Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
LORD BACH,
MR JOHNSTON
MCNEILL,
MR IAN
HEWETT AND
MR JOHN
O'GORMAN
11 JANUARY 2006
Q100 David Taylor: It is not a soft
cop-out management option just to outsource IT?
Mr McNeill: No.
Q101 Lynne Jones: I have got two
points. Why have you made hundreds of staff redundant and then
you have to employ lots of temporary people and at the same time
you said a lot of your remaining staff are having to do a lot
of overtime? Secondly, is all the extra work and overtime voluntary?
Mr McNeill: We have had a clear
plan in terms of reducing staff. What we have done is trawl the
organisation, in agreement with the trade unions, and given the
staff the opportunity to identify whether they wish to leave with
a package. A number have applied.
Q102 Lynne Jones: Should you not
have kept them on a bit longer?
Mr McNeill: I was just going to
come to that. What we have done is considered those who have applied.
We have been very fortunate that the number who have applied have
met our needs, so we are not looking at compulsory redundancy.
What we have then had to do is look at the particular skills and
experience those staff have. Some staff have left on retirement
over this period as well and we cannot stop that happening, they
have done their service and they are entitled to go. What we do
is look at the particular skills and experience of those staff
who are saying, "I would quite like to leave" and where
they have skills we think we can use, we have said—for a
significant number it is the case—"We cannot afford
to let you go until we finish certainly the first round of this
scheme" and a number have expectations that by this summer
we should then be in a position to release them, but in many cases
we still have not committed to that. What we have accepted is
that when possible we will release them. We have let other staff
go, I accept that, but often in areas not directly related to
processing SPS: support services, facilities management, we have
let some human resource staff go, things of that nature. There
is a consideration of each and every case.
Q103 Lynne Jones: How many staff
have you "let go" as you put it? Are you saying that
none of those could have been kept on longer and contributed to
the work that is being done by the temporary staff and staff doing
overtime?
Mr Hewett: Can I answer that question?
Since the start of the Change Programme 300[10]
staff have left the organisation and a further 100, bringing the
total to 400, are planned under part of the Change Programme.
A significant number of those have been released from the two
sites at Crewe and Nottingham which were not part of our Change
Programme and, therefore, were not part of the IT development
which we are now using to deliver the Single Payment Scheme. Those
staff were predominantly there to deal with the farm-based schemes
in those geographic regions. I visited both of those offices shortly
before their closure to thank the staff for their efforts in dealing
with the close down of what we now call legacy farm-based schemes,
the bovines and sheep schemes, et cetera. Some staff outside of
those two offices have left for the reasons Mr McNeill has already
explained as part of that programme in corporate areas or, in
a few cases, from some of the other areas. For example, at Reading
now the number of frontline operational staff who will be left
at Reading at the end of the Change Programme is very small, so
consequently some of those staff have disappeared during the course
of the programme and perhaps that was what Mr Taylor was referring
to.
Q104 Lynne Jones: I am not sure you have
answered my question on overtime being voluntary.
Mr Hewett: Sorry. In terms of
overtime being voluntary, absolutely. We do seek volunteers for
overtime on a regular basis but since the advent of bringing agency
workers into the organisation, primarily for specific jobs such
as data capture and more recently validation, we have tried to
target those individuals at specific parts of the day to make
best use of the system. We want an early shift, we want a late
shift and in some cases we have a double-day shift. Where we give
overtime over that, particularly weekend working, we do seek volunteers.
Q105 Mr Rogerson: On this business
of redundancies and, therefore, temporary staff coming in, some
of my constituents contacted me in relation to the implementation
of this system and one of the frustrations they claim to have
had is that the people they speak to do not seem equipped to answer
the questions which they have or, indeed, capable of taking on
board the corrections they are making in terms of letters they
have had that have raised issues. When they have tried to explain
those issues and explain the answers in order to move their assessment
forward they have had a letter back which has carried on with
exactly the same situation as before. Indeed, the Minister and
I have exchanged letters. We seem to have the same problems over
and over again. Is there an element where some of the temporary
staff and so on may have added to your problems in terms of being
able to meet the deadlines you have got because issues which could
have been settled simply have rolled on and on through repeated
exchanges of correspondence?
Mr Hewett: If I can try and answer
that question. First-off, administering the Single Payment Scheme
is not like administering previous schemes where we had more like
a claims management type approach and I would have one of my processors
looking after a particular claim and perhaps liaising with the
customer where appropriate. With the Single Payment Scheme and
the system that we are implementing it through, the claim goes
through a number of stages and a number of different individual
members of staff might be involved in processing aspects of that
claim. As I have already mentioned to one of your colleagues,
we have employed a number of staff on a short-term basis, either
agency or casual, to do specific jobs, to capture data, to do
certain aspects of validation. We know them in the trade as level
one or level two primary or more detailed validation. The primary
validation was about errors or omissions, so in certain cases
some of our staff would have been on the telephone to customers
saying, "There appears to be an issue around certain aspects
of your claim, could you explain to us". They would not necessarily
know certain other aspects of the process, for example if there
was a dual claim or an over-claim, they would not have been trained
in that, they would have been trained in looking for errors and
omissions in the claim. Perhaps that is part of the issue. The
other point is in terms of putting right problems when they are
found, certainly we have had issues in relation to land registration.
Mr McNeill has already explained the scope and the extent of the
land registration changes that we have seen in the last 12-18
months. That came on the back of a two year digitisation exercise
and I have to say not all of our customers were very keen to talk
to us about that digitisation process at that time. They now are
because they want to make sure their Single Payment Scheme and
Entry Level Scheme claims are accurate. We are now getting into
a situation where we have involved an outsourced supplier and
we are fielding calls around some of the work associated with
that outsourced supplier. We have also established a Customer
Service Centre at Newcastle, and now at Workington, that was introduced
just before the Single Payment claims went out, and we might touch
on that at some point. We knew there were issues around that in
terms of making sure that our staff were fully equipped with knowledge
around SPS. That is what we are trying to do. We are trying to
make sure that in dealing with the 2006 scheme inquiries we are
better placed to handle that by making available technology which
allows calls to be filtered out of the call centre into sites
where the expertise in processing claims for 2005 took place.
The Committee suspended from 5.03pm to
5.16pm for a division in the House.
Q106 David Lepper: This is a postscript
to what Dan Rogerson was asking about just now. Mr Hewett, you
have explained what I think is probably called the task-based
system for dealing with claims of rather than one person following
the claim through to the very end different people work different
aspects of it, and you have explained the reasons for that. This
relates to the staffing issue as well. The Country Land and Business
Association in their evidence to us talk about what they see as
a decline in customer service and they feel the way that manifests
itself is the personal contacts which did exist, which they felt
were valuable, at regional offices are replaced by voices at distant
call centres, as they put it, and the service suffers because
of that. I guess collectively you would argue the change is necessary
not just because perhaps some of those regional offices are no
longer there, I am not sure about that fact,—
Mr Hewett: They are not.
Q107 David Lepper:— but because
the nature of the system requires a different way of dealing with
it. Would that be the argument?
Mr Hewett: I think that would
be absolutely the case in terms of we took the decision as part
of the Change Programme to move from a regional-based solution
to a national-based operation and the Single Payment Scheme effectively
embellishes that, if you like, by moving this from the 11 farm-based
subsidy schemes to a single farm-based subsidy scheme which in
the first year is predominantly based around historic entitlement
and reference data and over time moves into a scheme that is based
predominantly around land. We have a Land Registration Unit, we
have a Customer Registration Unit, and the functionality that
supports that was delivered at the end of 2004 and early 2005.
We do still, and did during the application window for 2005, operate
a system where our customers can make contact with us at our sites
where we are processing, and at the moment we have six sites in
operation. Predecessor organisations occupied 11 sites, so you
can see there is a downsizing process there. Those contact centres
are still there if customers wish to deposit anything with us,
however our primary intention is to move to a situation where
we have a Customer Call Centre that is capable of dealing with
telephone and email inquiries and we hope over time, although
this is not yet proven, electronic communications.
Q108 David Lepper: So the regional
office is a thing of the past?
Mr Hewett: That was part of the
Change Programme ethos.
Q109 Chairman: I want to move on
to ask some questions about mapping but, just following on from
the last points that we heard about customer service, I am going
to leave with you a letter which one of my parliamentary colleagues
sent to me from a farmer in Gloucestershire. He sent a detailed
log of some 55 contacts or activities between 25 March 2004, when
he received from the RPA in Exeter a list of field numbers and
sizes in his efforts to get himself properly and accurately registered,
to the final event on 5 January this year when he finally received
maps from the RPA in Reading and they were still wrong. I do not
know whether this is an isolated example, I suspect it is not.
I suspect it reflects an awful lot of angst as far as landowners
are concerned. It would be helpful to have a detailed response
to the issues there on what you have done to prevent this kind
of thing happening in the future. As far as the mapping is concerned,
one of the things that surprised me in terms of the evidence you
have given so far is why you did not anticipate the extra volume
of work that occurred. Did you do any kind of sampling exercise
on farms to assess right at the beginning some of the practical
problems that were encountered? In the context of the people who
were new to making a claim, when the policy was determined, was
no exercise undertaken to estimate the numbers of new people who
would be eligible under the policy which you had agreed?
Lord Bach: The RPA representatives
can answer the factual question about whether exercises were conducted.
I think the 40,000 increase in claimants, in other words 50%,
did take us by surprise to some extent. Whether it should have
or not, I do not know, but I suspect it was rather more than thought.
In addition to the number of claimants was the number of changes
to be made or additions to be made to the land registration and
the mapping that follows from that. There I want to emphasise,
if I may, something I said a little earlier. It was not just those
who were new claimants who were putting forward changes to their
maps, it was those who had claimed for years who were legitimately,
in a sense, putting forward land they could now claim for as part
of the Single Payment Scheme. As I think Mr McNeill has said on
more than one occasion, frankly those people should have mentioned
that land when they were claiming for previous subsidies but they
did not, and it is human not to sometimes, I accept that. I think
the number of existing claimants who put in claims for new land
did surprise us.
Q110 Chairman: Minister, could you
answer the question that I asked. The question that I asked was
did you, once you had agreed the policy, not go out and visit
a few farms and say, "We know roughly the kind of information
that will be required, now let us do a little sampling",
to get some idea in the real world what kind of problems you would
encounter? Did any of that get done?
Lord Bach: That is a factual question
I cannot answer.
Mr McNeill: In terms of the existing
customer base in the summer of 2004, having built the new Land
Register and put on the circa 1.6[11]
million parcels of land, we sent to each of our known customers,
the circa 80,000 customers that we dealt with, a copy of the maps
and asked them to let us know whether those maps were right. We
realised that it was going to be important for legacy schemes
and, indeed, for SPS as it happened to have as good a Rural Land
Register as possible. We sent them out and a significant number
came back and somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000—I can
confirm that in writing—did not respond despite repeated
reminders and us chasing them up. What we then found was that
at the same time as we had to introduce SPS and once our existing
customers became aware that there was going to be an area element
to the new Single Payment Scheme we had the new Stewardship Scheme,
the Entry Level Scheme, introduced by RDS and in some cases the
same customers, in other cases new customers, realised that they
would also require land to be mapped to make application for that.
That was additional work that resulted from that other scheme
being introduced. In terms of the 40,000 customers the answer
is no, to my recollection we did not sample.
Q111 Chairman: That is what I thought
you were going to say.
Mr McNeill: We had an understanding
about the possible magnitude of the number of customers but who
they were and how much land they might hold we did not know. With
the introduction of people who kept horses and so on—
Q112 Chairman: Very simply, Mr McNeill,
you knew the policy but you were flying blind when it came to
trying to work out the volume and the volume only became apparent
once the paperwork started to come in. In other words, when you
started you had not got a clue.
Mr McNeill: We had a system which
at that time we felt was scaleable and we would be able to deal
with the volumes if all 40,000 decided to submit IACS 22s.
Q113 Mr Drew: Could I just check,
was the satellite monitoring, which is presumably how you built
up the knowledge of the field boundaries, included as part of
the software management system so that you could compare the bits
that were coming in with the acreages or the hectarages that were
being claimed for?
Mr Hewett: The original Rural
Land Register project, which was to map 1.7 million land parcels,
on which the old IACS system was based, was derived from Ordnance
Survey boundaries. That is comparable and allows us to do remote
sensing inspections on a proportion of our customer base. We did
that under the old IACS regime for arable claimants and we do
so for the Single Payment Scheme. A proportion of the customers
who were selected for inspection from the 2005 SPS population
were subject to remote sensing checks.
Q114 Mr Drew: So it was never thought
either feasible or sensible that there would be a comprehensive
pictorial representation of what people were claiming for?
Mr Hewett: We were already producing
that for our own purposes, if you like, in terms of monitoring,
checking from remote sensing inspections.
Q115 Mr Drew: That is for everyone
then, regardless. You say you trial, test some people just to
get a feel for how accurate the information is, but—
Mr Hewett: This is for compliance
purposes. We are required under one of the key controls that I
mentioned some time earlier, Chairman, to inspect a proportion
of our claimant base each year. Some of those inspections are
physical inspections on the ground with our inspectors actually
measuring the area; other inspections are undertaken by remote
sensing, by satellite imagery, et cetera, to check the claimed
area against the area found by satellite imagery. We use it for
compliance purposes. My colleagues in the Rural Development Service,
who are responsible for the administration of the Environmental
Stewardship Scheme, take as the basis the land area and they are
also very keen to make use of the Rural Land Register data as
part of the application pack which then goes to customers and
forms part of the agreement for that Environmental Stewardship
claim.
Q116 Mr Rogerson: This is a mapping
question but it also relates back to what I was talking about
before we had to go to vote on people's experience and the complicated
nature perhaps arising from having to speak to a different person
each time you contact the Agency. This is a gentleman who was
applying under the National Reserve as a new entrant into the
industry and he tells me that having completed and returned the
information he was required to do, others—the figure he
gave me was 18,000, I do not know whether that is true or not
in terms of the number of people applying for the National Reserve—a
smaller proportion of those had not responded with the details
necessary but, because there was no way of telling from your system
which were the ones who had responded and who had not, all 18,000
had to be written to again prompting a further response. I imagine
that would have generated a lot of confused inquiries from people
saying, "I have responded, why have you contacted me, is
there something missing?" Has that added to your workload
significantly?
Mr Hewett: I can give you a bit
of factual information. The 18,000 National Reserve applications
is a correct figure. By the time that we completed the assessment
of around half of that number, and the assessments have been undertaken
off of our main system and then we load the data on afterwards,
we determined that around half were in a category known as "insufficient
information to make a judgment". On that basis we decided
rather than take the time to trawl through the remainder to find
out if a comparable proportion were in that "cannot make
an assessment" category we would write to everyone to give
them a checklist against which to tell us, "Have you given
us all the information on this checklist that is relevant to your
case? If so, thanks. If not, please provide that and any further
information". Subsequently, we discussed that with stakeholders,
who we meet on a regular basis, one of whom is sitting behind
me, to explain that if any customer believed that they had already
provided the information we did not want it a second time, thank
you very much, we just needed confirmation that we were going
to get everything we wanted. As a consequence of that process
and part of our on-going assessment, a considerable number of
applicants have actually withdrawn their application, whether
they felt they did not have sufficient information to justify
eligibility or for whatever reason they decided to withdraw.
Q117 Mr Rogerson: Inevitably some,
who may not have been contacted through your various consultation
means, may well have felt, "Does this apply to me? Have I
been sent what I need?" and that would trigger off another
round of communications with the Agency?
Mr Hewett: Absolutely. Our stakeholder
representatives cover a significant proportion of the industry
now, it would be very helpful to us in selling key messages to
their members or customers if they helped us to work with this.
They recognise that, unlike previous schemes where we could say,
"That claim is eligible, pay it", you are putting everything
in the pot and working to some of the lowest common denominators
here.
Q118 Mr Williams: If I understand
you correctly, mapping is no longer impeding the processing of
the calculation of the entitlement?
Mr McNeill: My earlier comments
were about the fact that we have outsourced the processing of
the backlog of IACS 22, the applications to have changes made
to land, we have brought in the contractor who built the original
database, as I mentioned, and as a consequence there are a number
remaining, which I can give you, but it is relatively small and
planned to be finished in the very near future. So as such the
actual mapping process is not going to interfere with the payments.
We have had a concern which perhaps I can touch on, and that is
about the accuracy of the maps. We have had some system glitches
where the land is available on the screen, as our staff look at
the screens and the database, but unfortunately when printed the
maps have excluded certain parcels of land, and that is a fix
which Accenture are sorting for us and will be put in place shortly,
but we are aware of the land and who owns it. Unfortunately, when
we have sent out the maps, it appears we have missed something,
and that has been the problem. Another issue is that we do send
out maps and, indeed, we do get it wrong, but also we find that
customers often for the first time for sometime actually look
at the map in considerable detail and recognise that perhaps they
have missed things themselves and identify additional issues they
want to raise with us, which is understandable. So we have those
cases and so maps can go to and fro. Yes, we have made errors
with it. We closely monitor the quality of both our own staff's
performance on this and the contractors' and there is a certain
2%, 3%, quality issue which we have been addressing with the supplier
and indeed our own staff. So there will be cases when the maps
are wrong, and it is unfortunate, and we are aware it has happened,
but we would be pleased if customers could send them back and
we will sort it out.
Q119 Mr Williams: So if it is not
the mapping that is the problem in making your payments on time,
what is the problem?
Mr McNeill: As I mentioned earlier,
the problem we face is that there are a significant number of
outstanding issues which we need to address in regard to a significant
number of claims. We have gone through various parts of the process
and many parts are well nigh completed—level one validations
bar a handful are pretty much complete—so large parts of
the process are complete, but we are at the stage where there
are a number of issues which we still need to resolve. We are
also, as I mentioned earlier, awaiting some additional fixes.
These are not released as big pieces of functionality from the
supplier, but they are fixes which we think may well address large
numbers of these.
10 Note by witness: 299 left by 31 December,
117 in 2006, total 416. Back
11
Note by witness: should be 1.6 million. Back
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