Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 79)
WEDNESDAY 7 DECEMBER 2005
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS
Q60 Greg Clark: I am sure they would
be grateful for some support. Specifically, I am sure they could
have an audit of what proportion of their work . . .
Mr Lewis: I am sure they would,
but I am certainly not going to commit this afternoon to greater
funding for the CAB. I would like to say, just to finish that
point, that encouragingly, yesterday they did believe that in
general our forms and leaflets were getting simpler. They thought
that the standard of service given in the new Jobcentre Plus integrated
offices was a step change improvement on the past. So I was encouraged
by some of what they told me yesterday.
Q61 Chairman: You said you had to
spend a lot of time, obviously, on complexity and you had to prepare
for this Committee. How many hours did you have to spend preparing
for this hearing?
Mr Lewis: About three weekends,
Chairman.
Q62 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: We have heard
from Mr Khan that complexity is an inherent part of achieving
the policy objectives of combating poverty and targeting resources.
Mr Clark was trying to make the point that the complexity of the
benefits is a reason why there is less saving for retirement.
Would you agree that the complexity of the benefits system is
the only reason why there is less saving for retirement?
Mr Lewis: No, I do not and I think
that we have had a very thorough analysis from the Turner Commission
which sets out a whole set of reasons why in the view of the Commission
we are not saving as much as the Commission believes it necessary
that we should, as a society, for our future.
Q63 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Do you think
the complexity of the benefits system is the main reason?
Mr Lewis: No, I do not. We have
just had that conversation. I think it is a reason.
Q64 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I am glad
we cleared that one up. We have also been through, as I have just
said, complexity as an inherent part of targeting benefits, so
in simplifying the system, would you say that providing better
customer service is probably a better reason for simplifying the
system, because it says very much in the Report it would not necessarily
be a way of saving money?
Mr Lewis: I am a passionate believer—and
I have appeared before this Committee many times in many guises,
and I think this Committee will know that—that we should
deliver excellence in public service and excellence in customer
service. I believe that we should do that for its own sake because
people are entitled to it. I do believe that it then has, actually,
a seriously helpful advantage in terms of reducing the complexity
of the system. I think if people feel that they are being treated
and received and welcomed in a civilised, individual and personalised
way, it is much easier to have a conversation with them in which
some of the inevitable complexities of the system can come out.
Again, in preparation for this hearing, I listened in to some
of the calls being made to some of our centres, such as the Pensions
Centre, taking calls from members of the public, and I was very
impressed by both the knowledge and the sympathy of the staff
operating those lines in being able to help people through some
of those complexities.
Q65 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Obviously,
as MPs we only see the people who are not so impressed with the
service, and most of the complaints I receive from constituents
are frustration when they are trying to communicate with the various
Departments. I noted in paragraph 31 on page 14 "The Pension
Service has developed a local service for targeted assistance
of those pensioners who require face to face contact. These contacts
. . . require that staff have thorough training." How long
is the basic training for your staff when they come to do this
work?
Mr Lewis: I cannot give you that
figure because I am not sure there is one single figure which
covers the multitude of different jobs for people in the Department.
What I can say is that on average, right across the Department
for Work and Pensions, each member of our staff has about 6.5
days of dedicated training per year, and it is one of the huge
elements of our resource budget, providing the training budget
for our staff.
Q66 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Are they
trained in customer service techniques as well as benefits rules?
Mr Lewis: Yes, they are.
Q67 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Six and a
half days does not actually sound very long to me for someone
to suddenly be on the end of the phone having to deal with some
very complex inquiries. Is there a longer one for people who first
start doing it?
Mr Lewis: Yes, there is and that
will vary depending on the job that people are going to take up,
because that 6.5 days is an average across a Department of 116,000
people, and many of those people are already very experienced
in what they do and inevitably, their training need is less than
people embarking on their career.
Q68 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: How do you
ensure that your staff are kept up to date with the changes in
benefit regulations?
Mr Lewis: Again, that is something
that either of my colleagues may be able to say more about than
me. I think that is a real challenge but I think we have got better
in terms of putting out both paper-based but increasingly electronic
information to our staff which does seek to keep them up to date
with developments. For example, on the day when the Turner Commission
Report was published we sent a note about that to all of our staff
with a link into the website where they could find more detail.
Mr O'Gorman: It would be a mixture
of the appropriate training, ranging from simply informing people,
making information available electronically, to classroom training,
face to face, for people who have a need to have a deeper knowledge
of the particular change in question.
Q69 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: It mentions
at the end of the Report—I cannot remember the page but
it is also something people have said to me—the system itself
is complex but people have complex needs, and very often they
are accessing more than one benefit. When they actually do get
through on the telephone and talk to someone about one particular
benefit, they then find that that member of staff knows nothing
about the other one. Do you train your staff just in one area
or do you cross-fertilise?
Mr O'Gorman: We will try to have
people available. The claims process involves people increasingly
now contacting a centre which will take their basic details, they
will be phoned back and there will be a conversation about their
particular needs, what their circumstances are, and what might
be the appropriate benefits. On the basis of that, a claim form
is sent to them, and an appointment will be made for them at a
Jobcentre Plus office. They take the claim form along to the Jobcentre
Plus office and they will meet a financial assessor who will check
that they know what they are claiming, that they have completed
the claim form correctly, signed it and so on, and then they will
have an interview with someone who will typically talk to them
about what work they might be able to do or what help there might
be available to help them become more independent. It is certainly
the case, however, in some of the more complex cases we would
need to follow that up with someone who is particularly expert
in some of the more detailed points to do with the benefit, but
I think the huge majority of people we are able to deal with and
deal with successfully in the system I have just described.
Q70 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I think you
are probably right for the very first time somebody claims. Most
of the problems that come to me are where they have benefit, their
circumstances change and they are trying to talk to somebody about
it, and I am being told time and again "I just can't get
through. I have rung continually." Do you think you have
enough telephone lines? Is it telephone lines or telephone operators?
Mr Lewis: Let me take some of
that, not least because there have been in recent weeks some well
publicised difficulties in terms of people being able to get through
to one of our sets of call centres. Actually, overall, we do remarkably
well across the Department. We take approaching 0.5 million calls
from members of the public a week to our different businesses
and to our different call centres, and for the great majority
of the time we answer the vast majority of those quickly and effectively
and efficiently. As ever, when you are running a huge business—and
the DWP, this is a business, it is worth saying, which is larger
than the Prudential, larger than Barclays, larger than the Royal
Bank of Scotland on almost any test you care to measure—delivering
perfection every day is hard, and occasionally we fall below standards
that we should meet, but by and large actually, right across our
business, our standards of both answering and dealing with calls
are really very good.
Q71 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: Is there
any way of recording those calls that cannot be answered? Does
your telephone system cope with that?
Mr Lewis: Yes. On almost every
single one of our businesses we know how many calls were attempted,
how many got through and were answered, how many people rang off
before the call was answered. So we do that and that is one of
the key management challenges in the management of each individual
call centre. When you go there you see that they will typically
have a neon board right up in front which will tell you how many
calls are being answered at that moment, how many are waiting,
what is the maximum wait that any one caller has had and how many
people have rung off. So there is very, very strong management
control over that.
Q72 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: That sounds
to me like quantitative control rather than qualitative control.
Is there not a danger that, in answering quickly they are getting
the customer off the phone and not actually—it may take
a long telephone call.
Mr Lewis: Inevitably, there is
risk. Inevitably, when you are running any call centre operation,
there is a trade-off between trying to ensure that you answer
all of the calls, you do not miss calls, you do not have people
hanging up in frustration and, on the other hand, that you give
a good service, you genuinely deal with the call and the query
or with the application for benefit. That is one of the challenges
and those two things have to be continually weighed. To try and
ensure that we are handling both elements of that, we do measure
the satisfaction which people have with their calls.
Q73 Sarah McCarthy-Fry: I have seen
one of your gobbledegook letters. In fact, I saw one last weekend
at my advice centre. It looked as if it had been generated by
a computer, that it just put in a standard thing. Have you explored
the cost of explaining what that means in plain English at the
bottom of the letter so that the computer generates the numbers
and somebody actually says "This means you don't actually
get any money but don't worry," or something along those
lines?
Mr Lewis: I know that this is
an area of immense frustration to Members of Parliament at times
and to our customers. The Chairman read an example of a letter
which is pretty difficult to understand even for us, let alone
the person who received it. No, I do not think it is practical
that we could personalise in that way every single letter that
goes out from the entire Department. Realistically, I do not think
that is practical, but what I think we have to strive to do is
to make the letters that we send much easier to understand.
Q74 Chairman: Do these computer-generated
letters physically pass by somebody's desk so they can quickly
glance at them?
Mr Lewis: Yes, in general.[2]
Q75 Chairman: So in theory, they
could add something if they wanted?
Mr Lewis: Yes, indeed.
Q76 Helen Goodman: What is the cost
of administrating the benefits system at the moment?
Mr Lewis: I am not sure that I
can give you a single cost. The overall administration cost of
our Department is around £6 billion with a total benefit
spend of about £112 billion but, of course, the Department
does many, many things other than simply administer the benefits
system. I do not know if either of my colleagues has a more precise
figure to give you than that.
Mr Sharples: It would be just
under half of the Department's activity that is devoted to benefit
administration, so just under half of the £6 billion figure
that was just quoted.
Q77 Helen Goodman: Problems with
the benefits system are the number one issue that I get from my
constituents. The largest proportion of problems I face are problems
that people are having with the DWP. In particular, somebody came
to see me recently who had been turned down for a benefit to which
he was not entitled. A few weeks later he discovered that he was
however entitled to a different benefit, and he had not been advised
of this by DWP staff. Do you think that is reasonable?
Mr Lewis: No, absolutely not.
What we should be aiming for is to ensure that people receive
all the benefits to which they are entitled, and if we believe
that we are turning down someone who is applying for a benefit
to which they are not entitled but that there is an alternative
benefit to which they are, of course I want my staff to say, "No,
look, I'm awfully sorry. You're not entitled to this but I think
you may be entitled to that, so why don't you claim?"
Q78 Helen Goodman: I am very pleased
about that, because my constituent was told that it was his responsibility
to apply to another part of the Department of which he was not
even aware. Could I ask if you will consider changing the law
to give your staff a duty to advise and assist, which does not
exist at the moment, and which I think tends to encourage a rather
cat and mouse kind of game that goes on between clients and staff?
Mr Lewis: I would like to take
that away and consider it rather than to give you a simple, off-the-cuff
answer. There are two points I would like to make, without in
any way underestimating the force of what you say and your experience.
Of course, you do not hear in your surgery and I do not hear and
we do not hear about all the millions of occasions when people
do do precisely what you would like them to do, and that happens
on many occasions. The other thing I think it is reasonable to
say is: why are we discussing this this afternoon? Because the
benefits system is hugely complex. Our staff inevitably have a
reluctance to give advice on areas in which they feel they are
not expert, lest they feel that they may subsequently be thought
to have misled an individual.
Q79 Helen Goodman: I understand that,
Mr Lewis, but the point is that claimants are meant to know what
to claim for, and if your staff who are working on it full-time
cannot get to grips with it, it is rather unreasonable to expect
claimants to. I would like to move on to this issue about using
the telephone. You seem to be very enthusiastic about using the
telephone and I can see that using the telephone is a lot cheaper
for the Department. However, as is set out in one of the boxes
here, there are a number of people for whom using the telephone
is extremely difficult, people who cannot read or people who have
difficulty with manual dexterity; all sorts of people cannot do
that. Why is it that in County Durham there is only the possibility
now for face-to-face interviews on Job Seeker-related benefits?
For all pensions and retirement benefits, all sickness and disability
benefits, there is no possibility of any face-to-face discussion.
Mr Lewis: I do not want to question
the individual instance because I obviously do not know about
it but actually, that should not be the case. For example, the
Pension Service maintains a local service precisely so that those
pensioners who, for whatever reason, find it difficult or simply
do not want to deal through the telephone are able to request
that they meet someone either in one of our offices or actually
in their home, and that service should be available. So if you
have a specific instance where self-evidently it was not, I would
be happy to follow that up.
2 Note by witness: My answer was not right.
DWP sends out over 40 million computer generated letters each
year. The letters are automatically generated in response to contacts
with customers and the systems for producing and sending them
out are also automated. There is therefore no individual checking
by members of staff in this process. What is the case, however,
is that the accuracy of individual letters is checked wherever
the content of the letters change and also a periodic sample is
made to check their content. Back
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