House of Commons - Public Accounts

Select Committee on Public Accounts Fifty-Third Report

1 Accessing the Department's contact centres

1. The Department for Work and Pensions has introduced contact centres as the main channel of communication for many of its customers who wish to make or renew an application for benefit, seek advice, claim a pension, or look for a job. Contact centres are common in the private sector although there are some differences in the way they work. Private sector centres tend to use a wider mixture of methods of communication including telephone calls, e-mails, website forms, letters or faxes.[2] Currently, the Department's contact centres mainly use the telephone for most of their dealings with customers - 33 million outgoing calls in 2004-05, compared with 300,000 emails and 300,000 faxes. Private centres also tend to have more freedom in the mix of staff they employ, but the Committee was told that the public sector benefited from greater staff commitment and loyalty to customer service.[3]

2. We examined the performance of the 62 contact centres operated by three of the Department's agencies - The Pension Service, Jobcentre Plus and the Disability and Carers Service (Figure 1). Between them these services cost an estimated £190 million.[4]

Figure 1: Details of the contact centres covered in this Report

Executive Agency Principal Services Number of centres Call answering (2004-05)

Jobcentre Plus First Contact Officer (for claiming benefit); Jobseeker Direct 26 9.6 million calls answered (76%)

Employer Direct 9 1.7 million calls answered (97%)

The Pension Service Pensions Direct; State Pension Teleclaims; Pension Credit Application Line; Retirement Pension Forecasting 25 16.6 million calls answered (90%)

Disability and Carers Service Benefit Enquiry Line; Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance Helpline 2 5.5 million calls answered (21%)

Source: C&AG's Report

3. The Department's network of contact centres has been rolling out over a number of years. Between 2001 and 2004, there was a period of rapid growth, leading to a peak of 81 centres. There has since been some rationalisation which will continue. The Pension Service established 29 contact centres rapidly to deal with the introduction of Pension Credit, but is now reducing towards an end position expected to be 12 centres by 2010.[5]

4. Contact centres are a key part of the Department's overall programme of modernising welfare delivery and also securing the efficiency savings expected under the Gershon Review. The Department sees contact centres as one way of offering their customers choice in how they deal with them. It also considers that contact centres can offer a more convenient service, for example, for gaining an assessment of state pension entitlement quickly or for applying for Pension Credit and Housing Benefit in one call.[6]

5. As the centres have been established, customers have been encouraged to contact the Department by telephone in preference to visiting a local office. The latter are often no longer available. When Jobcentre Plus was created in 2002 it inherited around 1,500 offices from the former Employment Service and the former Benefits Agency. As part of the creation of the Jobcentre Plus network, 631 former offices have been identified for closure and 464 closed. Further offices are likely to close as a result of the decision to centralise benefit processing and for other reasons. Prior to the creation of Jobcentre Plus, work on pensions was carried out in some 450 social security offices. Under The Pension Service, this work was moved initially to 29 Pension Centres. Since January 2005 nine have closed and a further eight will close by April 2011.[7]

6. For many people, dealing with the Department via a contact centre is acceptable and convenient. For example, the Department reported that The Pension Service's 2005 customer survey had indicated that the telephone was the preferred medium for contact amongst a growing number of customers.[8] However, some groups - such as those with a disability, with mental health problems or who are frail and elderly - may have difficulties using the telephone.

7. Despite this, the Disability and Carers Service does not offer any face-to-face services to its 4 million customers. This contrasts with The Pension Service, whose contact centres are complemented by a local service, offering a home visit to customers.[9] Customers with a disability are potentially just as vulnerable as pensioners, but they appear to have been a lower priority for the Department.[10] A strong case can be made that they should have the option of dealing with the Department face-to-face. The Department's view is that it does not have the resources for making this choice available to customers with a disability. Instead it has sought to ensure that its contact centre processes are designed to take customers carefully through their application.[11]

8. The Department does tailor some services for people with disabilities and has set up a team to look at whether contact centres can be more user friendly to such people. For example, all centres operate a text phone service. The Department also enables customers with disabilities to contact them through representative individuals or organisations.[12] However, the National Audit Office found that groups such as the Citizens Advice Bureau reported problems in dealing with some contact centres on a customer's behalf and found that the systems in place are not consistent and were subject to widely differing interpretations.[13] The Department explained that it does deal with intermediary organisations and has issued guidance to staff on how to deal with them.[14]

9. Knowing which number to call is not easy for some customers. There are at least 55 different numbers they could use when contacting the Department, including 11 for pensioners.[15] More than one number is necessary in order to provide a differentiated service for pensions, jobseekers and employers, and many of the 55 are for accessing the same Jobcentre Plus service from different parts of the country. But the Department acknowledged that, despite its efforts to publicise services, some customers found it hard to find the right number. It has no target for reducing the number of telephone numbers, but may consider introducing a single number to act as a sign-post to the others.[16] The problem of too many numbers is compounded by the limitations of the Department's technology, so that a customer who rings one service cannot be transferred to another service. This flexibility will not be available until 2008.[17]

10. An unacceptable number of customers' calls did not get answered in 2004-05, when the Department agreed its performance had been poor. The centres surveyed by the National Audit Office answered a total of 33 million incoming calls and made 7 million outgoing calls in 2004-05.[18] However, a further 21 million calls attempted by customers went unanswered.[19] Performance was particularly bad for the Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance Helpline.

11. Performance in many centres has since improved, with the call answering rate overall increasing from 56% in 2004-05 to 84% in the first half of 2005-06.[20] However, the performance of the Disability and Carers Service's Benefit Enquiry Line has deteriorated as a result of the increased attention on the Disability Living Allowance Helpline.[21] It is too early to say yet whether the improved performance will be sustained.

12. Customers are not aware of how much they are paying for their call. Only a few of the numbers are free to call, with the majority being 0845 numbers which are charged to landline users at the local rate. Mobile phone users commonly pay a much higher tariff, and for these customers even freephone 0800 numbers may be expensive, as only the Pension Credit Application Line is free to mobile users.[22] The Department explained there were problems with free cost calls as they can attract nuisance callers. However, it does not offer information to callers on the cost of their call, and it is up to the customer to say whether they might have difficulty in paying for the call. Where the customer advises the cost is prohibitive, the agent will offer to ring back and the Department is considering whether its agents should make this clearer at the start of the call.[23] The Department estimates the average cost to customers of calling some of its services using a landline telephone is as follows.[24]

Figure 2: Estimates of the average cost per call for different services

Service Basis for calculation Cost (p)

Pension Credit Application Line Freephone number Nil

The Pension Service Based on average call of 6 minutes at 3p per minute 18

Pensions Direct/RP teleclaims Based on average call of 6 minutes at 3p per minute 18

State Pension In the three centres that take claims in one call, assuming average call 20 minutes 60

State Pension and Pension Credit teleclaims From July 2006, assuming average call of 30 minutes 90

Disability and Carers Service Average call duration from initial welcome and time spent in queue is 4 minutes, 14 seconds 13