UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 1034-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC ACCOUNTS

Wednesday 29 March 2006

 

deparment for work and pensions:

delivering effective services through contact centres

 

DEPARTMENT FOR WORK AND PENSIONS

MR LEIGH LEWIS CB,

JOBCENTRE PLUS

MS VAL GIBSON

THE PENSION SERVICE

MS JANET GROSSMAN

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 149

 

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

1.	This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.
2.	Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
3.	Members who receive this for the purpose of correcting questions addressed by them to witnesses are asked to send corrections to the Committee Assistant.
4.	Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.

 

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Committee of Public Accounts

on Wednesday 29 March 2006

Members present

Mr Edward Leigh, in the Chair

Mr Richard Bacon

Greg Clark

Mr David Curry

Helen Goodman

Mr Austin Mitchell

Mr Alan Williams

________________

Mr Tim Burr, Deputy Comptroller and Auditor General and Mr Jeremy Lonsdale, Audit Manager, National Audit Office, gave evidence.

 

Ms Marius Gallaher, Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, gave evidence.

 

REPORT BY THE COMPTROLLER AND AUDITOR GENERAL

 

DELIVERING EFFECTIVE SERVICES THROUGH CONTACT CENTRES (HC 941)

 

Examination of Witnesses

 

Witnesses: Mr Leigh Lewis, CB, Permanent Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions, Ms Val Gibson, Director of Contact Centres, Jobcentre Plus, and Ms Janet Grossman, The Pension Service, gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee of Public Accounts where today we are considering the National Audit Office Report on the Department for Work and Pensions, Delivering Effective Services Through Contact Centres. We welcome Mr Leigh Lewis, who is the Permanent Secretary for the Department of Work and Pensions. Would you like to introduce your colleagues, please.

Mr Lewis: Chairman, on my right is Janet Grossman, who is the centre operations Director for the Pension Service, and on my left is Val Gibson, who is the Director of Contact Centres for Jobcentre Plus.

Q2 Chairman: I would like to start by paying tribute to your staff who are working in the contact centres. I know that many are very highly committed and are doing an excellent job under difficult circumstances, but there are some problems which we want to explore this afternoon. I know there are anticipated efficiency savings. The reference is in paragraph 1.7 which you will find on page 16. Mr Lewis, I want to know how you can deliver them in the context of four different strategic plans, I think I am right in saying, 55 different phone numbers, a fluctuating number of centres and 21 million unanswered calls? You are obviously going to make efficiency savings, what is going to happen?

Mr Lewis: Chairman, thank you. We are, of course, making efficiency savings and they are significant and substantial. I think overall the performance of our contact centres, although there have been some problems as the Report brings out, has been improving steadily. So far this year in 2005-06 it has been on average and across the piece good.

Q3 Chairman: I am going to come back to that because I know the record in 2004-05 was poor and has improved. I will let you have a chance to go into how things are getting better, do not worry. That is your answer, is it? These plans for efficiency savings in the context of 21 million unanswered calls are not going to cause even more confusion and chaos?

Mr Lewis: No, I do not think they are, Chairman. In some of our contact centres we did have some significant problems last year and that is brought out in the Report. This year we have had just 3% of the 30 million calls blocked and almost 90% of our calls answered. As the Report brings out, we have got steadily improving performance across the great range of our contact centres.

Q4 Chairman: Let us look to the future for a minute and look, please, on page 25 at figure 12, which is how you are going to roll out your new IT, your equipment and your processes. How are you going to ensure that your equipment and your processes are not obsolete by the time you bring them in?

Mr Lewis: I think in many cases we have got a very good track record of that. For example, anyone going into one of our new Jobcentre Plus offices, and we have rolled out over 700 of those to time and budget, will see the job point terminals there which now hold details at any one time of nearly half a million job vacancies. That is one example and there are many other of IT programmes which have gone in to time and to budget. We do have, within the Department, very strong control procedures working to the board which look at all of our major IT developments and seek to ensure that they are proceeding as they should.

Q5 Chairman: Let us look at what was happening in 2004-05 at figure 25 on page 49. You will see that some performances are truly appalling. If you look at the bottom you will see that with the Disability and Carers Service nearly 80% of calls had to be abandoned. I know you have made some good progress on that, have you not?

Mr Lewis: Yes, we have.

Q6 Chairman: But how do we know the improvement you are going to tell me about now is not a blip because you are pretty vulnerable, are you not?

Mr Lewis: In a big organisation you are always vulnerable to blips, but I think the blip was last year and not this year. What we have done with the Disability and Carers Service is fundamentally re-engineered the system. We have brought in new telephony, we have updated our IT, but most importantly - and I have been to Walbrock House myself to see it - we now have a very substantial overflow system which means that we are not dependent simply any longer on those people whose job it is to answer calls on the DLA helpline all of the time. We have a very large number of staff who are there at times which are not peak times doing other work but who can be brought into the loop at any point where demand begins to rise. Through a system that everyone in that building calls turrets, which refers to the headsets they wear, they can be brought into that operation. That is one of the reasons why we are now answering well over 90% of the calls to that helpline.

Q7 Chairman: Let us look at flexitime now, your staff and how they work. This is mentioned in paragraph 19 of the executive summary on page five. The problem is that flexitime is not suitable in many cases, is it, because staff there work when they want to rather than when the public want to call them? Why have you made so little progress since we last reported on call centres in dealing with people working flexitime and therefore at unsuitable times?

Mr Lewis: I will put this in context and then let me take your question head-on. What, of course, we are doing in the Department is seeking to reduce our staffing overall very substantially by 30,000 over a three year period. That does mean that, quite rightly, we are seeking to relocate some staff from roles where we no longer need them into roles where we are expanding and that includes our contact centres. Those staff have existing terms and conditions which we have sought to honour, not least because we are rather proud of our family friendly policies and some of the flexible working patterns that we have. But we have been engaged in all of our contacts centres in a process of discussion with our staff and our trade unions to ensure that the patterns of work and the patterns that we operate are ones which are suited to the contact centre environment. In many ways, flexitime, as long as it is within some bounds, is an advantage to us because our contact centres have very large peaks of demand at different times in the day and at different times in the week.

Q8 Chairman: That is fine for the new contract and you can say, "The peaks are this and we want you to work at this time on Monday morning when people have come back after the weekend". The trouble is you have got a large number of people on old contracts and what worries me is we have looked at this already and there is not much point in us doing the work if the Department does not make any more progress?

Mr Lewis: I absolutely understand the point you are making, Chairman. I think we have been making real progress. In a number of places we have introduced new patterns of working. As you say, new staff are coming in on different contracts with review periods. It is a tribute to our staff in that they are remarkably flexible. Simply because they have flexitime arrangements does not mean that they operate them in an arbitrary way. Our staff care a great deal about their service to the customers, and we have an enormous amount of co-operation from our staff in adapting their flexitime to the needs of the centres and the customers.

Q9 Chairman: Will you look at the previous paragraph which talks about costing data. This is a baseline point and it is still very weak. Once again, you have highlighted this in the past and this is a problem which is apparently inherent in your Department, is it not? Of course, you will have read, with great interest, the speech I gave on the Budget yesterday, will you not, or have been briefed on it, as was the House, sitting breathlessly on my every word. Tell us something about your costing data.

Mr Lewis: I think our costing data is getting better, Chairman, I genuinely do. Forgive me, I have not read your words.

Q10 Chairman: Nobody else has either!

Mr Lewis: I will do so. You never have all of the data that you want, but we are getting better and better at having data not just in terms of the demand, but also increasingly we are getting cost per call minute data from more and more of our centres. We have a great deal of that in Jobcentre Plus. We have the balance scorecard, which is referred to several times in the Report which I have looked at myself, it is online which is giving us stronger management data than we have ever had before. There are still gaps, as this Report makes clear, but we are not operating in a data-free environment in any way.

Q11 Chairman: Let us look at ringing people back. If people ring you, presumably sometimes they will want to be phoned back. Shall we look at figure 29 on page 53:"The proportion of call backs completed within 24 hours has increased since Jobcentre Plus Direct started keeping records in August 2005". If we see your target, we would naturally assume that you would want to return 90% of the calls. You are way down below that. This could be crucial in the case of Jobcentre Plus. If you want to arrange an interview or something, you have got a pretty lamentable record. What is going on? How are you improving it?

Mr Lewis: My colleague, Val Gibson, may want to add to this. Chairman, there were some well documented problems in the summer of last year in terms of people making their first contact with Jobcentre Plus. The performance figures then, in terms of people having their calls answered and being rung back, were simply not good enough. We have said that very, very clearly and I say it again here today. The most recent figures -they are more recent inevitably than the ones in the Report here - show that in February, the last complete month, over 60% of call backs took place within 24 hours and over 90% took place within 48 hours. It is not that we are still where we would like to be. This situation, the problems we faced last summer, has been transformed out of all recognition.

Q12 Chairman: I think 3% of the nation's working population now work in contact centres, obviously mainly in the private sector. Does this Report not show that you are lagging far behind the private sector in the way you manage the contact centres.

Mr Lewis: No, I do not think it does. There are a number of instances in this Report which compare us directly with the private sector in terms of external benchmarks. We come out well overall against those benchmarks. Average cost per agent, we are as good as the industry's standard; turnover rates, we have lower turnover rates; the length of service of our staff is better than in the private sector and staff costs as a proportion of the total, we come in lower. I do not think this is one where the pubic sector is being shown to be languishing way behind the private sector norm. I think we are well up with it. What we want to do is to improve further.

Q13 Mr Mitchell: I wonder if you are not just lamely imitating the private sector, short of handling funerals and interments by call centres in Bangladesh and Bangalore if it could. Here you see the private sector shifting to call centres, particularly banks and building societies, which are absolutely infuriating to deal with, where you would never get an answer. Most of the people you talk to seem half-baked. The Department thinks "here is a marvellous way of saving money, let us have some call centres up in the North particularly where we can get low paid chaps and chapesses with nothing else to do and we can close down or contract most of the local offices".

Mr Lewis: It is simply not our policy to do that, Mr Mitchell.

Q14 Mr Mitchell: It was a way of economising, was it not?

Mr Lewis: No, it is not a way of economising. What we are trying to do in the Department is to offer - to use a slightly jargon-type word which I do not really like - different channels of communication to our customers. Let me give you a very good example of that. When I joined the Employment Service as its Chief Executive in 1997, the worst thing you could do was ring your local job centre, assuming you could find the telephone number, and ask if they could help you to find a job. What they would do is say, "You have to come into one of our offices and look at the cards on the board". If you now ring our Jobseeker Direct service, and a third of a million people have found jobs through that service, you can be helped through our full range of jobs on the phone or you can do that on the net or you most certainly can still come back into our offices, which are much more friendly places than ever they were, and use those job point terminals. What we are trying to do is offer our customers some real choice in many cases.

Q15 Mr Mitchell: Yes, but you have got so many agencies with so many functions and it is much more complicated. If I can get the number and I ring my bank's call centre and say, "Can I have loan?", and they say politely, "No", but yours is very different. A lot of it is very personal, and a lot of people want personal contact. Your aim seems to be that anything that does not demand face-to-face contact is going to go eventually through the call centres. Surely that means a massive contraction of your local offices?

Mr Lewis: Again, that is not our intention and I do not think it is what is happening. \if you look at Jobcentre Plus, we are offering far more and far better face-to-face services than ever we were through the New Deals, the New Deal for Lone Parents, and lots of other face-to-face services. The Pension Service, again - I have been out with colleagues from the Pension Service to meet pensioners in their own homes - offers that as an alternative. I do not want to just quote statistic after statistic, but the NAO's findings of what our customers who use our telephone service think of it are very encouraging indeed in terms of the quality of the service they think they are getting overall.

Q16 Mr Mitchell: As the Chairman said, the hours are convenient, but I am concerned about the number of functions the Department covers. I believe 55 separate numbers are far too many, is it not? Why can you not handle on initial contact all the basic simple things at the call centres and let the rest be handled by local offices?

Mr Lewis: What we are trying to do is to provide the service in a way which is most convenient for our customers. Of course, cost effectiveness is an example of that. It is not just the opening hours our customers thought were good, 97% felt the person they dealt with was polite, and 80% had their query resolved in one call. To give you one example again where I think we are offering something genuinely better through a contact centre, we are beginning to roll out in the Pension Service - and Janet Grossman can speak of that - the fact that as you come up to the state retirement age, in an increasing number of our centres you are now able to make one call in which you will have your state pension entitlement assessed over the telephone. At the end of the 20 or 25 minute call you can be told what entitlement you will get and a letter will go out confirming it. That replaces acres of form filling which you used to have to do.

Q17 Mr Mitchell:: Are you going to be able to get into a situation where you have got one number to ring and the answerers have one common system of information on the screen by them, as seems to happen, for instance, with the building society, and they can give you an answer straightaway, because 55 numbers is far too complex for a lot of people.

Mr Lewis: Certainly, we do not want to continue with 55 numbers. Can I put 55 numbers into context. If you sit in one part of the country, Manchester or Middlesbrough or wherever it is, you do not have 55 numbers because many of those numbers are the geographic numbers of your Jobcentre Plus call centre. For example, if you want to find a job, Jobseeker Direct on 08456060234, you can ring from anywhere in the country. We do want to make it simple and we do want to reduce the numbers, but one number, I think, is an unreal ambition. I do not think we will ever want to have one number which is the same for the employer wanting to give us a job vacancy or for the pensioner wanting to apply for pension credit, we do want some differentiation in this system, we have too much at the moment.

Q18 Mr Mitchell: Did you not rush into it a little too quickly in the sense that staff did not particularly want to do this work and did not join the Department to do call centre work which is fairly demanding? The turnover is high in most of the call centres I have heard about. It needs a more gentle - gentler than my questioning approach - rapport with people. They were not trained for that, therefore, since they were under-trained as well, compared with the private sector, the system got off to a bad start because you rushed into it too quickly.

Mr Lewis: I think there is always a trade-off, is there not, in seeking to deliver absolute perfection when you open up and a new service. There are lots of quotes in this Report - again, you do not have to search hard through the NAO's Report to find favourable quotes - in terms of the Department and the services that it is offering and it has opened up. What I think we have done over the last few years is we have revolutionalised the amount of choice, availability and service to our customers. In that process we have not got it all right. Going back, we would have tried to do some things better, we would not have gone through the problems that we experienced last summer in some of our centres, but I do not regret the fact that we have taken a series of decisions to seek hugely to expand the range of choice.

Q19 Mr Mitchell: Are the staff now happy?

Mr Lewis: I cannot sit hear and say that every one of our staff is happy because you will too easily find some that are not. It is interesting, you mentioned turnover, our turnover is less than the industry norm in our call centres and the NAO Report says that is because they think our staff are, in general, well motivated and satisfied. Of course, there will be exceptions to that.

Q20 Mr Mitchell: I have forgotten what the problem was, but there was certainly a problem in the Grimsby Job Centre. People had to ring Hull to register for unemployment benefit. They had to make the first call to the call centre. It is not only the alien act of ringing Hull, which is like asking people to ring Transylvania as far as Grimsby is concerned, but it was the fact that they could not get through, the phones were not answered. There must be occasions like that when you have got a particular problem in a local office when your call centre system gets jammed up?

Mr Lewis: I wonder if I can, at this point, pass over to Val Gibson because I think she may be able to say more about the specific problems because they did exist, you are absolutely right.

Q21 Mr Mitchell: I think I wrote to you about that.

Mr Lewis: Indeed, I think you did.

Ms Gibson: As Leigh said, there were some specific problems in our contact centres dealing with claims to benefits during last summer and they are acknowledged in the NAO Report. The Report also acknowledges the improvements that have been made since then. We have achieved our target of answering 90% of all calls every month from November on. We are answering them quickly because every month from December we have achieved our target, answering rate of 80% in 20 seconds. I think we are now on top of the problem. It was a very difficult summer for customers. We know that many tried and could not get through. We worked quickly to resolve that, and we worked quickly in collaboration with colleagues in job centres and benefit delivery sections so that we could make sure that the customers got the service they needed and got their benefit paid.

Q22 Mr Mitchell: I cannot say that I have received a lot of complaints from my constituents because I have not, in fact, except that people find it difficult getting through. More importantly, older people who do not have a portable telephone, and often do not have a telephone at home, do not know what to do when they are told they will be rung back. What do they do?

Mr Lewis: If someone really does not have a convenient telephone then we will always deal with them in one of our offices face-to-face. It is as simple as that.

Q23 Mr Bacon: Mr Leigh, how many local offices have closed?

Mr Lewis: We are going through a process which followed from the merger of the then Employment Service and the then Benefit Agency to form Jobcentre Plus, and we are reducing from - Val Gibson may have the specific figures - around 1,500 local offices to around 1000.

Q24 Mr Bacon: How many have closed so far, Ms Gibson?

Ms Gibson: I do not have the specific figures, but we can let you have them.

Q25 Mr Bacon: This is a radical change to the pattern of work in the Department and in job centres. I would imagine that knowing how many offices have closed hitherto is a pretty important thing to know.

Mr Lewis: We have opened now about 750 of the new style offices.

Q26 Mr Bacon: Do you mean 750 contact centres?

Mr Lewis: No. If your question is about contact centres, I cannot absolutely answer the question.

Q27 Mr Bacon: It is not. What I am trying to find out is how many local offices have closed, which neither of you seem to know. Ms Grossman, do you know?

Ms Grossman: The Pension Service came out of 450 offices but developed a local service capability. We visit over 800,000 pensioners in their own homes where it is most convenient to them but we did transition from 450 offices into 29 call centres to begin with.

Q28 Mr Bacon: Mr Leigh, is it possible that you could write to the Committee with a note both on the Pension Service and on Jobcentre Plus with how many local offices you had to start with, how many you are planning to close, how many you have closed so far and how many there are still left to close?

Mr Lewis: Most certainly. Can I make one point because it can sound as if we are cutting back hugely on the geographic scope. Often, what we have done is to close two offices almost literally where we had two offices on two different sides of the street and bring them into one.

Q29 Mr Bacon: I am sure you can put that in your note. If you would not mind saying where they are as well, including the ones you have not yet closed but are planning to close.

Mr Lewis: Most certainly.

Q30 Mr Bacon: You said, in relation to the Chairman's question about figure 25 on page 49, that the Disability and Carers Service was behind the others, but you have now fundamentally reengineered the system, and there is new telephony. I must say, when I looked at that graph, it really struck me that the grey bar for the Disability and Carers Service, that is to say the calls that were blocked or the customers heard an engaged tone, was nearly 80%, far, far poorer than the others for the most vulnerable group, the disabled and the carers. What was the telephone service you had before? What was the system you had before? If you had to get rid of them to put new telephony in, you had to get rid of them to fundamentally re-engineer.

Mr Lewis: It was an inadequate one, self-evidently.

Q31 Mr Bacon: Was it one that you had installed for the purpose which then turned out to be unsuitable so you scrapped it?

Mr Lewis: It is one that had been inherited. The Disability and Carers Service only came into existence as a separate business relatively recently. It inherited telephony which was quite clearly not fit-for-purpose. The actual figure, 77% of calls were blocked in 2004-05 to the DLA helpline and people rang many times and did not get through. That was completely unacceptable, just to be clear. The transformation which has been achieved is a remarkable one, but it is a shame and a great pity that the service was as poor as it was in 2004-05.

Q32 Mr Bacon: Paragraph 4.8 says that only some of the contact centres have useful messages for the customers waiting in a queue. It seems a fairly simple thing to make sure that your queuing system provides messages and yet only some do. Why is that? When are they all going to do that?

Mr Lewis: In general, it says if you look on the same page, 4.9: "All the automated systems used by the Department comply with good practice. In particular, they have short scripts and offer useful information to the caller".

Q33 Mr Bacon: Are you saying that they all provide useful messages?

Mr Lewis: No, I am not saying every single one.

Q34 Mr Bacon: With respect, my question was not about whether they all had short scripts or not, my question was why do they not all have useful messages for the customer.

Mr Lewis: Picking up what other colleagues have said, we try to avoid what one does find in many commercial centres, which is when the number is answered you then get a bewildering array of, "If your call is about X press button one" and 15 minutes later, "If your call is about something else, press button 92".

Q35 Mr Bacon: People have topped themselves while they were waiting!

Mr Lewis: Indeed. We do not use that. In general, we try and answer the phone when it rings. I think that is one of the reasons why the great majority of our customers say they find getting through to us easy and convenient.

Q36 Mr Bacon: You mentioned your comparison with the private sector being quite favourable. In paragraph 4.12 it says: "Each agency has internal targets to answer customers' telephone calls within 30 seconds". Later on in that paragraph it says: "Answering 80% per cent of calls in 20 seconds is the current call centre industry standard and the Department is considering whether to make this consistent across all agencies". You obviously have not done it yet. How far has your consideration reached and are you going to do it?

Mr Lewis: I would like to do it.

Q37 Mr Bacon: Is it a question of cost?

Mr Lewis: Yes, it is. Inevitably, before you take on a more demanding target you have to know that you have got the resource to be able to meet that target. I think our first priority, as my colleagues have said, is to try and ensure that we can hit our targets. Some of our businesses are already 80% within 20 seconds just to be clear, and others are 80% within 30 seconds. My priority is to get everyone meeting the current targets and then I would like to go further, but of course, there are resource considerations in that.

Q38 Mr Bacon: I would like to ask you about the cost of the calls because many of your customers, almost by definition most of them, are in frustrating circumstances, they are on low income. What would it cost to make all your calls free? Have you considered doing that?

Mr Lewis: Yes, we have. We do have some 0800 numbers. You will have seen that the Pension Credit application is an 0800 number. Almost all of our numbers are low cost calls, 0805, which are about three pence per minute. They are relatively low cost calls. If any of our customers tell us that the cost of the call, even at those charges, is prohibitive, then we will offer to ring them back. There are some real difficulties with having free cost calls because you do get an awful lot of what you might call nuisance calls made by people to 0800 numbers, so there are some balancing considerations. In general, there has been very little complaint or feedback from our customers about the cost of our 0845 calls.

Q39 Mr Bacon: Can I get you to turn your attention to page 52, paragraph 4.15. It talks about the "warm" phones that are connected to the contact centres which customers can use and are free. These are phones inside the Jobcentre Plus offices. I must say the first time I read this it looked slightly Kafkaesque that you go into what you think is the place you are going to get your service, where at least there still is a local office, and you are told to get on the phone to the contact centre. It also says that the customers do not use them because they do not like them because there is no privacy, which more or less destroys the point. First of all, would it not be very easy to create little booths which are soundproofed and there is a degree of privacy? Secondly, why on earth is this happening? Is it not slightly crazy that the staff in that local office are so unable to help you that the only thing they can tell the customer to do is "phone the contact centre"?

Mr Lewis: I think I am going to pass over to Val Gibson to take the specifics and, if I may, I will seek to add at the end to try and reach your general point.

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 ten 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. So far in 2005-06 we are at 80%, so we are hitting that target. My ambition is to hit it in every case.

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 survey.

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 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.

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.

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 great 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 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 ten, 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.

Q80 Mr Davidson: I understand that. Can I come to the question of reducing complexities. We have pursued this, and it is not addressed directly in here. I am wondering whether or not the changes that you have introduced and the way in which you have contacted people have led you to draw any particular conclusions about ways in which complexity could be reduced that perhaps were not being immediately obvious when you were operating a paper-based system. Are you seeing the same things again by using this system or is there something new that has been revealed to you?

Mr Lewis: I think what has been revealed to us is that well-trained staff with a good understanding of the system can help our customers navigate their way through a complex benefits system which is harder to navigate with the best written leaflets in the world and the best produced forms in the world. Human beings can help other human beings to navigate their way through a system, so I think we have learned that. There are inevitably some risks which can go with that which we have to guard against because the benefits system that we have, and which we have discussed in this Committee, is one that probably no single member of staff can ever understand the entire complexity of every benefit. Therefore we also have to be careful that our staff, in an effort to be helpful, do not unwittingly mislead our customers into, for example, thinking that they are not entitled to a benefit that they may be entitled to be delivered by another part of the business, for example. It is a trade-off but I have no doubt that well-trained staff operating sympathetically through our contact centres are helping many more people to get the benefits to which they are entitled.

Q81 Mr Davidson: Can I be clear then. Are you saying to us that perhaps we should not be as worried as we were before about complexity either deterring people or stopping them getting their way through the system because if you are operating this methodology then that does allow staff to take people through it and therefore the problem is perhaps not as difficult or as large as we thought it was, it is simply a question of now that we have discovered a new method of dealing with it, it drifts away or peels away?

Mr Lewis: No, I do not think I am saying that because, in a sense, what I am saying is this is a way of treating the symptom rather than the cause. I think we should go on being concerned, as this Committee has been, and as the NAO has been, about the complexity of the benefit system and seeking to reduce that complexity.

Q82 Mr Davidson: Fraud and error, in terms of cases dealt with by this system, is there evidence that fraud and error is reduced? I can understand why error due to complexity could be reduced but I can also understand that fraud might be increased because of the degree of anonymity and you cannot tell by somebody's eyes if they are lying to you and things like that. Do you have any feedback on that which you can help us with?

Mr Lewis: No, I have no feedback. I do not know the answer to your question to be straightforward about it. I am very willing to see if the Department does have any evidence which might suggest that there is an impact in that way. Certainly in terms of reducing what we call customer error where the customer gets it wrong but with absolutely no fraudulent intent, simply because they do not understand the system, then I think our contact centres should be helping. As I said to the Committee before, it is an absolute ambition of the Department to go on reducing. We have been very successful in reducing the levels of fraud, I now want us to be as successful in reducing the levels of customer and official error.

Q83 Mr Davidson: In terms of customer error, people are obviously, on occasions, going to forget a certain amount of personal data. I remember paying dearly for the fact that I could not remember how long I had been married recently. Do people who are dealing with these matters have access to the range of data you already have on clients and, if not, why not?

Mr Lewis: They do not and it is one of the things we are working on. They do not in every case have access to every piece of data that the whole of the DWP will hold on an individual because much though we would like it, our systems are not at the moment as joined up as in a perfect world they would be. Having said that, and again I have seen this myself in operation, they do have access to very large amounts of data. I have seen a call come in and someone telling me it is Mr Smith, and saying "Can you confirm your address to me, Mr Smith" and the address we hold for that person is on the screen. "Have you got your national insurance number", that is there, details of their last claim are on the screen immediately so we have lots of ability to corroborate.

Q84 Mr Davidson: We ought to expect a considerable decrease in errors and indeed in fraud in this system?

Mr Lewis: I do not want to over claim because the problem of fraud and error in a system with as many customers as we have is ---

Q85 Mr Davidson: You are always going to have it, but given what you are saying I would have thought that would allow quite a considerable reduction and we ought to be expecting that.

Mr Lewis: I am very much expecting and not simply expecting because expecting suggests that I am simply, as the Permanent Secretary, waiting in the hope that it will happen. One of the things, for example, that I said to the Committee that I was going to do, and I most certainly have done, is establish a task force in the Department specifically charged with reducing levels of customer and official error.

Q86 Mr Davidson: Can I ask about the question of contracting out. In terms of dealing with capacity overload and so on, you were contracting out a small amount of work. Are there any lessons that you have learned from that? Was it the same standard, the same quality, better, cheaper or worse?

Mr Lewis: In general, our contact centres are run by our own staff though often our providers will provide the infrastructure because that is normally provided by them. Almost all of our call centres are run by our own staff.

Q87 Mr Davidson: I know that but in chart 19 on page 36 "coping with peak flow", there is an element there of contracting out excess work. I wanted to clarify what the conclusion of that was. Is that something that you wish to seek to eradicate because it turned out to be more expensive with more errors, or was it much better than that? I want some sort of comparison.

Mr Lewis: I have not got that information if I am going to be straightforward. As you can see from this, it is a very small element, we have only used that in 3% or 4% of cases. I will seek to identify whether we have got any learning from that which will help to answer your question.

Q88 Mr Williams: I was interested in your answer to Helen Goodman on the disabled and if I understood it correctly you said you could not afford to provide a home visiting service because of the numbers involved, and I see there are four million of them. In that case, why do you provide it for pensioners when there are 11 million of them?

Mr Lewis: I think, inevitably, when you are running, be it in the public or the private sector, a very, very large customer service business, you are always balancing what you might like to be able to provide in a perfect world with what you are able to provide in the real world in which you are operating.

Q89 Mr Williams: I understand that but I am asking why have you decided that the disabled shall not have that capability or even the capability of going to the local centre?

Mr Lewis: We think that for our pensioner customers, many of whom are ---

Q90 Mr Williams: I am asking about the disabled.

Mr Lewis: I apologise because I am seeking to answer your question. We have had to prioritise where we put the capability to make home visits and at the moment ---

Q91 Mr Williams: You are saying they are not a priority?

Mr Lewis: --- we have given that priority to our pensioner customers because some of them are very elderly and inevitably find dealing with this in other ways very difficult.

Q92 Mr Williams: Some of the disabled are very ill. I find that a very strange priority. Everybody has priority over them.

Mr Lewis: Can I say one other thing which is very relevant to our customers and that is that we absolutely enable customers who have disabilities, which make dealing with this difficult, able to operate through representatives or other organisations. We go out of our way to accommodate that as a means of helping in those cases.

Q93 Mr Williams: Not only do you not provide them with the home visit that you provide for pensioners and you do not provide them with the local visit that you provide for pensioners, but you also provide this crappy telephone system where they only get 20% access in their attempts to contact you whereas the pensioners get 90%. Do not you think when you take that together, only 20% successful telephone contact and then the non-availability of local centres and home visits, that you could be seen as severely neglecting a certain group that are particularly in need?

Mr Lewis: The fact that last year 77% of people who attempted to ring the DLA helpline had their calls blocked was simply unacceptable. It was not an acceptable way to run that part of this Department's business.

Q94 Mr Williams: I am sure they are sorry about that and are glad to hear your apology but what are they to do in the meantime?

Mr Lewis: I gladly give it, if you see what I mean. What I would like to say is that we have worked extraordinarily hard to reverse and transform that situation, and we have reversed it and transformed it.

Q95 Mr Williams: Transformed it to what level now?

Mr Lewis: To the level where well over 90% of people are having their calls answered which is well above the target, the industry standard.

Q96 Mr Williams: That is a verifiable figure?

Mr Lewis: Yes, it is.

Q97 Mr Williams: What about the costs? From your point of view, are you making a saving switching? I assume this is the purpose of the call centre system. What savings do you make and how does that work out if there is such a figure for the customer?

Mr Lewis: We are making savings and indeed the NAO Report says that we are delivering improvements in value-for-money as a result of our contact centres and to quote, "We now have the potential to deliver more".

Q98 Mr Williams: How much?

Mr Lewis: With our contact centres we are saving very substantial amounts of public resources.

Q99 Mr Williams: Very substantial is fine, but how much?

Mr Lewis: There is not a single figure which says what our contact centres are contributing. We are, for example, reducing the total number of the Department's staff by 30,000 over a three-year period and dealing with our customers more efficiently through contact centres is one major part of our meeting our efficiency challenge.

Q100 Mr Williams: As long as they are not disabled?

Mr Lewis: But, and it is a point that I want to emphasise, it is also about offering our customers better service and the message of this Report is overwhelmingly that is what we are doing. We are offering the vast majority of our customers not only a service which is less costly to the taxpayer, but which is better and accessible to them.

Q101 Mr Williams: We have been making substantial savings, where is the figure? This is an accounting Committee, give us the figure?

Mr Lewis: I can certainly give you the figure. The NAO Report says that the average cost of dealing with a phone call is £3, the average cost of dealing with a letter that comes into one of our offices is £5. That gives you some indication of the scale.

Q102 Mr Williams: It does not always mean a telephone call would be a substitute for a letter, does it?

Mr Lewis: Indeed, it does not. To give you one other example, because I think we should be pleased and proud, if I may say so, of some of the savings we are making, 97% of our customers are now paid directly into their bank accounts and, as this Report says, our ability to effect that change through calling them on the telephone was a major way of reducing that.

Q103 Mr Williams: That is a different matter from what we are taking about, we are talking about the means of delivery here and I do not want you switching off onto other areas. I am dealing with costs at the moment. How far have your cost savings been achieved by transferring the cost to the customer? The customer now has to pay the cost of phone calls. A pensioner, for example, probably has a free bus pass or something like that, what are the costs to your customers of contacting you by phone, for example, not per minute but per item?

Mr Lewis: That inevitably does depend on the length of time the customer spends on the telephone.

Q104 Mr Williams: That is surprising, yes.

Mr Lewis: For our 0845 numbers, and that is the low-call service that we offer to the great majority of our customers, that is 3p per minute.

Q105 Mr Williams: I know it is 3p per minute. I can understand the argument for you offering a lower rate, but they are still paying for a phone call they were not paying for before and you do not know how many minutes they have to pay for or how many times they have to make it.

Mr Lewis: In some cases, we will sound as if, and perhaps we are, Mr Williams, having almost an altercation which I regret in this sense ---

Q106 Mr Williams: I think we are.

Mr Lewis: --- if you take another instance in order to find a job in the old style Employment Service ---

Q107 Mr Williams: I am sorry I am not talking about jobs I am talking about the cost to your average customer, for example, a disabled person, of having to contact you by phone because you are not willing to make any other means of contact available to them.

Mr Lewis: If a customer makes clear that the cost of the call, even on a local charge, is something which they have difficulty with, we will call them back in every case. If you would permit me to finish one point ---

Q108 Mr Williams: They phone you to tell you they cannot afford a phone bill.

Mr Lewis: Inevitably somebody has got to make the first phone call, otherwise we will not have any contact at all. In many cases, what we are able to do now is prevent people making long and expensive journeys into our offices which cost them vastly more. For example, a third of million people have found work through Jobseeker Direct for the price of a local phone call and that, it seems to me, is good value for us and for them.

Q109 Mr Williams: I am sure it is good value. I am not looking at that, I am trying to look at the area where I am particularly concerned about, the most vulnerable people who are absolutely dependent on your services. You cannot, as yet, show me that you are not imposing a cost on the disabled but that you are supplying them with a vastly inferior service.

Mr Lewis: In some cases, of course, we use totally free numbers, 0800 numbers. In every other case, bar people calling us from abroad in some very unusual circumstances, we use low cost call numbers and in every case if an individual when we answer the phone says "I am worried about the cost of this call", we will call them back. I am not sure with the best will in the world I can help much more than that.

Q110 Mr Williams: My final point, coming back to the question of how much you are saving, you said £3 for dealing with a case by phone as compared with £5 by letter. What about the gross saving coming back to that? What is the financial evidence of the precise benefits of the changes you have made?

Mr Lewis: What I will do is I will write to the Committee and give them details of our overall financial envelope in which we are operating ---

Q111 Mr Williams: You came here to an accounting committee where we talk about money and you do not have with you the information to answer the most basic and simple thing: how much is it costing and how much was it costing. That should be straightforward, should it not?

Mr Lewis: Be that as it may, I will write to you with that information. I have all the costs in front of me of our call centre operation. I think it is virtually impossible to disaggregate that completely from the Department's total budget but I will make the best effort that I can to provide the Committee with that information.

Mr Williams: We will look forward to it.

Chairman: You have sparked some interest because all of my colleagues have supplementary questions. Mr Mitchell?

Q112 Mr Mitchell: I trust you have the information on housing benefit. Is that housing benefit for council tenants which is verified by the ODPM as well?

Mr Lewis: Perhaps Janet Grossman might talk about that because one of the things that we have done is enabled pensioners in particular to apply for both Pension Credit and housing benefit in one phone call.

Q113 Mr Mitchell: Both housing benefits, not only in the private sector?

Ms Grossman: If a pensioner is entitled to housing council tax benefit, we have done an outreach programme in conjunction with the local authorities to make sure that they are getting the benefits that they are entitled to. It has been highly successful and we are able to do that in one call and also passport them to their benefits.

Q114 Mr Mitchell: Are they giving any running total as to what it has cost them so far as they yammer on?

Mr Lewis: Sorry, can you just help me with the question?

Q115 Mr Mitchell: I have got a complex query and I talk for an hour. Am I told at the half hour point, "Well that is 90p", if it is 90p. Are they given any indication of what the call is costing?

Mr Lewis: I do not think that they normally are. Janet, can you help me on that?

Ms Grossman: We publicise our numbers and those rates are established nationally but we do not, it is fair to say, pre-describe how much it is costing.

Q116 Mr Mitchell: I know you get more calls in Yorkshire than in the South. What information does an operator have on a screen beside them? When I went into the Halifax Building Society, I was horrified by the fact that a pretend call from me brought up all sorts information, some of it derogatory flashed up on the screen, like having missed two payments and having asked for a mortgage increase which had been refused. What information does the operator have in these cases?

Mr Lewis: Generally quite a lot of information in the sense that normally for the benefits which they are dealing with, they will have our history of dealing with that individual. They will have the payment history for our interaction, our dealings with that customer.

Q117 Mr Mitchell: The Report gets a bit mystical when it talks about the eventual staffing reductions but the union is clearly worried that there are going to be substantial job losses. I do not know whether you have had any agreement on the level of staff losses you are expecting or aiming at but when it says that staff reductions are to be seen in a wider context of the largest public sector organisation in the country and the IT has to be reviewed as one of the largest change programmes in Europe I begin to get a bit suspicious. Either that distinction is quite wrong or you are expecting some massive outcome. Have you an agreed outcome with the unions?

Mr Lewis: It would be wrong to say because I am sure if our trade union colleagues were here they would most certainly say that the outcomes are not agreed with them but we have very public targets set by the Government for both the overall level of financial savings in the Department and a reduction in our headcount of 30,000.

Q118 Mr Mitchell: You are only saying that to try and blame me, are not you?

Mr Lewis: No, I am not seeking to blame anyone. That is simply the case now.

Q119 Mr Bacon: Mr Lewis, I would like to return to this question of the delay in payment because there is a delay in returning the call which means there is a delay in the interview. Mr Clark explored this question to some extent. The Report says that the interview will usually take place with Jobcentre Plus within four working days, but in practice, the NAO found that the researchers said for some customers the delay from the initial call until they receive their first payment of benefit can be a matter of weeks. Can you say how many customers have had to apply for social fund crisis loans because of delays in organising an interview?

Ms Gibson: No, I do not have that information available to me.

Q120 Mr Bacon: You do not know how many social fund crisis loans are made?

Ms Gibson: The information is available and we can let you have that very quickly.

Q121 Mr Bacon: If you could write to us with that, we would be grateful. My second issue is about staff-training. It has prompted us to look over the nature of your training. I was surprised to hear my local Citizens Advice Bureau telling me not only that the DWP locally will refer people to the CAB as far as the question of telling the DWP offers the jobcentre cannot but also a common complaint when you phone up or when you are in the jobcentre is they will say, "the person who deals with that is not here today, I only deal with disability living allowance or Jobseekers Allowance, I do not deal with income support, the income support person has to deal with that." The way apparently the training works is in 13 modules you do income support and nothing but income support and you know an awful lot about that but nothing about the others. In addition to having a high level of competence in each of these areas, would it not be sensible for all of your staff to start with a module that explains, in overall terms, the range of benefits so that they at least know something about Jobseekers Allowance, Income Support, disability living allowance, Housing Benefit and so on before they go on to getting greater expertise.

Mr Lewis: I think this illustrates one of the genuine dilemmas we face. The Report by the NAO on the complexity of the benefit system makes clear that we have a hugely complex benefit system, many different benefits and even within those individual benefits there are often very, very complex rules. You have a choice as an employer, either you try and give your employees a little knowledge about a very large number of things or you try and give them a lot of knowledge about a small number of things. In general, we veer towards the second of those because we do not want to give misleading or wrong information. What we try and do is ensure that our staff can signpost people to the sources of information where they do not have that themselves. I worry, as the Department's accounting officer, if we had a lot of staff with a little knowledge, the famous quotation, I think it can be a dangerous thing.

Q122 Mr Bacon: Do you ever worry as the accounting officer, and I asked Sir Richard Mottram this question, that the nature of the benefits system is itself so complex that it makes it nearly impossible for you to do your job as accounting officer? I am thinking particularly, for example, of housing benefit which is administered with varying degrees of success around the country because local authorities do have varying degrees of success going from the very good to the appalling. The design of the system - this is where we as a Committee come up against the membrane of the policy but we do not know - inhibits your ability to account for the use of public money effectively, efficiently and economically.

Mr Lewis: There is no doubt that one of the reasons why there is error in the system is the complexity of that system. Both our staff make errors and our customers make errors and if the system was simpler we would make fewer errors. We have done a lot, as I explained to the Committee I hope at my last appearance before it, to make the system simpler but the Iron Law in general tends to be that simpler benefits are more expensive benefits because they are less differentiated and that is the dilemma that all governments of all colours struggle with.

Q123 Greg Clark: We have been concerned about the performance of the Disability and Carers Service with all of these blocked calls and you assured us that the performance had improved recently, hence the Report indeed talks about a renewed emphasis on customer service. "Renewed" seems a strange word. The Report also makes clear at figure 27 page 51, that as the helpline has improved in terms of accessibility, the Benefit Enquiry Line has got worse?

Mr Lewis: Yes, it has,

Q124 Greg Clark: Why?

Mr Lewis: Partly because with the Benefit Enquiry Line, which is a very general service, in a sense, there was a conscious decision taken by the senior management of the Disability and Carers Service to concentrate on improving the Disability and Carers helpline, the one that was in the most difficulty.

Q125 Greg Clark: It is a matter of policy that the Benefit Enquiry Line should deteriorate?

Mr Lewis: It was a matter of judgment that senior management had to prioritise where they wanted to effect the biggest improvement most quickly. I can tell you, because those figures for the Benefit Enquiry Line are again simply not good enough, I make no pretence about that, they have now improved dramatically without any corresponding deterioration in the Disability and Carers helpline. In the most recent month, for example, February, 85.3% of calls were answered. There has been a dramatic improvement in the performance of that particular helpline. It is a good example, I think, that the price of delivering improved service is a constant vigilance and I am absolutely determined that we are not going to see a repeat of some of the problems that we suffered last year.

Q126 Mr Davidson: Can I turn to the section on page 57 about third parties reporting the difficulties in representing customers' interests. I have got quite a number of centres in my area, CABs, legal centres and so on and so forth. They frequently deal with the least competent people, those with the most chaotic lives who cannot do the things that you and I would find pretty straightforward to deal with. Therefore, I am a bit alarmed that this seems to be one of the areas where not as much progress as perhaps should be being made is being made. In particular, the bottom of paragraph 4.29 where it says, "...one Jobcentre Plus contact centre said it would not deal with intermediaries at all." There is an issue there I would have thought.

Mr Lewis: Yes there is, and I have asked for information about that because when I read that sentence I too was alarmed. There are two possible explanations, one is they did not quite understand the question that they got from the National Audit Office ---

Q127 Mr Davidson: That is reassuring.

Mr Lewis: --- or simply that they are out of order because the answer that they gave that they would not deal with intermediaries at all, if indeed that is their policy, is plain wrong and we have taken steps to rearrange this.

Q128 Mr Davidson: I must confess that I would have thought one of your staff would have checked that for you before you came to the meeting here today. Can I go on to paragraph 4.30 where there seems to be the issue again of " ... requirements and systems are not consistent..." That seems to be a worry as well, does it not?

Mr Lewis: Yes, we do put out a lot of guidance to try and ensure that our staff do understand the position which applies both when we are dealing with formal representatives where an individual has asked someone else to act for them or representative organisations.

Q129 Mr Davidson: If you are putting out lots of guidance, there presumably should not be a lack of consistency?

Mr Lewis: No, there should not but, again, and this is a reality of dealing with very, very large dispersed organisations ---

Q130 Mr Davidson: I understand that. If your own staff cannot understand your own guidance, what hope is there for humanity in a sense. You are meant to be publicising things to people to make it comprehensible and your own staff cannot understand the guidance you are giving them on issues of access.

Mr Lewis: It is either that they do not understand or they have not received, I am not following. I accept your point.

Q131 Mr Davidson: That is even less reassuring.

Mr Lewis: It is absolutely our responsibility as the senior management to try and ensure that all of our officers and all of our staff are following guidance. When you have, as I do, 115,000 staff in over 1,000 offices, it is hard to get absolute consistency.

Q132 Mr Davidson: I would accept that. However, I did get the impression from reading this that this was more than one member of staff out of however many zillion you have. I get the impression that it is more of a widespread issue. In 4.31 it has got the bit there about " ... some intermediaries report repeated problems..." Is there a dialogue between yourselves and, say, organisations like CAB, Money Matters and legal centres? Presumably these questions must constantly come up from them to you. Why then have they not been resolved?

Mr Lewis: First of all, just to reassure you there is a very substantial dialogue between us and a whole set of intermediary organisations including, in particular, the Citizens Advice Bureau and, indeed, we are seeking to offer a secondment opportunity into the taskforce that is seeking to reduce error and simplify the benefits system to the CAB. We work very co-operatively together both at local level and nationally, and we are continually seeking to ensure that our contacts with the CAB and other intermediary organisations are as good and as effective as they can be.

Q133 Mr Davidson: Why are they still complaining?

Mr Lewis: We live in an imperfect world in which we operate through many thousands of human beings in many thousands of locations every day and getting perfection is hard but that does not absolve us from the responsibility of trying to do our very best.

Q134 Mr Davidson: The final point I want to raise, the final clause of paragraph 4.31 says, " ... further simplification is not possible if it is to protect customer information." It implies that you have reached a state of perfection beyond which it is not possible to go. I would be interested to hear whether or not these groups with whom you have a close relationship accept that. In my office I have the same sort of issues sometimes with government departments but very often some relatively simple security steps, such as phoning them back, can provide reassurance. This is one of the most worrying elements for me given the nature of so many of my constituents.

Mr Lewis: We face a dilemma in the sense that we are subject to two competing pressures and we were trying to get both of them right every day. One of them is to hold information about our customers securely, because it is very private information, and not to allow that to get into the wrong hands. That is a major obligation on us. The second is to help our customers, and those who they are asking to help them and represent them, to be able to access our systems and get support from us. It is hard to get those two perfectly in balance and sometimes we are equally criticised when information is released about a customer and it transpires that that customer had not authorised the release of that information. That is why we try and operate the procedure.

Q135 Mr Davidson: Can I ask the National Audit Office whether or not they came across any example of that?

Mr Lonsdale: Of information being released?

Q136 Mr Davidson: Yes, anybody complaining?

Mr Lonsdale: Certainly not in this study but it is an issue and there is a serious problem with information being released to people that do not have the right to it. It was not something that we picked up.

Q137 Mr Davidson: It did not come up in this at all?

Mr Lonsdale: Not that I recall but it is an issue we know about.

Q138 Mr Williams: Just following on from what Ian asked earlier, the one Jobcentre Plus contact centre that said it would not deal with intermediaries at all, you immediately gave a very clear indication that they were wrong. What did you do about it?

Mr Lewis: My understanding is - but if I am wrong I will correct this answer because I do not want to mislead this Committee - with the National Audit Office we have taken steps to identify that office and make sure they are operating correctly. If I am wrong about that I will let you know.

Q139 Mr Williams: Did you not think we might ask about that? You said immediately I saw it I said to myself that was wrong. If it was me coming here and knowing what this place can be like, I would be inclined to say who is it and they must be told tomorrow to stop it because when was this Report actually prepared seemingly?

Mr Lonsdale: The information was finally approved at the end of February. This reference relates to a survey that we undertook in the autumn and we can definitely, with the Department, identify straightaway who gave this response.

Q140 Mr Williams: Has the Department asked you?

Mr Lonsdale: The Department has the data.

Q141 Mr Williams: It has the data?

Mr Lonsdale: In the course of discussing the Report ---

Q142 Mr Williams: You do not know whether you have been in touch with them to tell them they have got to stop?

Mr Lewis: I believe we have but I do not want to mislead this Committee, that is something I would very strenuously seek to avoid.

Q143 Mr Williams: Do you remember which centre it was?

Mr Lonsdale: We have not got it here, but we can provide it straightaway.

Q144 Mr Williams: If you can let us have the list. Then the 12% who did not answer, that is even more puzzling because it could well be that the one is not the only villain and the others decide to keep their heads down and say nothing. Has anybody identified the 12 who did not reply and what has been done about those? Is any attempt being made now to get them to provide the information?

Mr Lewis: I have not done that, just to be clear. This was a survey which the NAO carried out but I have not done that.

Mr Lonsdale: I was going to say we can also provide the list of those.

Q145 Mr Williams: Will you let us have a list of those bodies. Some Members may want to follow up if they happen to be in their constituency areas and I am sure, Mr Lewis, you will want to follow up and make sure that they are not hiding anything.

Mr Lewis: Indeed.

Q146 Helen Goodman: Mr Williams asked you earlier about the cost of the current scheme to the claimant. You know the average cost of the calls; you know the average length of the call costs and you know the average number of calls made for the different categories of claimants. I wonder, therefore, if you could give us a rough average estimate of the costs falling on people in the disability and carers category and pensioners?

Mr Lewis: I cannot do that now but I have offered to write to the Committee to give you our best estimates of the economies that we have made through the moved contact centres. I will attempt to give that information to you at the same time.

Q147 Chairman: You were telling us a moment ago about the 115,000 people who you employ. The trouble is that large numbers of them are not delivering money to the deserving, they are dealing with the complexity of the system. This was taken up by a recent report by the Work and Pensions Committee, our sister committee, on efficiency savings and Jobcentre Plus. It refers on page 27 to this Committee and to what Sir Richard Mottram, your predecessor says, "if you want an honest discussion, it is a reality official errors have gone up because of organisational share." For instance, when you brought in your customer management service system you did not have enough people trained to deal with it, did you? This is mentioned in paragraph 12. Do you want to say anything about what Sir Richard said, to make it clear to us that you are getting a grip on this Department?

Mr Lewis: In that same Report there are some quotes that I made personally to the Work and Pensions Select Committee and I would prefer to rest on what I said.

Q148 Chairman: We will leave it at that. Ms Grossman, this is a sort of overview, you have obviously come from the private sector and you have had 20 years experience in this call centre world. It seems that you are perhaps the face of the new Civil Service, people who are experts in project management rather than giving intelligent answers of why things have gone wrong. Give us your overview of the difference between the public and the private sector and what the public sector can learn from the private sector in the call centre world?

Ms Grossman: In the private sector you have a lot more leeway in terms of the mix of staff that you employ and the mix of staff you can employ. We have taken a very established workforce and supplemented that with people we have hired with specific skills. As a fair employer with family-friendly policies - that I always did not have to follow in the private sector - that makes it a challenge. However, in the public sector, I have found the commitment of staff to be head and shoulders above what I ever experienced in the private sector. There is more loyalty to customer service, they are here for the right reasons and I think our turnover demonstrates that. In terms of the pace of change, I think because of the size of Government that does pose some risk. However, the way we manage that risk in terms of manageable chunks of risk, consistent approaches and processes and learning from one another is the secret to success. I think the more we collaborate on what is working in the Department, the more we can prevent things that are in trouble.

Q149 Chairman: Thank you. I think that is a very good point to stop. Thank you, Mr Lewis, for what you told us this afternoon. You said that the majority are satisfied with the service but you recognise with 40 million callers that still leaves ten of thousands of people who receive inadequate service, so you can expect a very hard-hitting report.

Mr Lewis: Can I say one last thing. Inevitably your questions and the Committee's questions rightly have focused on areas where we are not performing satisfactorily, have not, and I have been very clear that I accept, and the Department accepts, responsibility. This Report, however, is fundamentally a positive Report. It says, "The implementation of contact centres has already achieved cost savings, more are expected to follow. The vast majority of customers report that the service is delivered by a polite agent within a reasonable time and the follow-up services are good." This is a success story in Government.

Chairman: You have had the last word. Well done.