Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS, JOBCENTRE
PLUS AND
THE PENSION
SERVICE
29 MARCH 2006
Mr Tim Burr, Deputy Comptroller
and Auditor General and Mr Jeremy Lonsdale, Director of
Work and Welfare Value for Money Studies, National Audit Office,
were in attendance and gave oral evidence.
Mr Marius Gallaher, Alternate
Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, was in attendance.
REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR
GENERAL
DELIVERING EFFECTIVE SERVICES THROUGH
CONTACT CENTRES (HC 941)
Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome
to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are considering
the National Audit Office's Report on the Department for Work
and Pensions: Delivering Effective Services Through Contact
Centres. We welcome Mr Leigh Lewis, who is the Permanent Secretary
for the Department of Work and Pensions. Would you like to introduce
your colleagues, please.
Mr Lewis: Chairman, on my right
is Janet Grossman, who is the Centre Operations Director for The
Pension Service, and on my left is Val Gibson, who is the Director
of Contact Centres for Jobcentre Plus.
Q2 Chairman: I would like to start
by paying tribute to your staff who are working in the contact
centres. I know that many are very highly committed and are doing
an excellent job under difficult circumstances, but there are
some problems which we want to explore this afternoon. I know
there are anticipated efficiency savings. The reference is in
paragraph 1.7 which you will find on page 16. Mr Lewis, I want
to know how you can deliver them in the context of four different
strategic plans, I think I am right in saying, 55 different phone
numbers, a fluctuating number of centres and 21 million unanswered
calls? You are obviously going to make efficiency savings, what
is going to happen?
Mr Lewis: Chairman, thank you.
We are, of course, making efficiency savings and they are significant
and substantial. I think overall the performance of our contact
centres, although there have been some problems as the Report
brings out, has been improving steadily. So far this year in 2005-06
it has been both on average and across the piece, good.
Q3 Chairman: I am going to come back
to that because I know the record in 2004-05 was poor and has
improved. I will let you have a chance to go into how things are
getting better, do not worry. That is your answer, is it? These
plans for efficiency savings in the context of 21 million unanswered
calls are not going to cause even more confusion and chaos?
Mr Lewis: No, I do not think they
are, Chairman. In some of our contact centres we did have some
significant problems last year and that is brought out in the
Report. This year we have had just 3% of the 30 million calls
to us blocked and almost 90% of our calls answered. As the Report
brings out, we have been steadily improving performance across
the great range of our contact centres.
Q4 Chairman: Let us look to the future
for a minute and look, please, on page 25 at figure 12, which
is how you are going to roll out your new IT, your equipment and
your processes. How are you going to ensure that your equipment
and your processes are not obsolete by the time you bring them
in?
Mr Lewis: I think in many cases
we have got a very good track record of that. For example, anyone
going into one of our new Jobcentre Plus offices, and we have
rolled out over 700 of those to time and budget, will see the
job point terminals there which now hold details at any one time
of nearly half a million job vacancies. That is one example and
there are many other of IT programmes which have gone in to time
and to budget. We do have, within the Department, very strong
control procedures working to the Board which look at all of our
major IT developments and seek to ensure that they are proceeding
as they should.
Q5 Chairman: Let us look at what
was happening in 2004-05 at figure 25 on page 49. You will see
that some performances are truly appalling. If you look at the
bottom you will see that with the Disability and Carers Service
nearly 80% of calls had to be abandoned. I know you have made
some good progress on that, have you not?
Mr Lewis: Yes, we have.
Q6 Chairman: But how do we know the
improvement you are going to tell me about now is not a blip because
you are pretty vulnerable, are you not?
Mr Lewis: In a big organisation
you are always vulnerable to blips, but I think the blip was last
year and not this year. What we have done with the Disability
and Carers Service is fundamentally re-engineered the system.
We have brought in new telephony, we have updated our IT, but
most importantly—and I have been to Warbreck House myself
to see it—we now have a very substantial overflow system
which means that we are not dependent simply any longer on those
people whose job it is to answer calls on the DLA helpline all
of the time. We have a very large number of staff who are there
at times which are not peak times doing other work but who can
be brought into the loop at any point where demand begins to rise.
Through a system that everyone in that building calls turrets,
which refers to the headsets they wear, they can be brought into
that operation. That is one of the reasons why we are now answering
well over 90% of the calls to that helpline.
Q7 Chairman: Let us look at flexi
time now, your staff and how they work. This is mentioned in paragraph
19 of the executive summary on page five. The problem is that
flexi time is not suitable in many cases, is it, because staff
there work when they want to rather than when the public want
to call them? Why have you made so little progress since we last
reported on call centres in dealing with people working flexi
time and therefore at unsuitable times?
Mr Lewis: I will put this in context
and then let me take your question head-on. What, of course, we
are doing in the Department is seeking to reduce our staffing
overall very substantially by 30,000 over a three year period.
That does mean that, quite rightly, we are seeking to relocate
some staff from roles where we no longer need them into roles
where we are expanding and that includes our contact centres.
Those staff have existing terms and conditions which we have sought
to honour, not least because we are rather proud of our family
friendly policies and some of the flexible working patterns that
we have. But we have been engaged in all of our contacts centres
in a process of discussion with our staff and our trade unions
to ensure that the patterns of work and the patterns that we operate
are ones which are suited to the contact centre environment. In
many ways, flexi time, as long as it is within some bounds, is
an advantage to us because our contact centres have very large
peaks of demand at different times in the day and at different
times in the week.
Q8 Chairman: That is fine for the
new contract and you can say, "The peaks are this and we
want you to work at this time on Monday morning when people have
come back after the weekend". The trouble is you have got
a large number of people on old contracts and what worries me
is we have looked at this already and there is not much point
in us doing the work if the Department does not make any more
progress?
Mr Lewis: I absolutely understand
the point you are making, Chairman. I think we have been making
real progress. In a number of places we have introduced new patterns
of working. As you say, new staff are coming in on different contracts
with review periods. It is a tribute to our staff in that they
are remarkably flexible. Simply because they have flexi time arrangements
does not mean that they operate them in an arbitrary way. Our
staff care a great deal about their service to the customers,
and we have an enormous amount of co-operation from our staff
in adapting their flexi time to the needs of the centres and the
customers.
Q9 Chairman: Will you look at the
previous paragraph which talks about costing data. This is a baseline
point and it is still very weak. Once again, you have highlighted
this in the past and this is a problem which is apparently inherent
in your Department, is it not? Of course, you will have read,
with great interest, the speech I gave on the Budget yesterday,
will you not, or have been briefed on it, as was the House, sitting
breathlessly on my every word. Tell us something about your costing
data.
Mr Lewis: I think our costing
data is getting better, Chairman, I genuinely do. Forgive me,
I have not read your words.
Q10 Chairman: Nobody else has either!
Mr Lewis: I will do so. You never
have all of the data that you want, but we are getting better
and better at having data not just in terms of the demand, but
also increasingly we are getting cost per call minute data from
more and more of our centres. We have a great deal of that in
Jobcentre Plus. We have the balanced scorecard, which is referred
to several times in the Report which I have looked at myself,
it is online which is giving us stronger management data than
we have ever had before. There are still gaps, as this Report
makes clear, but we are not operating in a data-free environment
in any way.
Q11 Chairman: Let us look at ringing
people back. If people ring you, presumably sometimes they will
want to be phoned back. Shall we look at figure 29 on page 53:
"The proportion of call backs completed within 24 hours has
increased since Jobcentre Plus Direct started keeping records
in August 2005". If we see your target, we would naturally
assume that you would want to return 90% of the calls. You are
way down below that. This could be crucial in the case of Jobcentre
Plus. If you want to arrange an interview or something, you have
got a pretty lamentable record. What is going on? How are you
improving it?
Mr Lewis: My colleague, Val Gibson,
may want to add to this. Chairman, there were some well documented
problems in the summer of last year in terms of people making
their first contact with Jobcentre Plus. The performance figures
then, in terms of people having their calls answered and being
rung back, were simply not good enough. We have said that very,
very clearly and I say it again here today. The most recent figures
-they are more recent inevitably than the ones in the Report here—show
that in February, the last complete month, over 60% of call backs
took place within 24 hours and over 90% took place within 48 hours.
We are still not where we would like to be. But the situation,
the problems we faced last summer, has been transformed out of
all recognition.
Q12 Chairman: I think 3% of the nation's
working population now work in contact centres, obviously mainly
in the private sector. Does this Report not show that you are
lagging far behind the private sector in the way you manage the
contact centres.
Mr Lewis: No, I do not think it
does. There are a number of instances in this Report which compare
us directly with the private sector in terms of external benchmarks.
We come out well overall against those benchmarks. Average cost
per agent, we are as good as the industry's standard; turnover
rates, we have lower turnover rates; the length of service of
our staff is better than in the private sector and staff costs
as a proportion of the total, we come in lower. I do not think
this is one area where the public sector is being shown to be
languishing way behind the private sector norm. I think we are
well up with it. What we want to do is to improve further.
Q13 Mr Mitchell: I wonder if you
are not just lamely imitating the private sector, short of handling
funerals and interments by call centres in Bangladesh and Bangalore
if it could. Here you see the private sector shifting to call
centres, particularly banks and building societies, which are
absolutely infuriating to deal with, where you would never get
an answer. Most of the people you talk to seem half-baked. The
Department thinks "here is a marvellous way of saving money,
let us have some call centres up in the North particularly where
we can get low paid chaps and chapesses with nothing else to do
and we can close down or contract most of the local offices".
Mr Lewis: It is simply not our
policy to do that, Mr Mitchell.
Q14 Mr Mitchell: It was a way of
economising, was it not?
Mr Lewis: No, it is not a way
of economising. What we are trying to do in the Department is
to offer—to use a slightly jargon-type word which I do not
really like—different channels of communication to our customers.
Let me give you a very good example of that. When I joined the
Employment Service as its Chief Executive in 1997, the worst thing
you could do was ring your local job centre, assuming you could
find the telephone number, and ask if they could help you to find
a job. What they would do is say, "You have to come into
one of our offices and look at the cards on the board". If
you now ring our Jobseeker Direct service, and a third of a million
people have found jobs through that service, you can be helped
through our full range of jobs on the phone or you can do that
on the net or you most certainly can still come back into our
offices, which are much more friendly places than ever they were,
and use those job point terminals. What we are trying to do is
offer our customers some real choice in many cases.
Q15 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but you have
got so many agencies with so many functions and it is much more
complicated. If I can get the number and I ring my bank's call
centre and say, "Can I have loan?", and they say politely,
"No", but yours is very different. A lot of it is very
personal, and a lot of people want personal contact. Your aim
seems to be that anything that does not demand face-to-face contact
is going to go eventually through the call centres. Surely that
means a massive contraction of your local offices?
Mr Lewis: Again, that is not our
intention and I do not think it is what is happening. If you look
at Jobcentre Plus, we are offering far more and far better face-to-face
services than ever we were through the New Deal, the New Deal
for Lone Parents, and lots of other face-to-face services. The
Pension Service, again—I have been out with colleagues from
The Pension Service to meet pensioners in their own homes—offers
that as an alternative. I do not want to just quote statistic
after statistic, but the NAO's findings of what our customers
who use our telephone service think of it are very encouraging
indeed in terms of the quality of the service they think they
are getting overall.
Q16 Mr Mitchell: As the Chairman
said, the hours are convenient, but I am concerned about the number
of functions the Department covers. I believe 55 separate numbers
are far too many, is it not? Why can you not handle on initial
contact all the basic simple things at the call centres and let
the rest be handled by local offices?
Mr Lewis: What we are trying to
do is to provide the service in a way which is most convenient
for our customers. Of course, cost effectiveness is an example
of that. It is not just the opening hours our customers thought
were good, 97% felt the person they dealt with was polite, and
80% had their query resolved in one call. To give you one example
again where I think we are offering something genuinely better
through a contact centre, we are beginning to roll out in The
Pension Service—and Janet Grossman can speak of that—the
fact that as you come up to the state retirement age, in an increasing
number of our centres you are now able to make one call in which
you will have your state pension entitlement assessed over the
telephone. At the end of a 20 or 25 minute call you can be told
what entitlement you will get and a letter will go out confirming
it. That replaces acres of form filling which you used to have
to do.
Q17 Mr Mitchell: Are you going to
be able to get into a situation where you have got one number
to ring and the answerers have one common system of information
on the screen by them, as seems to happen, for instance, with
the building society, and they can give you an answer straightaway,
because 55 numbers is far too complex for a lot of people.
Mr Lewis: Certainly, we do not
want to continue with 55 numbers. Can I put 55 numbers into context.
If you sit in one part of the country, Manchester or Middlesbrough
or wherever it is, you do not have 55 numbers because many of
those numbers are the geographic numbers of your Jobcentre Plus
call centre. For example, if you want to find a job, Jobseeker
Direct on 0845 6060234, you can ring from anywhere in the country.
We do want to make it simple and we do want to reduce the numbers,
but one number, I think, is an unreal ambition. I do not think
we will ever want to have one number which is the same for the
employer wanting to give us a job vacancy or for the pensioner
wanting to apply for pension credit, we do want some differentiation
in this system, we have too much at the moment.
Q18 Mr Mitchell: Did you not rush
into it a little too quickly in the sense that staff did not particularly
want to do this work and did not join the Department to do call
centre work which is fairly demanding? The turnover is high in
most of the call centres I have heard about. It needs a more gentle—gentler
than my questioning approach—rapport with people. They were
not trained for that, therefore, since they were under-trained
as well, compared with the private sector, the system got off
to a bad start because you rushed into it too quickly.
Mr Lewis: I think there is always
a trade-off, is there not, in seeking to deliver absolute perfection
when you open up a new service. There are lots of quotes in this
Report—again, you do not have to search hard through the
NAO's Report to find favourable quotes—in terms of the Department
and the services that it is offering and it has opened up. What
I think we have done over the last few years is to have revolutionalised
the amount of choice, availability and service to our customers.
In that process we have not got it all right. Going back, we would
have tried to do some things better, we would not have gone through
the problems that we experienced last summer in some of our centres,
but I do not regret the fact that we have taken a series of decisions
to seek hugely to expand the range of choice.
Q19 Mr Mitchell: Are the staff now
happy?
Mr Lewis: I cannot sit hear and
say that every one of our staff is happy because you will too
easily find some that are not. It is interesting, you mentioned
turnover, our turnover is less than the industry norm in our call
centres and the NAO Report says that is because they think our
staff are, in general, well motivated and satisfied. Of course,
there will be exceptions to that.
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