Examination of Witnesses (Questions 99-119)
MS NICOLA
SIMPSON, MS
JANET ALLBESON
AND MS
NANCY LOMBARD
13 OCTOBER 2004
Q99 Chairman: Good morning, ladies and
gentlemen. Can I call the Committee to order and welcome you all
this morning. The Committee is in the middle of an inquiry into
the performance of the Child Support Agency and we have got an
important session of oral evidence this morning. Can I say at
the very beginning that we have a young member of the Lombard
family with us who is being encouraged to heckle us, but with
a bit of luck he will be able to stay and he is very welcome.
We have three distinguished practitioners in the field representing
One Parent Families: Nicola Simpson, who is the Chief Executive;
Janet Allbeson, who is a former distinguished servant of the Committee
who is now Policy Consultant to One Parent Families, and Janet
is particularly welcome back; and Nancy Lombard, who is a lone
parent herself and is, as I say, welcome with family. Nicola,
maybe you could start by just saying a bit about what your organisation
is doing and introduce maybe the roles of Janet and maybe the
role you want Nancy to play this morning, but really the first
question I wanted to tax you with in substance is: how do you
assess the performance of the Agency currently?
Ms Simpson: Well, thank you very
much for giving us the opportunity to attend today. Maintenance
is very, very important to one-parent families. As you know, 45%
of the poorest children are in one-parent families, so maintenance
can make a huge difference. On our telephone helplines it is one
of the top three enquiries that we have. Recently we did a survey
of our members, and we were overwhelmed by the response we had,
feeding back all of the frustrations and difficulties they were
having with the CSA, Nancy is a member of One Parent Families.
I suppose, finally, there is a lot of research and certainly our
own experience is that if maintenance is paid regularly, it increases
the chance of a woman staying in work much longer and keeping
a job, so for a whole range of reasons maintenance is very important.
Q100 Chairman: Well, the work that your
organisation has been doing has been very helpful to lone parents
generally over the years, so we are very grateful for that, but
do I recall accurately that there was a newspaper report which
said that some of your members were shunning up to a third of
telephone calls with the CSA? You mentioned some of the survey
work you have done on some of the telephone calls to the Agency,
up to a third of which are abandoned by staff. Was that press
report accurate? We would like to hear a little bit more about
that if that is so. Janet?
Ms Allbeson: I think certainly
one of the things that comes through for our members is that communication
with the Agency has been a real problem- people saying, "I'm
on the phone every week twice a week"; they are running up
huge phone bills trying to talk to the right person; they have
to talk to a different person every time; there does not seem
to be any facility for noting down what they said, and each time
they ring, they are told different things. What comes across is
absolute frustration, irritation and despair and just the emotional
burden really of having to take on the Agency to try and get the
maintenance that they are due.
Q101 Chairman: Nancy, you are important
in all this because you are a user at the end of the day and that
is what the service is designed to serve. Just tell us a little
bit about your experience. How would you rate the Child Support
Agency today, the service that it provides to people like you?
Ms Lombard: When I first contacted
them, I think they were very helpful and there are workers that
are very, very good and very good at getting back to you. But
my experience is that I rang twice a week for 13/14 months, each
phone call being maybe 20 minutes or half an hour which really
builds up. No one will ever ring you back, but you are always
encouraged to ring back later which increases your phone bill
again and I suppose it is that frustration factor, that it does
not come through. I thought that I always had to push for things,
like I was told that I was not entitled to any maintenance because
my ex-partner was a student and when I asked why that should be
the case when he earned nearly £30,000, someone on the off
chance that I spoke to said, "Actually you are right. Maybe
we should look into that. Maybe you can apply for a variation",
so I was lucky that I managed to speak to one person who knew,
whereas I had spoken to 10 people who had told me I was not entitled
to anything.
Q102 Chairman: So how does that affect
your feeling for the Agency? I do not want to put ideas in your
head, but do you have confidence in the system as it is currently
constructed?
Ms Lombard: No, no, I do not at
all. I think there are good workers there and I think that should
be taken into consideration, but there is a lot of ineptitude
as well.
Q103 Chairman: So a radical change is
necessary to get the service right?
Ms Lombard: Yes, I would say so.
Chairman: That is a very compelling opening
statement.
Q104 Ms Buck: Are you on the old system
or the new system?
Ms Lombard: The new system.
Q105 Rob Marris: Just turning briefly
to assessment and calculation, there has been a lower than expected
number of applications made in recent months. Have you any idea
why that might be? Are people shying away from putting in applications?
Ms Allbeson: We were very struck
by the fact that in the business plan for the year just gone,
there was an expectation of 30,000 cases a month and indeed the
Secretary of State, when he was announcing the introduction of
the new scheme in March 2003, said 30,000 cases. Yet if you look
at the take-on rate, it is averaging below that at 26/27,000.
I think we raised this in our submission and we are saying it
is a bit of a puzzle really. Since then I have seen some evidence
from the Civil Service union suggesting that there have been problems
with the interface between Jobcentre Plus and the CSA, the IT
interface, and that there may have been a problem bringing cases
over from JSA which is rather worrying because it suggests that
there might be backlogs building up there. I know a lot of work
has been done to try and improve that, but, even so, looking at
the figures in the last 15 months, there have only been two months
when the applications have reached 30,000 to the Agency. Of course
that is the group who are parents with care on income support
who would benefit from the £10 a week child maintenance premium.
It also means a delay in first contact with the non-resident parents,
which is of course the date that child maintenance liability can
actually begin, so there is a real financial loss to parents with
care if there is any delay in getting that first contact made
with the non-resident parent. I think it might be a computer problem,
but in a way we are looking at it from the outside and we can
just see there is a problem.
Q106 Rob Marris: Speaking of delays on
assessment and calculation, at one point the Department was talking
about a six-week time-frame from application to assessment up
to first payment, they now tell us, which they seem to have abandoned.
What feedback are you getting as to the delays or, one hopes,
lack of delays?
Ms Allbeson: Apart from this whole
issue that just dealing with the Agency being enough to drive
anyone mad, it is delay. It is the fact that, like Nancy, they
are ringing repeatedly to find out what on earth is happening
and in the meantime incurring bank charges, running down their
savings, the kids cannot afford school dinners, and they are having
problems with school uniforms. I notice that the Chief Executive
told the Committee in April that it was taking between 12 and
15 weeks to get to the stage of a calculation, when their original
target was six weeks until payment. Just looking at the stats
on that, as far as we can see, there is this backlog building
up of around 30,000 cases a month and of the cases where they
have actually made a calculation, which of course is only quite
a small proportion of the total number of applications, only 39%
have received a first payment, so there are delays all the way
through to getting the first payment.
Q107 Rob Marris: What about the accuracy
of the calculations, the assessments themselves? Have you come
across problems with those and if something finally does get through
the sausage machine, is it coming out looking like a sausage at
the other end?
Ms Allbeson: Well, I think that
in terms of the feedback we are getting from parents with care
there is a big issue in terms of what you mean by "accuracy".
What lone parents' moan is whether it truly reflects the non-resident
parent's income and there seem to be huge problems about whether
the Agency has done enough to scrutinise properly what the non-resident
parent is saying. One has to face the fact that the CSA is dealing
with, not all the time, but a substantial minority of non-resident
parents who do not want to pay, who will avoid paying and will
seek to minimise the income that gets taken into account in order
to minimise their liability. It can particularly happen, for instance,
when the non-resident parent has a big bonus or commission as
a substantial part of his regular income, where he does agency
work a lot, where he works for a family firm or he is working
for a new partner's firm. The self-employed are a particular group
of course where it is possible quite legitimately to minimise
your taxable income through putting it into another form. That
is the real problem of accuracy and there is a real frustration,
I think, on the part of lone parents affected as to what extent
the Agency is really being robust about what is going on. What
came through a lot was people being told that they had to be a
private detective and literally those words repeatedly, "You've
got to be your own private detective". Well, a lot of lone
parents want to use the Agency as a buffer between them and the
ex-partner and they want to move on. They do not necessarily want
to have that relationship with the ex-partner and they want it
to be perhaps slightly more harmonious.
Q108 Rob Marris: Did you get the impression
then that the Agency was, on occasion, taking as gospel what the
non-resident parents said about their income without digging into
perhaps apparent inconsistencies put forward by the non-resident
parents?
Ms Allbeson: Very much so.
Q109 Rob Marris: Just taking the easy
route on occasions.
Ms Allbeson: Almost triumphant
that they got a figure out of the non-resident parent at all.
Given what we know about compliance levels where only 50% of non-resident
parents, at best, are paying under the old system, and under the
new system it is similar levels, they are lucky to get anything
at all and maybe that is the attitude. I do not know if Nancy
wants to add anything on that.
Q110 Rob Marris: Not on compliance though
because we are going to go on to that, but the accuracy of assessments
and how they sceptically, or otherwise, treat the income suggested
by the non-resident parent.
Ms Allbeson: Yes, and this point
that the onus is very much put on the parent with care to find
out, both to chase them, but also to find out what the non-resident
parent's income is. Of course that income may change. One of the
points that lone parents got very angry with me about was the
fact that there is no onus on the non-resident parent to inform
the Agency when his income goes up. It is left to the parent with
care to say, "Well, actually he gets a big annual commission
bonus every year. He needs to have an annual review", and
to chase them. There is not that kind of proactive engagement
with the non-resident parent's circumstances.
Ms Lombard: They tell you that
it is up to you if you think they have had a pay rise where, if
you do not have any contact with your ex-partner, there is no
reason why you should, so on the off chance every year they tell
you to request that. If you have chosen, and I use, the CSA as
a third party to do that, to run around and to have that contact
for me because that is something I choose not to do, that makes
it harder.
Q111 Ms Buck: This may be fairly obvious,
but when you gave your written evidence, we had not had the latest
figures on compliance and what we can see from that is that the
compliance rates under the new scheme are about a third, I think,
below the targets that were set. I wondered if you could just
tell us a little bit about what your perception is of why that
is, what the barriers have turned out to be. We know about the
IT problems, and you can perhaps talk about that, but it is counter-intuitive
given the principle that the new scheme being simpler would hopefully
boost compliance, so what are the barriers? Why has that not achieved
progress against targets as was expected and what do you see the
impact of that being?
Ms Allbeson: I think we were wrong
in our submission to you because we thought that they were going
perhaps to reach their targets on compliance and the annual report
is frighteningly bad. I think they had taken their eye off the
ball on compliance. There had been such a preoccupation with getting
what they call "clearance" which is interesting in its
terminology because of course clearance is just the start of the
process. That is getting as far as the calculation or closing
the case when in fact you have got a relationship with a non-resident
parent which may last 15 or 18 years. That is just the beginning
of the process. The job is to keep him in payment, regular payment,
full payment for a continuing period of time. Specific things
that may have contributed to the problem with compliance is of
course the worrying issue of staff cuts where at the start of
2003 there were over 12,000 staff in the Agency and it is now
down to 10,500 and it has to be reduced to 8,000 by 2006. Now,
that is a reduction of a third in staff at a time when really
the new scheme is not working. The compliance figures are shocking
and yet how on earth can they really bear down on the problem
of compliance when they have lost a third of their staff? It is
deeply worrying and an immediate thing we would call for is stopping
any further staff reductions until the Agency is back on its feet
and that includes compliance and enforcement, perhaps saying that
they have got to reduce the size of the debt in terms of money
owed to lone parents by, say, at least a quarter before they cut
any more staff. The other point is that in a way there was a sort
of deal struck with the new system, that it was going to be simpler,
it was going to lead to lower payments for parents with care,
but the quid pro quo was that the maintenance would flow
quicker. I do not know if you remember what Baroness Hollis said
when very early on she said that 90% of the time was being spent
on assessments and 10% on compliance and enforcement and they
were going to turn that round, so it was going to be 90% on compliance
and enforcement. Well, if you look at the latest edition of their
magazine for advisers, it says that at the start of this year
80% of staff were being spent on assessments, so there is still
an awfully long way to go and the danger is that the staff released
from the simplicity of the new system are not being put back into
compliance work, but they are actually being just treated as staff
reductions and that in a sense we regard as a breach of faith.
Q112 Ms Buck: Looking at the compliance
figures for the old scheme which have come in over target on both
case compliance and cash compliance, does that tell us that whatever
the teething difficulties in the early years of the scheme, those
people who are now in payment are compliant because there was
at least some effort made after the initial assessment to get
that figure up?
Ms Allbeson: I am slightly sceptical
about the cash compliance and case compliance measurements. If
you look at the quarterly statistics where every quarter they
say what percentage of non-resident parents has been fully compliant
that quarter, partially compliant and nil compliant, the figures
come out as 50% fully compliant, 23% partial, this is for May
2004, and a quarter nothing. Now, that sounds to me, in terms
of the cases we get, more accurate than the case and cash compliance
figures which are very global figures and they also include arrears.
Q113 Ms Buck: So the figures that we
are looking at on the new and old scheme compliance, which appear
to be counter-intuitively indicating that the old scheme is much
more compliant than the new scheme, you would argue that, on your
interpretation, actually neither is achieving good compliance
figures?
Ms Allbeson: Absolutely not, no.
Q114 Ms Buck: Should we now be migrating
old cases on to the new scheme given this very poor compliance
rate for the new scheme?
Ms Allbeson: Well, I think there
is a danger of confusion. The new scheme in a way is struggling
with the IT system which is very worrying and seems to be pretty
fundamental. But compliance and enforcement are not really to
do with IT and the worry is that there is too much of this idea
that once we have got the IT sorted, it is all solved. From looking
at what needs to be done and the cases we have where just even
finding a non-resident parent seems to be a problem in lots of
cases, you cannot solve that problem with a computer. It is labour-intensive,
it is hard work, it requires skill and it requires staff resources.
We know that there are 200 staff in the enforcement teams. Well,
that is really pretty small.
Ms Simpson: Another aspect is
that the longer that you delay migration, individual cases will
be coming on because of the change of circumstances or another
partner becoming involved, the messier it gets, so the longer
we delay migration, the less well the whole migration can be managed
effectively.
Q115 Ms Buck: Can I summarise that as
saying that you should not delay migration, but the whole issue
is going to hinge upon the quality and scale of the staffing effort
to back up assessment with proper compliance?
Ms Allbeson: The migration obviously
cannot take place until the IT system is working, but there are
real, real problems of running two systems side by side. There
is no excuse, say, for not taking seriously compliance and enforcement
in the two systems at the same time. It is a separate issue. There
is no reason to go soft on compliance just because you are having
to manage two systems simultaneously. Enforcement and compliance
procedures in both are pretty similar and it just requires effort
and energy.
Q116 Ms Buck: Compared to the very early
days of the scheme, there has been some progress on the disregard
both in terms of those on benefit, albeit a fairly modest premium,
but also the discounting of tax credit recipients. What impact
has that had? I am really interested to know whether there is
an obvious correlation between payment and people being on tax
credit and, therefore, being able to keep their maintenance. Has
that worked? You may or may not know that we came back from Australia,
having looked at their system with a much more generous premium,
and the advice within Australia was very much that you would never
start a system where the point of it is effectively to return
money to the Exchequer rather than to put money into the hands
of the family. Are we doing enough on that and has it made a difference
in terms of tax credits?
Ms Allbeson: The members who replied
to us when we asked them what were their recent experiences said,
"I'm on income support. It doesn't matter whether I get it
or not. I don't know whether he's paying", so in a sense
they had kind of lost interest in it because, as far as it was,
it did not concern them. In fact the majority of replies were
from working lone parents who were saying what a fantastic difference
maintenance would make to them. A lot are struggling with paying
for school dinners, paying for shoes and it was the thing which
in a way would help them. One of the things a lot of them said
was that getting maintenance would enable them to have quality
time with their kids. They would work, but they might balance
their hours differently, that it would make them feel less guilty
about working because they could have some time with their kids.
Q117 Ms Buck: I think we would all accept
that it is a good thing, but is there any indication that it is
making a difference? If income support recipients are saying,
"We don't know if we get it or not. It doesn't make any difference
to us", so there is no incentive on both the parent with
the care and the non-resident parent, the corollary should be
that if you are on tax credit, it, therefore, does make a difference
as you are a low-income working parent, so is it actually feeding
through into encouraging the parent with care to chase it and
take more of an interest in the non-resident parent and that the
payment that he made would go directly into the pocket of the
family? Is it actually boosting compliance rates?
Ms Allbeson: If you look at the
figures, the number of people getting child support who are on
income support compared to the numbers on tax credits, it is substantially
reduced on income support and there are a lot more people on working
tax credit, so in that sense I think it has made a difference.
I think it does come through from the letters that if they are
working and they are getting it, they are fully aware that they
are keeping the whole of it which they would not have done on
income support. It is hard to say without analysing whether that
was the reason why they went to work, but there is no doubt about
it that once they get maintenance and they realise that they are
going to keep it, that boosts their ability to manage and to stay
in work.
Q118 Ms Buck: So would you say, and this
is speculative, that one of the ways in which compliance could
be stimulated would be to look again at the premium on income
support, and if that was more generous or lifted, is it likely
to have a positive incentive on compliance?
Ms Allbeson: Yes, I think it would
because at the moment there are very few people getting the premium;
I think it is something like 25,000. What is clear is that lone
parents talk to each other. People who knew we were doing this
inquiry got their friends to write to us as well, so people do
pass it on and if they think they should get maintenance, they
will let their friends know that it will happen.
Q119 Mrs Humble: You mentioned Baroness
Hollis's comments about spending 90% of the time on assessment
and then in the future it would be 90% on compliance and enforcement.
I do not want to go down the route of enforcement which I think
is separate, but we have been told when we have spoken to CSA
staff that they, under the whole-system approach, see assessment
and compliance being linked in together, so you cannot differentiate.
You cannot say, "That member of staff is the one who does
the assessment and that member of staff does compliance",
and there may well be another member of staff who does the enforcement,
but how are you finding the new so-called `whole system' working?
In a way, it links back to Nancy's comments about her own experience
with the CSA because we are being told that under the new system,
the way that the CSA staff deal with both the parent with care
and the non-resident parent in doing the assessment is to build
up a relationship which will then encourage compliance. Now, the
statistics that we have got show that that is not working. If
it is not working, why is it not working?
Ms Lombard: I do not think I have
spoken to the same person about my case for more than maybe two
or three weeks and they told me that my son's father had refused
to pay, which brought a whole lot of personal issues to bear for
me and I just panicked and thought that we would never get any
money. They told me that and then they said, "Oh actually,
no, it is a problem with the computer. He has paid and it's here",
but that was the first time. Then the second time that happened
and we did not get any money, I spoke to over 10 people and said,
"Look, last time you told me he hadn't paid and then you
gave me the money. Can you check that that is not the case?"
I said that each week to each person I spoke to and tried to go
back to the original person and never could. They said, "No,
he's definitely, definitely not paid. He's not paid". They
told me that for five months and then they rang me up in September
and said, "He has paid and we've got all the money in our
bank. He's paid every month on the dot". When they said that
he had not paid, I said, "I want a wage arrestment".
I suggested it, not them. I did not use those words because I
did not know that is what it is called, but I said, "I want
you to take the money directly from him". They said, "We'll
just give him a bit longer, a bit longer". I pushed and the
wage arrestment is only valid for three months and it was in the
final week of the wage arrestment that they said, "Okay,
we'll do it", and that is when they found out that he had
been paying all along.
Ms Allbeson: It seems to be very
lethargic and half-hearted, but they just are not going through
the stages to enforce compliance fast enough. I just draw your
attention quickly on the compliance issue to the report of the
Standards Committee which is an internal committee which looks
at decision-making. The full report is only published on the Internet
with the CSA annual report and it is quite revealing in that it
says that in 97.5% of cases monitored, there had been no attempt
to operate national procedures about debt management, and that
means the bit about making people pay arrears on top of their
current amount. There is some very worrying information in that
survey.
|
