Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS, JOBCENTRE
PLUS AND
THE PENSION
SERVICE
29 MARCH 2006
Q60 Greg Clark: That data is crucial.
I am pleased that you have it. It would have been good if the
NAO had it since they were limited to this one. What I would ask,
through the Chairman, is given this is so important, could you
each month, say for the next 12 months, write to us with this
monthly data because it really is crucial. I do not think people
want to wait 14 days to get their benefits. I think that is unacceptable.
Mr Lewis: I will happily do that.[3]
Q61 Helen Goodman: I wonder if I could
just go back to what you said earlier which is that people can
always have face-to-face interviewing in extremis. Could you take
a look at page 15, chart seven, which does not include face-to-face
interviews as a means of delivery and only shows home visits for
The Pension Service. Why does it not show home visits being available
for the Jobcentre Plus other services and the Disability and Carers
Services?
Mr Lewis: Quite simply because
that is not part of what we offer to our customers save in highly
exceptional cases. For reasons which probably the Committee can
understand, we think it is very important still to be able to
visit pensioners in their own homes in many circumstances. The
sheer volume of our working age customers in Jobcentre Plus means
that is not a service which we can offer within the resources
which we have available. That is why it is very important that
our other means of dealing with our customers in our working age
systems, visits to our offices, through the telephone, and indeed,
increasingly through email and through the internet are as effective
as they can be. That is also why we have invested £2 billion
in not just upgrading our offices but fundamentally transforming
our offices so that they are good places for people to come in
to.
Q62 Helen Goodman: I can see why
what you say applies to employers and jobseekers which is why
I did not include them in my question. I cannot see why that applies
to Disability and Carers Service. I would have thought that for
them the case for home visits was as strong as for pensioners,
do you not agree with that?
Mr Lewis: I think in a perfect
world I would like to be in a position to offer everyone of the
many millions of people who have dealings with our Department
in any one year the ability to have a service precisely in the
way that they would have it delivered. The truth is that no more
than any other major financial institutions or retail organisations
with huge customer business can we do that because the resource
costs of making that absolute and total choice available would
exceed our ability to meet them. In terms of our Disability and
Carers Service where we have gone to very considerable lengths
to ensure that our telephone services, for example, when people
ring to make a claim for disability living allowance, attendance
allowance or carers allowance are very, very much focused on the
customer in terms of going through the circumstances of that customer,
understanding them and helping them through the claims process.
This is not a distant process. I have again listened myself to
calls between our customers and our staff, and I have been hugely
impressed by the care and trouble which our staff take to help
those customers through their claim forms.
Q63 Helen Goodman: It is clear that
contact centres and use of the telephone are efficient ways for
both you and claimants and recipients in the majority of cases
but the knack to getting this system right is to peel off at an
early stage those people for whom a bog standard system is not
going to work. Can we look at chart 16 on page 29, which is the
one that shows that any individual has a choice of 22 different
telephone numbers. Can I put it to you that you are expecting
the claimant or the recipient to do the customer segmentation
rather than the Department doing it? Would you accept that?
Mr Lewis: I think what I would
accept is that we do not yet make it as easy for our customers
as I would like to ascertain where to call, about what issue and
on what day. At times our customers find it harder than I would
like to access our services in terms of finding out the right
number although we do go to very great lengths to publicise those
telephone numbers.
Q64 Helen Goodman: I also accept
that it would not be sensible to have the same telephone number
for jobseekers as for pensioners but there is a vast array of
numbers. I wonder if you could tell the Committee when you expect
the non-Jobcentre Plus contact centre numbers to halve?
Mr Lewis: I cannot give you a
simple answer to that question, not least because—I know
it will sound a strange thing to say when we are talking about
telephone numbers—I do not think I want to be in a numbers
game. I want there to be as few numbers as is compatible with
properly differentiating our services. Some of this is inevitably
history and what has been built up over time. I do accept that
we have more numbers than we should. For the great majority of
these services nationwide, there is a single number. If you want
to claim DLA or Attendance Allowance, there is a single number
to call for that service. Our challenge is to make sure that single
numbers are easily available and obtainable and we go to considerable
lengths to secure that.
Q65 Helen Goodman: You do not think
that it would be good to have one number where somebody could
ring and find out about their winter fuel allowance and their
Pension Credits and their pension?
Mr Lewis: Yes, I would like to
explore the possibility that we might have say a single number
which if it did nothing else could signpost, if you see what I
mean, just as in terms of electronic government we are using the
e-gov site increasingly as a signpost. I would like to look at
the possibility of doing that. These things are not always as
easy to deliver as they might immediately sound.
Q66 Helen Goodman: Could I ask you
to look at chart 17 on page 34. This shows the very high number
of calls abandoned from the Disability and Carers Services. I
think 90% were abandoned. Chart 25 on page 49 shows that even
this year there is a problem with calls being abandoned and calls
being blocked. If we turn to the charts on quality on page 55,
you can see that more than 10% of contact centres have no services
for people with mental health, 20% have nothing for people who
are partially-sighted and more than 10% have nothing for people
with speech problems. Could you say whether you think it is as
realistic to use the telephone for people with disabilities as
for the rest of the population and whether perhaps the very bad
poor performance early on, when this service was introduced, is
in fact not to do with the fact that those were run any differently
or worse but because the client group was different and, therefore,
it is worse in the sense that it is insensitive to that client
group?
Mr Lewis: There are a number of
elements, can I take some in turn and do please come back to me
if I miss any of them out. It may sound a strange place to start,
but can I say that I think there is a difference between a call
which is blocked and a call which is abandoned because the terminology
of abandoned suggests that it is almost inevitably a bad thing.
When a call is blocked that is a bad thing, it means somebody
tries to ring the number and they do not get through, they get
the engaged tone and that is not the service we want to provide.
A call abandoned may be abandoned for a number of reasons and
all contact centres throughout the industry have a significant
proportion of abandoned calls.
Q67 Helen Goodman: Mr Lewis, you
do not need to go into that detail, I am asking you about sensitivity
to people with disabilities?
Mr Lewis: My apologies but I was
trying to respond to one element of your question. We do try hard
to respond to the needs of people with disabilities. For example,
you will see that in 100% of our call centres, we operate the
text phone service. We have a group at the moment which is looking
at whether we can make our contact centres, as all the Department's
centres, more accessible and user friendly to people with disabilities.
When we are dealing with a customer on the telephone if it becomes
clear that we are dealing with someone who is not able to cope
with that way of dealing with us then we will seek to make an
alternative arrangement for helping that individual.
Q68 Helen Goodman: What is your long-term
target for the number of cases that are dealt with over the telephone?
Mr Lewis: There is not a single
target of that kind. I make no apology for there not being a single
target of that kind because I think what we are trying to do within
the resources that we have available is offer our customers the
maximum amount of choice. I do not want to get into face-to-face
good, telephone bad, because, as this Report shows, we are delivering
a vastly better service to the vast majority of our customers
than ever we were in the past. My ambition is, within the resources
available to me and the Department, to go on offering people maximum
choice and maximum convenience. At the risk of trespassing on
your patience, I do want to repeat that this Report shows that
the vast majority of our customers who use those telephone services
find them convenient, easy to use and ones that they welcome.
Helen Goodman: I think I acknowledged
that at the outset. My concern is with the small proportion of
people for whom that is not the case but unfortunately I have
come to the end of my time.
Q69 Mr Davidson: You have a number
of call centres in the South East. It has been the experience
of this Committee over a long period that call centres and other
activities in the South East tend to be the most expensive and
least effective. Why have you still got any there?
Mr Lewis: We have only got one.
If we go to appendix four, we have only one remaining call centre
in London or the South East, in Hastings. For the rest, all of
our call centres have now moved from London and the South East.
Q70 Mr Davidson: I was operating
off appendix three which obviously has been Tipp-Exed out in your
copy.
Mr Lewis: Indeed. Appendix four
illustrates call centres that were going to close but this is
a moving target.
Q71 Mr Davidson: Let us see if you
can do as well with the other questions that I have got. Taking
up Pension Credit, on page four at paragraph 10, you are using
your contact centres to phone people up, to pursue them, as it
were, about taking Pension Credit. Presumably you have not had
a 100% success rate?
Mr Lewis: No.
Q72 Mr Davidson: Can you clarify
for me whether or not there are any particular reasons why you
have not been successful by using the phone system to pursue people
for Pension Credit. I would have thought that you would always
get virtually, entirely a 100% clean-up rate.
Mr Lewis: I wonder if I may ask
Janet Grossman to answer that.
Q73 Mr Davidson: Because that is
a hard one!
Mr Lewis: No, I think we are rather
proud of what we have done on Pension Credit where we have now
got 2.7 million—
Q74 Mr Davidson: I understand that,
you still have not got everybody, I would have thought you would
have everybody by this method?
Mr Lewis: No and that is why I
wanted someone with absolute detail to answer your question. We
are proud of what we have achieved so far.
Q75 Mr Davidson: As you should be.
Ms Grossman: I would like to say
that we make every opportunity to contact the customers. We have
done it through press ads, we have done it through voluntary organisations
and by the telephone.
Q76 Mr Davidson: I know that.
Ms Grossman: Sometimes our research
shows that quite a few pensioners are frankly too proud to take
benefits. We try to make sure that they know that this is what
they are entitled to and it is their right to have it. We try
to persuade them to take up the benefit and we would be happy
to provide that research to you.
Q77 Mr Davidson: Let me be clear,
yes I can understand that, it is an ideological objection almost.
I can understand that and accept that you cannot do anything about
it. I want to be clear that there are no procedural difficulties
because I have certainly had the complaint from a number of my
constituents at various times, who have filled in the forms, they
are too complex and all the rest of it. I want to clarify whether
or not you have had a number of people who contacted you by phone
telling you that no, they were not going to do it because even
by phone it was too complex?
Ms Grossman: Our Pension Credit
application line is highly successful in answering the calls and
the customer feedback we have is positive. For instance, instead
of filling out the entire form by hand—
Q78 Mr Davidson: I understand that,
I want to be clear that the feedback you are getting from people
who are refusing to pursue Pension Credit after you have contacted
them by phone is solely because of this ideological objection
to taking what they see as charity.
Ms Grossman: It would be wrong
to say solely. Where people are not comfortable on the phone,
again, we have visited over 800,000 pensioners in their own homes.
We also offer information points and other mechanisms to reach
them.
Mr Lewis: We also operate, it
is worth saying, with a range of partner organisations.
Q79 Mr Davidson: I understand all
of that. You still do not have 100% and I want to be clear whether
or not the shortfall is solely those who are, as it were, ideologically
opposed to the concept of taking charity or whether or not there
is still something else that could be done to reach those people?
Ms Grossman: There is more to
be done and we are transforming our business as we speak, making
it easier and shorter for customers.
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