Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80
- 99)
WEDNESDAY 7 DECEMBER 2005
DEPARTMENT FOR
WORK AND
PENSIONS
Q80 Helen Goodman: I might need to
write to you about that because it is not evident to me, to my
Citizens' Advice Bureau or to any of my claimants where people
are to go to get face-to-face contact on any benefits other than
Job Seeker ones and I think that lack of communication is quite
a serious problem.
Mr Sharples: I just wonder if
I could pick up on what you said at the beginning of your question,
which suggested that the telephone-based approach was driven by
a desire to make savings. I think that it is easy to underestimate
just how significant the change is that we have made in the benefit
application process. In the old days claimants would have to fill
in themselves quite a complex form, maybe 30-40 pages long. If
they are lucky, they might get some help in doing that. Now the
claim for pensions benefits and for working age benefits is completed
over the telephone by being prompted with questions from an experienced
operator on the telephone, who will complete the form for you,
then send you the form; all you have to do is check it, sign it.
You then get a further stage of help because—
Q81 Helen Goodman: Sorry. Which benefit
are you talking about?
Mr Sharples: I am talking about
the retirement pension, about Pension Credit and about the benefits
that Jobcentre Plus administers, including Housing Benefit, where
they will collect the information on your behalf and forward it
to the local authority. The point is that the new approach, the
new standard operating model, has a lot of help for people built
in. It is a much smoother process to operate and you get a chance
to talk to a financial assessor in the Jobcentre Plus office face
to face who will help deal with any queries that you have.
Q82 Helen Goodman: I have to tell
you that my local CAB say that filling in a Disability Living
Allowance needs their support and it always takes an hour and
three-quarters, so that is simply not the experience that my constituents
are facing on a regular basis.
Mr Sharples: You have picked on
the one area which is both more complex and also still paper-based,
Disability Living Allowance and the other related benefits still
have to be completed on paper. They are particularly complex benefits
because of the link between the payment of benefits and the assessment
of the way someone's disability affects their personal needs and
requirements. There is an element here which inevitably requires
more detailed submission from the customer.
Mr Lewis: Can I just pick up a
point on that, because one of the things I have just managed to
see for myself, I took myself to both Manchester and Blackpool
to see the disability and carer service in operation, including
the process of claiming DLA.
Q83 Helen Goodman: Could I cut you
short there, please, because I am time-limited and there are some
more questions I want to ask?
Mr Lewis: Half a sentence. I saw
some really interesting developments going on there which are
designed to do precisely what you would like to happen.
Q84 Helen Goodman: Good. Thank you
very much. Mr Sharples, you said in your opening remarks at the
beginning of the session that there was a Regulatory Impact Assessment
on all new regulations.
Mr Sharples: What I said was there
is a Regulatory Impact Assessment for new primary legislation
and for those regulations which have a regulatory impact, so,
for example, the Disability Discrimination Act last year had a
Regulatory Impact Assessment, and there were quite a large number
of regulations that followed from that. Those regulations had
a Regulatory Impact Assessment done.
Q85 Helen Goodman: As it happens,
before I came to this session, I was in a Statutory Instrument
session and we were looking at the Job Seeker's Allowance, Job
Seeker Mandatory Activity Pilot Regulations 2005, and the Opposition
spokesman asked for the Regulatory Impact Assessment and we were
told by the Minister that this was not done unless the regulations
impacted on the private sector. So if the regulations are simply
impacting on other parts of the benefits system and clients, it
appears that a Regulatory Impact Assessment is not being done.
Would you consider extending the number of Regulatory Impact Assessments
that you do to cover those groups which are really the groups
that matter for DWP?
Mr Sharples: I think this is a
very interesting point and I think it comes back to the discussion
we were having earlier about the way one challenges the impact
of any new proposal on the complexity of the system. As we were
saying earlier, we want to strengthen that challenge, and perhaps
that is an idea that we can take away and consider in the course
of the assessment.
Q86 Kitty Ussher: When I was reading
this Report, it reminded me of the conversations and policy that
we have around a totally different part of government, namely,
as Helen Goodman just alluded to, the effect on companies of government
activity. It reminded me of the rather "stuck-record"
debate I feel we often have where some people say, "Oh, there
is too much regulation for business, there is too much burden
on business," and then when the other side says, "Which
one would you scrap?" it is actually quite difficult to come
up with one. The conclusion that I have drawn from my experience
in that area of policy is that what we should always have is a
countervailing pressure, so there should always be a cross-departmental
team looking at burdens on business, we should always have Regulatory
Impact Assessments, and there should always be teams within departments
thinking about whether there is a smarter way we can do something.
Do you think that that analogy entirely works in your area of
benefits complexity?
Mr Lewis: I think it works pretty
well actually, and I thought, coming to this as a newcomer, one
of the great strengths of the NAO Report was that it does not
pretend that there is some magic wand here that can just be waved
and we will be in a great Nirvana, if you see what I mean. There
are lots and lots of countervailing pressures in the system, but
I do think—and this is really to agree with your question—that
in the past we have not put in a sufficient counterweight perhaps
to emphasize the issue of complexity, the need both to avoid it
when we are doing something new and the need to go on trying to
reduce it in terms of what we already have. As I have already
said this afternoon, I intend to introduce a greater counterweight
into the system.
Q87 Kitty Ussher: This is your new
team?
Mr Lewis: The simplification unit,
I have called it.
Q88 Kitty Ussher: Could you give
us a little more detail on that perhaps? Can you say how often
it will meet, what rank of civil servants, what will its task
be, who does it report to, is there a Minister involved, etc?
Mr Lewis: I can certainly give
you some of that. It is going to be quite small. It is going to
be full-time. I have in mind a unit of three or four people. It
is going to sit in Mr O'Gorman's division, and I am going to give
it a direct line of reporting straight to Adam Sharples and straight
to one of our Ministers so that it is not going to be buried away
somewhere in the bowels of the organisation.
Q89 Kitty Ussher: So one of the Junior
Ministers in DWP will have it as part of their responsibilities?
Mr Lewis: Yes.
Q90 Kitty Ussher: Can you say which
Minister that will be?
Mr Lewis: No. I would like to
obviously just have a bit of latitude to think where that best
fits in because I do want it to be a unit which covers the whole
of the DWP's benefit horizon, not just working age, not just for
pensions, for example.
Q91 Kitty Ussher: Will it report
to the Secretary of State?
Mr Lewis: Everything in the end
reports to the Secretary of State. It goes without saying, but
I think it would probably be right, because of the huge demands
on the Secretary of State's time, that a Junior Minister take
more direct responsibility for it.
Q92 Kitty Ussher: Is there an evidence
base that that new unit will be able to draw on in terms of perhaps
customer satisfaction surveys, mystery shopper reports? Can you
explain what type of work you do?
Mr Lewis: We do actually measure
customer satisfaction very widely within the system, and it is
a point that has come out this afternoon that we do not, of course,
tend to hear, understandably—you do occasionally get some
really nice letters and they cheer you up, particularly on a bad
day. Nevertheless, we do not tend to hear from the people who
are satisfied, but our most recent survey for 2004 showed 86%
of Jobcentre Plus customers satisfied with the overall level of
service. That is up from 82% the year before. The Pension Service,
84% of its customers satisfied overall, up from 80% two years
ago. So, we have quite high levels of satisfaction, but I want
that unit to take all the information that we have as a baseline
and then to rise to the challenge of whether we could do better.
Q93 Kitty Ussher: Do you think customer
satisfaction surveys could be part of the metric that Mr Clark
was talking about as a way of quantifying complexity?
Mr Lewis: Yes, I do. I think it
is terribly important, not just for this reason; there are other
elements that go into customer service. You can simplify the system
but you can still treat people awfully, if you see what I mean,
and I think we have to see customer service in the round, but
I do think it is a terribly important measure for us.
Q94 Kitty Ussher: Running through
the Report, without being specifically quantified is this kind
of feeling that if the benefits system was so complex, then staff
must by definition be confused. Do you have any evidence of staff
being confused when they are doing their job?
Mr Lewis: I quoted a figure before
that about two-thirds of our staff feel that they do have the
training and knowledge that they need to operate the system effectively.
Inevitably, that means that there are quite a number who do not
feel that, and I think we have to get better. We have to get better
at helping our staff. It is a complex system to administer. We
cannot expect every individual one of our 116,000 staff to carry
in their heads every single piece of complexity for the entire
benefits system. It would be Herculean and impossible. So we have
to get better at giving people access and channels through the
guidance, and I think we are doing better on that, help lines
that they themselves can go to as well as our customers when they
are faced with a particularly difficult instance and they are
struggling. I had a very good example of that. I was listening
to a call coming in from a member of the public, who began to
raise some very complex issues, and I was thinking, "Heavens!
How is my colleague going to deal with this?" and what he
did, rather professionally, was to say, "I'd like to bring
another colleague into this call who understands this better,
if you would hang on," and I thought that was a very professional
way of handling it.
Q95 Kitty Ussher: Extremely good.
We talked earlier in this session about the amount of errors that
unfortunately do take place. How direct is the link between error
and the complexity of the system? It seems to me errors can occur
for a number of other reasons as well: lack of motivation, bad
management and so on. Do you have any comment on that?
Mr Lewis: Not all error is down
to complexity. Quite clearly, people can make error in other ways.
You can simply add up numbers wrongly, you can not do something
which self-evidently you should have done and so on and so forth,
but I do not want for one moment to suggest that there is no link
between complexity and error. The more complex the system is,
the easier it is both for our staff and our customers to fall
into error unwittingly.
Q96 Kitty Ussher: To what extent
will your new unit in the Department be actually taking the experiences
of front-line staff when they consider their work?
Mr Lewis: I am a great believer
in our staff in our corporate head offices getting out, hearing
the experience of our staff at the front line. It is something
I do myself and which I have always done and I think it is hugely
valuable. When you go out, you always come back having learned
something, and I want them to do that.
Q97 Kitty Ussher: Excellent. You
will be glad to know that I have actually done it as well. I have
a Pension Centre just a stone's throw from my constituency at
Burnley. It is actually in Ribble Valley. It employs a large number
of my constituents and it deals with the claims of a large number
of my constituents. I have seen the neon board with how many people
waiting and I have to say, my expectations were medium, and it
completely surpassed them. I was incredibly impressed.
Mr Lewis: Thank you.
Q98 Kitty Ussher: Particularly impressive
was the ability to forecast the demand of calls based on things
that had been in the newspaper, based on what had happened in
previous weeks and previous years, and I think possibly, to answer
part of Helen Goodman's question, the staff were able to be deployed
from other parts of the service, often on a half-hourly basis,
or perhaps for a whole day, to meet that kind of demand. One thing
I found particularly interesting was the way that the service
was using information from other parts of government to check
for fraud and also, to a certain extent, to pre-populate the electronic
forms that were then being sent out. I wonder if you could comment
a bit on this. Has it proved effective? What are the limitations
in terms of data protection? Obviously criminal records and doctors'
records and that sort of thing cannot be accessed. Is there greater
potential to simplify from the customer's point of view by actually
using databases in other parts of government?
Mr Lewis: We are doing much more
of this, and although inevitably there are serious and proper
data protection considerations, actually, they do not constrain
as much as sometimes people imagine. We are working ever more
closely with local authorities, with HM Revenue and Customs, and
we are providing more of our data online to local authorities,
to other organisations like the court service, so that, where
there is a clear and sound operational need for it, people can
identify the data that we have against the data that they are
receiving, and undoubtedly that is a very fruitful way of reducing
levels of error.
Q99 Kitty Ussher: You mentioned earlier
that you had been quite successful in reducing fraud. Could you
give us some examples of that and perhaps quantify it, and say
whether this new way of working electronically has actually had
an impact?
Mr Lewis: Yes, I can. If you take
the overall levels of fraud in the system, we think that fraud
overall accounts for about 0.8% of benefit expenditure. That is
about £0.9 billion in the most recent year, 2004-05, but
if you take the benefits where we have a time series, where we
have been regularly able to monitor fraud, and that is particularly
in relation to Income Support, JSA, Pension Credit, we have come
down from 1997-98 where fraud stood at about 5.9% of expenditure
on those benefits, to the position in the most recent year for
which we have information, 2003-04, where it is down to 2.6%.
So we have seen some very substantial reductions in fraud in the
system.
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