Select Committee on Public Accounts Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)

DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS, JOBCENTRE PLUS AND THE PENSION SERVICE

29 MARCH 2006

  Q40  Mr Bacon: Why are they called "warm", by the way?

  Ms Gibson: Our preferred term is "customer access" phone rather than "warm" phone. I think "warm" phone is a bit of a jargon term. The design of the customer access phones is that they should be in some sort of booth or acoustic hood to maintain privacy. We have not always been able to achieve that because of the estate's considerations, but where we can, that is the case. As far as is it not a little bizarre to come into an office and then be directed to the telephone service, it is a question of us trying to direct customers to where they are going to get the best help for their particular requirement.

  Q41  Mr Bacon: Your customers tell you they are reluctant to use them unless absolutely necessary. Apparently, Ms Gibson, you are not able to provide data on them as to how much they get used.

  Ms Gibson: We do not have statistics on how widely used they are.

  Q42  Mr Bacon: Why not? One of the things you can very easily monitor is phone use. Everybody is familiar with phone bills, and if you have an office with 10 people in it, you can see who is using the phone the most and indeed even where they are calling. Why can you not easily provide data on how much they are used?

  Ms Gibson: This is one of the self-help measures that we are offering to our customers, the other is the internet service. We do not measure currently the use of those customer access phones.

  Q43  Mr Bacon: You are just repeating what is in this paragraph. My question is why can you not provide the data, not do you provide data or do you not. I already know that you do not, that is what it says in this paragraph, so repeating that does not really help me. What I am looking for is why do you not, given that with a telephone you pick it up, it makes a connection, you can measure that, it goes through a computer telephony integration, or whatever it is, and you can very easily write a routine to enable you to see, at the touch of a button, how much that phone is being used. Then you would immediately be able to make comparisons across the country and see why some are used more than others. Why do you not do that?

  Ms Gibson: Certainly we can have a look at that. We have not found a need to do so up until now.

  Mr Lewis: I think there is a risk that we will almost conclude that our phones are a bad thing. Paragraph 37 of the Report says: "Contact centres are playing a major role in the transformation of the DWP and have already expanded the range of the services that can easily be accessed by its customers whose satisfaction levels are generally high". The Pension Service has just produced its 2005 Customer Survey which is very interesting. It shows that its pensioner customers increasingly want to use the telephone as their preferred medium of contacting The Pension Service. More are doing it as their preferred vehicle for contacting us as than was the case in 2003.

  Q44  Mr Bacon: I am not disputing that phones can be useful as a medium of communication and I am not disputing why people have slated them, all I was saying in relation to paragraph 4.15 is that your customers appear to be reluctant to use them unless absolutely necessary. If you measured how much they are being used and looked at where they are being used more, where they are being used less, you might be able to figure out why. If you are spending money installing them and they are not being used, then that surely is a waste.

  Mr Lewis: This is a very rarefied group of customers who come into our offices, normally for one purpose, and then, in a sense, ask about a different service. In those circumstances it is often better, rather than a member of staff whose job it is not trying to provide the service, for us to say, "If you use this telephone which is here in the office and ring this number, then you will be connected to a colleague who will be able to provide that service". There are issues, in some cases, about whether we have got enough of those phones and they are sited perfectly et cetera, though colleagues who have been into our new Jobcentre Plus offices will know that the physical environment is vastly better than ever it was in the former Social Security office. This is quite a rarefied group of our customers.

  Ms Grossman: I also wanted to add that the NAO Report pointed out that pensioners who use the telephone are our most satisfied customers, so we are clearly doing something right.

  Q45  Chairman: I want to comment on that as you are sitting here, before this line of questioning gets forgotten about. I do not think it was an entirely full answer when you said you were entirely content with the service. Shall we look at paragraph 4.12 again which Mr Bacon referred to. There you have got a target of answering 80% of calls in 20 seconds. If you read further down the page you see that only seven of the 58 sites that reported data have achieved this target. This is very important—let us congratulate Ms Grossman, shall we—if we read her CV we see that: "Under Janet's leadership, The Pension Service operations have improved efficiency and customer service, reducing staff numbers by 26% whilst improving service levels in the last 18 months". She has done a fantastic job and I pay tribute to her. When we need to summon you back in a couple of years' time, which I will obviously do, will you be able to tell us that Ms Grossman has been promoted and received a pay rise but those responsible for a lagging performance elsewhere have been sacked and moved on?

  Mr Lewis: Without over-personalising—

  Q46  Chairman: I only personalise when I praise.

  Mr Lewis: Janet Grossman is good example that increasingly we have brought people with very serious expertise into the Department from other sectors. I am not satisfied with our performance in the speed of call handling right across the Department's contact centres. If, however, you compare our 2005-06 performance to date with 2004-05, in every case we are increasing the proportion of calls that we are answering in all of our major businesses, Jobcentre Plus and The Pension Service, compared with where we were. To give you one example, in The Pension Service where the target is the industry standard of 80% within 20 seconds, we only achieved that in 56% of the cases in 2004-05. So far in 2005-06 we are at 80%, so we are hitting that target. My ambition is to hit it in every case.[2]

  Chairman: Like you should. Thank you very much.

  Q47  Greg Clark: Mr Lewis, the benefit system has become more complex in recent years and there are reasons for that which we understand. Call centres offer the opportunity to help people cut through that complexity, so I agree that the potential is significant. The experience from my own constituency call centre is that a large number of people come to me because they have been completely befuddled by the call centre process. So far from helping them through the complexity, it has proved to be a rather alienating experience. Is that something you would recognise?

  Mr Lewis: I am absolutely sure that those of your constituents who have said that to you, that was their experience because people tell it as it is. I would not want to gainsay any one of your constituents. I am absolutely sure that there are times when our performance in explaining and answering customer queries is not as clear and not as good as it should be. It is worth saying that the NAO's survey itself found that 80% of the customers they interviewed—this was their survey of our customers—said they had their query resolved in one phone call. One of the facts of life—and my last appearance before this Committee was to respond to the NAO's Report on the complexity of the benefit system—is we have a very complex benefit system. At times, our contact centres can help because if we have contact centres with staff with the right training, they can cut through some of that complexity and help people to the service and the information that they do need. It is a tough job.

  Q48  Greg Clark: That is what they should do. Can we look at this business of call backs, which I think has been a particular problem with Jobcentre Plus. Anyone calling Jobcentre Plus has presumably lost their job and they are about to claim benefits. They are at a point of crisis in their lives. The idea that we see on page 53 that whilst having a target of 24 hours it was often over 14 working days before people were called back, when people were in despair, they had lost their job and had got no benefits, the stress that must cause is enormous. Is it the case that they cannot claim benefits until they have had their interview at Jobcentre Plus?

  Mr Lewis: I will ask Val Gibson to go through the system with you and explain it, just to be clear. The figures that you quote for some of the times that it was taking us to make call backs during last summer were unacceptable and they are vastly better now. It is and remains the case and was the case then that anyone who said, when they got through to our centre, they were in immediate hardship would have been dealt with on a fast track.

  Ms Gibson: That is true. The process for a customer currently is that they make a short call to Jobcentre Plus where we determine their likely entitlement to benefit. That is followed with a call back, which is the Harper process, a 24-hour standard. At that call back, where it is appropriate we book a work-focused interview in their local job centre so that we can talk to them about work, resolve any final benefit enquiries and then process their claim. You are right to say that they cannot get their benefit until the call back has been conducted and, indeed, those later parts of the process.

  Q49  Greg Clark: If you have got a phased delay there, it is crucial if people cannot claim their benefits.

  Ms Gibson: Yes, it is. As Leigh said, we were in those sorts of difficulties. Indeed, now, anyone who is in personal hardship is entitled to be considered for an emergency payment.

  Q50  Greg Clark: Is that the first question you ask?

  Ms Gibson: It is not the first question we ask, but we would establish that within the call and, if so, refer them to the job centre.

  Q51  Greg Clark: Is it part of the standard script?

  Ms Gibson: No, it is not.

  Q52  Greg Clark: People are unaware of this concession?

  Ms Gibson: People may or may not be aware of the concession. They are certainly aware of their own circumstances and can represent those to us.

  Q53  Greg Clark: You should be there to help them, especially with these stressful circumstances, to guide them through and tell them what they are entitled to. Your answer to that is they have three separate transactions that they have to make before they can get benefits. The fact is that there is somewhere in the system, a concession that if people are in hardship then they can get their benefits quickly, but you have to know about it, you have to be an insider. Perhaps, as a result of this, you have to be an MP to be able to advise them if there is a concession. Why is it not part of your script if this is to help people to immediately say to all the callers, "Are you in extreme financial difficulties and, if so, we can help". Why is that not part of the script?

  Ms Gibson: Can I say something about what we are trialling at the moment in Grimsby which seeks to address some of the problems you are talking about.

  Q54  Greg Clark: Yes, but before we do that, why is it not part of your script to offer people this opportunity to go straight to benefits?

  Ms Gibson: It may not be part of the script but that does not mean it is not part of the interaction with the customer.

  Q55  Greg Clark: The script is ordinary, it is very clear from this Report that you encourage and require people to stick to the script and the NAO made it clear that departures from the script result in errors. The whole point of the context of the script is to get people to stick to it. This idea that they should leave that undermines the whole point of the context. It is individual discretion that needs to be exercised, they would be better off having face-to-face interviews, would they not?

  Mr Lewis: Let me say one thing and then ask Val to say something. Again, this is inevitably a balance because if we were to ask every single customer in effect whether they would like to be fast-tracked then we would have to have the capacity and the capability to do that and that would inevitably be very resource intensive. What we do seek to do, however, is if there is any indication that a customer is in immediate financial need then they will be fast-tracked through the system.

  Q56  Greg Clark: I submit that the Department has more resources than someone who has lost their job and needs to claim benefits. The idea that you pass on financial risk to your vulnerable customers to pay for, in effect, your failures if you cannot see them within 24 hours I think is unacceptable. Just to move on a little bit, you said that the figures had improved recently but on page 53 at table 28—table 28 is a month in the life of this call centre Jobcentre Plus—the footnote says "Data on the booking ahead period for call backs was only collected in August 2005 and September 2005. The Department no longer records this data." Is that inaccurate?

  Mr Lewis: That data is of a different nature which is the period of time that elapses between the call back and the person coming into one of our offices. It is not the data on call back times which has very significantly improved.

  Q57  Greg Clark: Can you explain that because this table is not about the figure you described, this is about the target, the number of days it takes to call back, so the footnote is related to that. Can I ask the NAO to explain the tables and the footnote I assume relates to the data in the table?

  Mr Lonsdale: This is the detailed information from a number of Jobcentre Plus contact centres. As you say, over a short period of weeks the average call back period is shown in the middle and this is the range across the country.

  Q58  Greg Clark: The call back data is no longer being collected, presumably it is the data in this table that you are no longer collecting?

  Mr Lonsdale: We could not take it any further forward because the data was not available.

  Q59  Greg Clark: There we are. That is my point, Mr Lewis.

  Mr Lewis: I think what I will need to do is look into this because I most certainly have the data on call backs which I have been quoting to the Committee this afternoon. The data shows that our performance in call backs has very substantially improved and in February, so only one month ago—it is very much real time data—we made 64% of call backs within 24 hours and over 90% in 48 hours.


2   Note by witness: My original answer to question 46 was inaccurate. In 2004-05, The Pension Service answered 53.4% of calls within 30 seconds and not 56% in 20 seconds as I stated. I apologise that my answer was inaccurate. Back


 
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