file by a variety of means to
a solely telephone based service, affected those people who cannot
use the phone (and there are a lot out there) either because they
have difficulties with hearing or because of a lack of confidence.
It is very misleading to look at telephone ownership because many
pensioners have a phone in their house but it is there for emergencies.
They do not use it as a preferred means of communication and it
has been very difficult for those pensioners.
Ms Gurney: I think you need to
have the maximum possible number of ways of accessing the benefit
if you want to improve take-up. What you should not have done
is introduce a telephone service but take away some of the other
methods, which is what happened. Claim forms were really difficult
to get hold of and I think there are still some advice agencies
that have not managed to get a supply of claim forms. I think
they should be made broadly available so that people can pick
them up and have time to think about them. I find that pensioners
often want to weigh it all up, they want to think about it, they
need time to consider if this is really for them. It often takes
two or three interventions and contacts from an adviser or somebody
else before they have the confidence to go forward and claim.
Q226 Chairman: I will come back to the
LGA. We have been looking at some of the accuracy targets and
figures for the agency and their accuracy targets are quite high.
On the other hand, there is some prima facie evidence,
and in an anecdotal sense, that the accuracy on the ground is
not all it is cracked up to be in the figures. Again, very briefly,
have you got a perspective on that?
Mr Dickson: Around premiums we
find the accuracy levels dreadful.
Q227 Chairman: Dreadful?
Mr Dickson: Dreadful. If I can
give you two examples, my colleague carried out 10 checks last
week. Five of those were wrong in terms of missing premiums. There
is an issue around carer's premium where, because the Pension
Service are not encouraging people to take up underlying entitlement,
on a straightforward superficial accuracy check that person's
benefit will be seen as being correct. However, had they gone
and got someone to apply for an underlying entitlement there would
have been an additional premium available. We find that all over
the place, basically.
Q228 Chairman: That is very clear. Janet,
do you concur with that?
Ms Gurney: I largely agree with
that. They are pretty good at getting the basic rates right and
there are only two options. The premiums are problematic and we
have examples of arguing cases repeatedly, to be honest, to get
the premiums. Also, all the other possible additions, such as
housing costs, we are finding recently are becoming a problematic
area.
Q229 Chairman: That is very clear also.
The question of award letters has floated up at us a lot during
the course of this inquiry. Do you have anything to say about
the quality of communication of the service?
Mr Dickson: It is hard to separate
out Pension Service from other elements of the DWP. A particular
problem is the so-called award letter. It is a non-award letter
for carer's allowance. I defy anyone to understand that letter,
including the bullet points. It tells people, "You have to
let us know if you get sent to prison", and they have actually
sent that letter out to pensioners.
Q230 Chairman: It is not the first time
that has been raised with us.
Mr Dickson: It is a strange point
to make conceptually. Award letters have always been a problem
in the 20 or so years I have been involved in welfare rights and
they continue to be a problem. There is an issue around, for example,
housing costs. For some reason that I do not fully understand
a letter is generated telling someone that they are not entitled
to pension credit when they are entitled to pension credit and
that is because they have not had time to do their housing costs.
Q231 Chairman: Do you concur with that
generally, Janet?
Ms Gurney: For me the major issue
is that people forget which parts of pension credit they have
got because they no longer have order books which would give us
more information. The award notice does not tell them that that
is the only time that they are going to be told how it has been
calculated and which components they have, which is quite important
for passporting them onto other benefits. They really need to
be told to keep that somewhere safe. The other issue that I have
about award notices and communication is that when we have discussed
this at liaison meetings, because all the correspondence is handled
centrally, even if we can agree that we need an improvement in
something the local office do not have the flexibility to re-design
their letter and make an improvement. They have to send it up
and it can take us years to get an improvement and, of course,
by then the situation has changed completely.
Q232 Chairman: That is very helpful and
clear. Carol, you obviously have a perspective on some of that.
Mr Patterson: Perhaps I can deal
with that. On the telephony point, the call centre model gives
a lack of ownership of cases and there is a lack of expertise.
It takes a long time to resolve these areas of difficulty. On
the computer system itself, backdating is a huge problem and staff
have to fool the computer to get the correct outcome when they
are inputting to get backdating and that takes extra time. On
the award letters, that is something that is extremely unclear.
There is national standards group looking at the letter but progress
is quite slow.
Ms Habberfield: Picking up on
Terry's point with the telephony scripts, the LGA have been at
pains to point out that they do not encompass advice on other
benefits. There is an overarching approach which limits the accuracy
of the advice that is given out at the telephone pick-up points
and also at the pension centres themselves. The SDP (severe disability
premium) rate for couples is a prime example. The other issue
which has started to come to light is incorrect assessment where
there is pension credit for work around people with children.
Those are usually incorrectly assessed and that is because the
wrong rate of retirement pension has been taken into account.
Chairman: I want to move on now to some
of these areas in a little bit more detail.
Q233 David Hamilton: Can I carry on the
theme that you have just been discussing, Carol, and that is take-up
of pension credit linked with other benefits? Are the targets
for pension credit sufficiently ambitious at present? The number
of new claims each month seems to have dropped considerably since
March of this year. Could you give us a reason why that has happened?
The National Audit Office have apparently highlighted the importance
of take-up work at local level. What progress is being made to
develop local take-up strategies? Can I make one observation here,
that where there is a patchy response right throughout England
and specifically in this area there has not been a very good relationship
to assist that take-up between the workers in the two organisations.
Could you give me some good examples of how you are working together,
and indeed how you are wanting to move on from the take-up of
pension credit, which in turn has allowed claimants to enter into
other benefits?
Ms Habberfield: If you look to
the south west of the country where Joint Teams have been in operation
for about two years, they are adopting a holistic approach to
the whole issue of older people's services, and if you look at
that you will see large increases, for instance, in attendance
allowance take-up which then can trigger entitlement to pension
credit through the award of extra premiums. There is some anecdotal
evidence at the present time of additional take-up through those
Joint Teams which are working in a holistic way. That holistic
approach is spelt out in the Link Age document which was recently
published and which was produced with the Local Government Association
and central government. Regarding take-up generally, there are
concerns in the LGA at present about the withdrawal of things
such as the pension credit Sub-Committee which has been looking
at the maximising of take-up via pension credit and the additional
marketing of that. That was withdrawn without any consultation
and we would like to express our concern at the abolition of that.
It does seem to send messages through about how concerned the
Government truly are regarding enhancing take-up. With regard
to the pension credit targets, if we look at some of the work
that our major partners are doing, even if 100% of those targets
were met it would still leave a million pensioners in poverty
who would not be receiving their true pension credit entitlement.
We would say that the targets overall are not ambitious enough.
Q234 David Hamilton: Have you any comment
Mr Dickson?
Mr Dickson: I am not sure I agree
with that. This is the first government that has ever introduced
a target for take-up of benefits and for me that was quite a development
and something to be welcomed. From our point of view it is hats
off to them for that. The target, looking at it now, appears to
me to be quite ambitious because I do not think they are going
to meet it. What I think is happening is that the initial wave
of publicity has clocked up all those people who are quite willing
and comfortable with the telephone based claims process and they
have all gone through the system now and are getting pension credit.
What we are left with are what have always been termed the hard
to reach groups and they will be much more difficult to get onto
the benefit for a whole range of reasons.
Q235 David Hamilton: Could I just follow
that through? Do you have the information you need in order to
get to that target at local level? You are identifying that that
is where you are now. Are you able to achieve that goal of getting
the information you require in order to achieve that goal?
Mr Dickson: We have enough information.
We have been doing this work for a long time. We know how to reach
those types of pensioners and we would be quite happy to share
our approach to take-up work with the Pension Service. The problem
for the Pension Service is that they are not interested in a dialogue
with us about how we would get to those hard to reach groups.
Where we have contacted hard to reach groups the Pension Service
are not co-operating with us and helping us to get those people
onto benefits.
Mr Patterson: We have 20 years
of local authority-led take-up work which is mainstream take-up
work for all sorts of groups. With sheltered housing and new council
tenants you will often find that they are automatically signed
up to the whole range of benefits provided by services. What seems
to have happened more recently is that the department has been
playing catch-up and learning about take-up strategies in the
last two or three years. In applying those take-up strategies
they have a long way yet to go. The scans and data-matching were
done in 2002-03. They did local outreach in 2003 into 2004. Now
we are at the hard stage where the scans are still being worked
upon but they are not generating good returns. The current scan
in the Pension Service Local Service may have 200 cases of which
only a handful are entitled to pension credit, so they are not
working on the best data. The best data tends to come from housing
benefit records and local authority-held records, which give a
straight indication of a high level of likely eligibility, and
whenever we look at those we achieve very high success rates.
The feeling in local government is that more attention needs to
be given to local authority-led partnership work.
Q236 Vera Baird: Do you know who is not
claiming? I think the department is now coming round to the point
of view that, exactly as you have said, most people with a sizeable
claim have been caught and the ones who have not been caught by
take-up campaigns and so on are, contrary to what you said, not
necessarily being left in poverty but are being perhaps left with
a pound or two less than they are entitled to which they simply
do not think is worth claiming.
Mr Patterson: The answer to that
is yes, we have a lot of information about who is not claiming.
Q237 Vera Baird: On the issue of whether
people are being left—as you put it in a rather dramatic
way, a million people are left in poverty and the targets are
achieved—are we in fact failing to get to people who have
only a little bit to claim who perhaps know that they might be
entitled to that but simply do not bother because it is too complicated?
Mr Dickson: Amongst the hard to
reach groups there are people for whom the benefit is marginal,
but we are still coming across lots of people who have been very
reluctant to claim for a number of reasons and who are missing
out on huge sums. Last year we did a mailshot using Social Services
data and I did not believe some of the figures on paper. There
were people who on paper were living on £75 a week, and I
was quite sceptical about that, but when we went out and visited
them they were living on £75 a week. For various reasons
they had been very reluctant to do something about that.
Q238 Vera Baird: You said people who
you say are still deeply poor are reluctant to claim have been
reluctant for a number of reasons.
Mr Dickson: They are frightened
that the money is going to be taken back off them. There are some
very deep-rooted fears about committing fraud and suddenly finding
that they are going to be asked for the money back. There is a
lot of difficulty over the claims process, even with the claim
forms, not just because of the telephone service. There is a whole
range of reasons like that. It could be mis-information, having
been turned down in the past. They maybe claimed five or six years
ago when the rules were different and got refused, and they do
not realise that the rules change and things move on and you may
become entitled.
Q239 David Hamilton: The real question
is, do the Pension Service have the resources they need to apply
these issues and what could be done differently to achieve that
link that you were just talking about?
Ms Gurney: I think it is a question
of linking the different benefits together. For me, in order for
them to achieve their target they have got to do the attendance
allowance and the carer's allowance as well because they trigger
the additional amounts. The way that we work in Leicestershire
is that we get referrals from other parts of social services,
so we are not specifically doing take-up work. We are acting on
the basis of referrals. Currently I have over 220 referrals waiting
to be allocated and I did some analysis on those recently to see
what the problems were. Of those 220 there were only 14 people
who needed solely a pension credit claim. However, the vast majority
were entitled to either additional pension credit or a new pension
credit claim but they needed to claim attendance allowance or
carer's allowance in order to get it. This is the difficulty.
The Local Service are concentrating on doing only pension credit.
In Leicestershire they have reduced the amount of work they are
doing on other benefits. They do not fill in the forms. They will
hand them out and that is the limit, and they have reduced that
in order to do cold-calling. I have checked this week with the
Local Service about the cold-calling and what they have said to
me is that the cold-calling is producing around a 25% success
rate in returns, whereas previously they were achieving a 50-70%
success rate, so it is going down remarkably. They are saying
that is due to the lack of accuracy about the data from the data
scans.
| 
