Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
JOBCENTRE PLUS
26 JANUARY 2005
Q1 Mr Williams: Today, we are going to
question on the running of the Social Fund and I welcome here
Mr Anderson. Is this your first visit?
Mr Anderson: No, it is not; it
is my third Committee of Public Accounts.
Q2 Mr Williams: Third, is it? You do
not show any scars or wounds.
Mr Anderson: Only on the inside.
Q3 Mr Williams: As I have explained
to you, and I will explain to people sitting around you, there
is going to be a series of votes non-stop which will go on for
an hour and a quarter to an hour and three quarters, we do not
know, starting at 4.30. My aim is to see whether we can get through
this so that instead of keeping you here, we will be able to complete
it when the voting starts and then you can go, otherwise you will
be sitting around and we would just be doing five minute snatches.
Shall I start straightaway with the most fundamental question?
The Social Fund has been around a long time, yet what comes over
in the Report is how few people are aware of it and aware quite
of what it offers or even that they have a right of appeal if
they have made an application and failed. Why do you think awareness
is so low and what are you planning to do to rectify that?
Mr Anderson: There are different
levels of awareness amongst different groups for different parts
of the Fund and a consistent theme, looking at the whole Report,
is that you find different levels of decision making and understanding
around Funeral Payments, Sure Start Maternity Grants on the one
hand, which are quite well known by the communities who need them,
through at the other end of the spectrum to Crisis Loans, which
probably have the widest possible community in that they are open
to anybody and they are less known. Then the Community Care Grants
and the Budgeting Loans are quite well known to benefit claimants,
who are eligible for them. So the question you ask has different
parts. We have a lot of activity for replacing leaflets, improving
leaflets which will help the key groups who use the service. Most
of the customers of the services are benefit claimants and they
will get information through that. We have programmes to work
with the Pension Service to improve awareness of Social Fund amongst
pensioners and we have work planned with Ministers to simplify
the Fund so that we find it easier to make our own staff more
aware of it, which is also one of the key things in the Report.
So there is a lot of work in train to address the issue you raise.
Q4 Mr Williams: The impression we
get is that the message still is not getting through to a lot
of the most needy. Perhaps if you have any proposals in mind,
you will drop us a note to tell us exactly what you are intending
to do to heighten awareness, is that all right?
Mr Anderson: That is fine[1].
Q5 Mr Williams: I am one of the few people
here, other than Sir John I think, who was here 12 years ago when
there was a hearing on the Social Fund. I remember it very well.
We made certain recommendations at that time, particularly we
were very worried about the local variability in the level of
grant and loan that was available and also in the percentage of
people who were getting those loans and grants. If we turn to
page 19, where we have the two graphs, 12 and 13, if we look at
the upper one, that deals with variations in the percentages who
get payment and you find if you look at the first of them, which
is the Community Grant, it varies between 29% and 63%, so it more
than double in some localities than others. It varies between
40% and 88% on Funeral Payments and if you look to the third column,
Crisis Loans which after all are particularly important, it can
be as high as 97%, but it can be as low as 46%, again half. Then,
if you look at the lower part, we see the same variability in
the amounts that are given. So you have double shown in relation
to the Community Care Grant, up to double in the Funeral Grants.
Now 12 years ago, we highlighted this. Why is it still so apparent
and so widely varied in view of the fact that we are dealing with
people who are often in very great need?
Mr Anderson: The key changes that
have happened over the 12 years are in Budgeting Loans, where
much more work is done now to set a national budget and make sure
that the money which is available for each district is as closely
as possible aligned to its need. As far as Community Care Grants
go, there is so much discretion in the scheme in terms of the
decision making, particularly in terms of whether the case is
a priority, which is concerned with those cases where people need
help to establish themselves or remain in the community and demographics
have a very, very important part to play there. You would expect
more people to need that kind of help in some districts than in
others, therefore you would expect on Community Care Grants to
see quite a difference in the variations of people who get a payment
and those who do not.
Q6 Mr Williams: When you look at
the level of amounts as well, take for example Funeral Payment,
it can vary between £700 and £1,400. You cannot put
that down to demographics can you?
Mr Anderson: No. In terms of payment
on Funeral Payments, obviously there are variations in cremation
charges and funeral charges in different parts of the country
and a good part of this money is—
Q7 Mr Williams: But it is hardly
likely to be double.
Mr Anderson: No, I do not think
it would be as much as double and some of this will be differences
in the number of people, for example, who get further away from
where they are buried, across one boundary or another, and some
of it will be the difficulty in consistency in decision making.
Certainly in Funeral Payments, we are aware that there are some
aspects of the decision making that we need to improve, notably
around some of the technical areas about what you can include
and what you cannot include and we have to work on that.
Q8 Mr Williams: How can we stop it
being quite as arbitrary as it is? The ranges are utterly unacceptable.
Could you again put in a note, unless one of my colleagues asks
for further clarification now, of what you are doing to try to
remove the arbitrary discretionary nature of decision making,
in order to get a greater degree of consistency?[2]
In a way that is reflecting the next question. If you look to
page 26, paragraph 15, this is the correctness of initial decision
making between the types of awards. It is very worrying that urgent
decisions such as Crisis Loans and Funeral Payment have just over
50% accuracy and the Community Care Grants have about 75%. Why
is there such a lack of precision in decision making?
Mr Anderson: If we look at the
two poorest results here, for Crisis Loans and for Funeral Payments,
there are several differing factors for each. One reason for these
low numbers is a common reason in other benefit areas; it is where
we have had difficulties in retrieving papers and therefore a
decision is marked as an error where we cannot provide all the
evidence that was used to make the decision. That would make a
significant difference in the decisions that were correct. Another
key area for Crisis Loans is so-called alignment payments and
these are deemed incorrect where we make an alignment payment
when a benefit payment is due and in those cases, we should make
an interim benefit payment rather than use a Crisis Loan. In practice
the reason that people do that is because very often the people
who would make the interim benefit payment are the same people
who have delayed making the original benefit payment, but the
Crisis Loan team are a different team and they can give the money
straightaway and they do so. That is deemed as an error, rightly
so because it is an error. Those two reasons show that some of
the decision making is not as poor as this graph would suggest
it is. The statistics that we have for errors which actually affect
customers—this table includes errors which do not affect
customers, but are technically incorrect decisions—are much
better than this. If we looked at Crisis Loans for this year,
overall the number would be 65% accuracy, where we were talking
about affecting customers. So there is a number of reasons there.
Q9 Mr Williams: Could we have a note
on those up-to-date figures with explanations, where appropriate,
of the changes which have taken place?
Mr Anderson: Yes.[3]
Q10 Mr Steinberg: Regardless of what
you say, Mr Anderson, I think this is a very poor Report. I have
to say that I have never actually ever been impressed with the
Social Fund and I have always seen it as a sort of derisory way
in which to treat people who are in poverty and crisis. As far
back as when it was introduced in the early 1980s and the 1990s,
I always felt that it did not meet the needs of the people for
whom it was meant and that was the people who were in crisis and
were in poverty; it seemed to neglect their needs. My experience
at the time clearly showed that as well. The way that I actually
saw a crisis and the way that was dealt with by the benefits officers
clearly did not reflect, as far as I was concerned, the situation
that people were in. Right from the beginning I thought it was
a very, very poor system. However, it is with us now and there
is nothing we can do about it. I have to say that at the present
time I get very few cases from the Social Fund and I put this
down either to it being administered much better, there is not
so much crisis about because people are actually better off, or
people just ignoring it altogether. Which is it?
Mr Anderson: I should like to
think that what is happening is that there are fewer people unhappy
with the way decisions about Crisis Loans are made.
Q11 Mr Steinberg: I thought you would
say that. If you read the Report, that is just not a true reflection
of the Report, is it? Absolutely not. If you read the Report,
it clearly states in the Report that the staff do not understand
it, the staff are not trained in it, the staff do not give advice
in it, the staff do not know about it themselves, in fact some
of the staff do not even know it exists. You are sitting there
and saying it is because it is being better administered by staff.
That is not what this Report says.
Mr Anderson: I think the evidence
is that the majority of decisions are correct and that the staff
who deal with—
Q12 Mr Steinberg: The majority of
decisions are correct? That is not what this Report says; far
from it. This Report says that over 50% of decisions made were
wrong.
Mr Anderson: A high proportion
of the decisions which go to review are overturned, but that is
different from the proportion of decisions which are correct in
the first instance. Obviously, the cases that go to review are
a sub-set where people have been unhappy with the decision. If
we look at Figure 15 which is on page 26 of the Report, which
is the one to which Mr Williams just referred to that is about
the decision making—
Q13 Mr Steinberg: The Report clearly
says that 50% of the applications made at job centres to the Benefits
Agency which pays them, are wrong. The applications which come
in from your own job centres are returned. Right or wrong?
Mr Anderson: I do not believe
that is correct.
Q14 Mr Steinberg: Let us have a look.
Over 50% are returned, only 47% are correct.
Mr Anderson: I do not have the
page reference you are talking about, but the statistics sound
as though they may be referring to the cases that are reviewed
rather than all the cases.
Sir John Bourn: Paragraph 3.10.
Q15 Mr Steinberg: I knew I had read
it somewhere. "The quality of initial decision-making varies
between types of award. 92% of Budgeting Loan initial decisions
are correct but only 52% of Crisis Loans and Funeral Payments
initial decisions".
Mr Anderson: Yes, and overall
the figure—
Q16 Mr Steinberg: That is appalling
and you are sitting here defending it, are you not? You are saying
it is being administered better now and it is not being administered
better, it is being administered no better than it was right at
the very beginning.
Mr Anderson: As I just explained
to Mr Williams, the statistics on the decision making which are
in Figure 15, which is on page 26, show that we have difficulty
in decision making for Crisis Loans and Funeral Payments. The
discretionary nature of these decisions means that they are difficult—
Q17 Mr Steinberg: Go to paragraph
2.14. You have said all that before and you are just repeating
yourself. If you go to paragraph 2.14, page 18, it tells us here
that two people with identical circumstances, at the same time,
could go into a different job centre and get different decisions
regarding their applications for a Community Care Grant. The system
that can do that is therefore, in my view, fundamentally unfair.
How can two people be treated totally differently with exactly
the same conditions?
Mr Anderson: The way that the
Community Care Grant is administered is that the district has
an amount of money which is available to it to pay out and the
decision makers have to allocate a priority to the cases that
they get. Therefore, it is possible that cases of equal priority
would receive different—
Q18 Mr Steinberg: How is that fair
then? How is it fair if a constituent of mine goes to get a loan
and Frank Field's in Liverpool goes, they both have exactly the
same conditions, yet one could come out with a different grant
from the other; exactly the same circumstances. How is that fair?
Is it fair?
Mr Anderson: In those particular
cases, if that arose, it would not be fair. That would be very
rare indeed, because we make enormous efforts to make sure that
the way the budget is allocated for Community Care Grants matches
the demand that will arise and it is based on forecasts of the
demand for the Community Care Grant which could arise in each
district.
Q19 Mr Steinberg: So really it depends
upon the resources you have.
Mr Anderson: Yes, we try to allocate
the resources across districts according to the likely demand.
1 Ev 12 Back
2
Ev 13 Back
3
Ev 18 Back
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