Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2005
MS LESLEY
STRATHIE, MR
KEVIN BONE
AND MR
MATTHEW NICHOLAS
Q40 Justine Greening: In terms of
the qualitative side of your training—you said that what
you found is that people's experience in terms of what they needed
to deliver was slightly different to what you might have expected
up front—do you think you reflect any of that learning in
your training that you give to people because you realise they
need to have a slightly different balance of skills set developed?
Mr Nicholas: I think it is actually
having the confidence for them to feel that they do not have to
be medical experts; that they can bring in our more specialist
disablement employment advisers or refer to the health condition
management delivered by the NHS. It is focusing in on being an
adviser who deals with the barriers to work rather than the medical
condition. That is probably the change in emphasis. So it is not
that they need more skills, it is convincing them that they can
do their job as an adviser without substituting for a GP or for
the specialist disability services.
Q41 Justine Greening: Obviously,
one of the plans is to expand out Pathways to Work, and in doing
so it will start to delve into all those priority cases, I think,
that you talked about earlier. Do you think there will be enough
personal advisers to cope with all of that?
Ms Strathie: I think there are
a few areas that we need to look at. One is the investment already
announced. Another four districts started Pathways on 31 October,
and so we are broadly now into roughly a third of the customer
base. We have no future announcements, we have no future resourcing,
so that is where we are at and that is what we are working on.
I think, at the moment, that is about 610 head count advisers.
So we have the money, and that is the money for the end-to-end
process and all the relationships with occupational health and
other providers that help us. We have the head count we need to
live within for the advisers, so that is how much we spend on
the advisers and how much we spend on their learning and the other
things. Then we have the capability in UK plc to underpin all
of this. No matter how much these people want to work and how
much we want to get them into work we do need that underpinning
of health and support. And it is not just support into work, it
is support to stay in work when you have been away from the labour
market for a long time, and working with employers so that employers
see what this customer group has to offer rather than what the
disadvantages are. So we have all of that for the customer base
for the third of the country that we are covering now, and we
will go on learning and we will go on pushing for the resources
and building the capability to expand it further.
Mr Nicholas: One key bit of that
capacity is actually the attitude and involvement of the medical
professions. I think if I look back a couple of years, a lot of
people in the medical profession were a bit suspicious of us;
they thought we were going to do nasty things to people's benefit
rather than help them to work. There has been a change, I think,
in the perception of "work is good for people"; it tackles
mental health, inactivity, diet and physical activity. Now if
you speak to a PCT chief executive or a Strategic Health Authority
there is much more of a willingness to engage in their contribution
to getting people into work. I think that is increasing the general
resource in the community; it is focused on helping people move
off Incapacity Benefit rather than stay on sickness.
Q42 Justine Greening: One quick,
final, question on the personal advisers. How many cases, on average,
does a single personal adviser have to deal with? How many patients—whatever
you want to call them—or customers, I guess, would be on
their books?
Ms Strathie: Part of the national
job entry action plan that I was talking about here sets benchmarks
for advisers; benchmarks for how many interviews of different
customer groups, because clearly some customers are hardest to
help. So we would have benchmarks and we would have job outcomes
and a range of others which we could provide, but I do not have
that for Pathways today.
Q43 Justine Greening: Okay, I guess
we can get that. Finally, from me, what advice do the Jobcentre
Plus staff give to people about how returning to work affects
their Disability Living Allowance? Often, for some customers,
a key concern would be how their potential work might affect that.
Ms Strathie: Although we have
picked up anecdotal suggestion that this was a big issue for Disability
Living Allowance customers, there is absolutely no evidence to
support it and I do not have any customers writing to me on the
subject at all. I think what we are doing is working very closely
with Terry Moran, the Chief Executive in the Disability and Carers
Service, and across the piece, to look at how we make Disability
Living Allowance an in-work benefit and how we make sure it is
not a disincentive to taking work. So we are aware of some people's
concerns but there is just no evidence to say it has had any impact
at all yet.
Q44 Jenny Willott: I want to move
on to the IT element and the Customer Management System. (I am
sure it is one of your favourite subjects.) DWP produced research
that had interviewed and spoken to Jobcentre Plus staff, and that
showed that staff had no confidence in the CMS and what it is
delivering, and staff also said that they felt it led to "greater
inefficiencies in staffing, resources and the claims process".
What plans have you got to improve the situation and what contingency
plans do you have if problems do carry on?
Ms Strathie: You are absolutely
right, we could all spend all day talking about the Customer Management
System and different people's views on it. However, I am not going
to do that because this is Kevin's field of expertise.
Mr Bone: First of all, I would
like to say that the CMS is sometimes labelled as the IT system,
whereas actually it is the end-to-end business process, and the
IT system is part of that process. As we have said earlier, this
is a massive change in the way we do business, so one of the first
things I would like to suggest is that there is a large group
of our staff that are having difficulty in coming to terms with
working in a different way—and there are some who do not
particularly like the process as well. Having said that, we have
recognised that with any major business process change you make
it is never going to be perfect first time. We have been working
consistently, since CMS first went live, which is just over two
years ago now, with those offices that were the early piloters
of it to make sure that we feed back improvements into the system.
On the IT side, in the early days we had problems with the robustness
and scaling of the system, which is no different to what any other
organisation would have when they are rolling out a big new system.
We have to remember that our IT systems are some of the biggest,
if not in the UK in Europe, so there are a lot of people using
them. Those issues have gone away completely and our Service Level
Agreement targets are being met consistently month-in month-out,
in terms of availability and stability. There have been some problems
around the financial assessor role, in terms of the amount of
time it takes for an assessor to do their role. We have done some
piloting work in Cheshire and Warrington district on doing some
initial outbound calls from financial assessors to customers just
to check on information before they come into the office, and,
also, to ensure that customers are coming into the office—because
one of the things we suffered in the process was non-appearance
of customers. That has significantly increased the rate of attendance
of customers as well. So that work has been very successful and
we are looking at rolling that out in the New Year across the
country in a managed way to allow the rest of the country to benefit
from that. The other end of the process, where we have had problems
as well, is that for the first time ever we have tried to automate
the interface to our legacy benefit systems, and we have actually
been successful. So that at the end of the process, when the adviser
has finished dealing with the customer and the claim is a genuine
claim and we want to trigger the payment to the customer we can
automatically generate that in the system. That is an extremely
complex process and it requires our staff to be very accurate
in the data that they submit into the system at that point, and
it is true to say that we have had some problems with our staff
in understanding how we do that. Again, we have done some piloting
work in Northampton, at our office there, and again have had some
very successful results in producing guidance on how our staff
should use the system to push the data. Again, that is something
we are rolling out across the country. The other thing that you
obviously find when you put in place a new system is that it is
going to have some rough edges and problems. The system, as it
was designed, does not quite do the business we want it to do,
so we have had quite a lot of those lessons. On 31 October we
released phase three of CMS live. That has taken away an awful
lot of the clerical work around the desk aids that our staff were
using. In fact, we have had some excellent feedback from the staff
just in the first weeks of using phrase three, in improving their
productivity, efficiency and the way that they deal with customers.
I am sorry it is such a long story but I think CMS has been a
huge success for us. It has had its problems, it will continue
to have one or two problems and we will deal with those as they
come up, but the main thing we have got to get down to now is
to ensure that our staff throughout the country know how to use
it in the best way possible, and that we concentrate on giving
them that information, and training, to use it.
Q45 Greg Mulholland: You say that
there are issues in terms of delivering what you want CMS to deliver,
and that they are rather small issues. The evidence that we have
is that there are very serious and fundamental issues with CMS;
that both the customers of Jobcentre Plus are being seriously
failed, on occasion, because the system quite simply is not working,
and also that is very strongly the view of staff. I would challenge
very strongly your description of the situation. Obviously, do
defend the Jobcentre Plus from those suggestions and the evidence
that we have had. Jenny asked you what you are going to do about
it, but how on earth did this happen in the first place? A system
was implemented which simply has not worked. Whether it is the
staff's fault or whether it is simply lack of resources, have
you analysed what went wrong and why an ineffectual system was
put in in the first place? Secondly, the other thing that is quite
clear is that lessons do not seem to be learned. Again, the strong
view of the staff is that senior management have ignored the ongoing
problems, because this has been implemented for over two years
and still there are problems; still there are calls for a clerical
contingency. This is supposed to be IT; this is supposed to be
delivering for staff and clients, and it clearly is not.
Mr Bone: I would disagree that
the system is not working, the system is working; it is meeting
all its service level requirements. The system has to be up and
running right across the country from 7am to 7pm Monday to Friday
and from 8am to 1pm on Saturday. We are consistently getting Service
Level Agreement targets in excess of 99% availability. So the
system is there and it is working. That is a fact. Any new system
that you put in place on this scale is going to have problems,
whether it is in the private sector or it is in the public sector,
because all customised IT systems are, basically, prototypes,
and any prototype when it is first put in is very unlikely to
work 100%, as we envisaged. So there is always a period when you
are evaluating how it is working, how it interfaces with people
and how the end-to-end process works, and you go through a process
of putting in place corrections, tunings, and those sorts of things.
That is what we have done.
Q46 Greg Mulholland: I just do not
feel that Jobcentre Plus is acknowledging the problems. Some of
the evidence we had was that CMS had led to "greater inefficiencies
in staffing, resources and the claims process". On 29 September
this year Computing.co.uk reported Contact Centres using
the CMS2 by having to revert to clerical processing. You cannot
possibly say that this is working. The issues just do not seem
to be being addressed.
Mr Bone: We addressed the clerical
issues earlier in the discussion. Those reverting to clerical
processes were not as a result of the system; they were the result
of queue problems with Contact Centres. We talked about the six
centres where we had problems. So I can give you evidence that
for a long, long time CMS has been there and running; it has not
been down and it has not been a cause of reverting to clerical,
other than on one or two occasions in the past six months where,
after a weekend power-down for maintenance in one of our data
centres, we had problems getting the system back up for Monday
morning.
Q47 Greg Mulholland: I personally
do not feel satisfied that the issues we have in our evidence
are being addressed. I know we do not have time to talk about
it today but can I request a report on that specifically?
Mr Bone: Which things specifically?
Q48 Greg Mulholland: Specifically
the issues I have raised today. My own feeling is that you are
simply not acknowledging the problems that staff have identified,
that organisations like the Citizens Advice Bureaux have identified,
and they need to be addressed; they are quite fundamental. My
own feeling is that there are flaws in the system which are not
being dealt with in the way they should be.
Ms Strathie: Just so that I am
clear about what you would like us to explore, we are telling
you there are a number of issues in the end-to-end process and
in our staff capability and willingness to make the change. You
are asserting that the difficulties as quoted in a computer magazine,
etc, are system failures, are CMS IT system failures. That is
your assertion.
Q49 Greg Mulholland: The evidence
we have suggests that that may well be the case.
Ms Strathie: That is not the evidence
we have, so we would be very happy to provide whatever it is you
ask.
Q50 Chairman: If you could provide
a memorandum of your understanding.
Mr Bone: Can you provide us with
the evidence you have, and I would be very happy to address it.
Q51 Jenny Willott: Going back to
CMS2, one of the things that the previous Committee recommended
was that the department should publish business cases for the
major IT projects. The Government has promised that we are going
to have a copy of the contents business case for the Pensions
Transformation Programme, so that we can scrutinise it. Will you
supply the Committee with the business case for CMS and CMS2?
Also, you have mentioned there is CMS3 now. May we have copies
of those so that we can scrutinise them?
Ms Strathie: We can provide that
to the Committee afterwards. We will need to remove the "financial
and in confidence" information from that first.
Q52 Jenny Willott: Greg mentioned
some of the problems that came up with delays; the fact that some
computer problems and some contingency plans that were put in
place caused delays of payments to claimants. Can I ask what arrangements
are in place so that individuals do not experience hardship? There
are a couple of elements to that: firstly, the fact that there
are actually delays in the claims being processed, and the delay
in the time in being sent from Contact Centres to local offices,
and so on. There is also the element, for those that are really
suffering hardship, of not being able to get through to the Contact
Centres. Unless they have been able to get through and do their
Jobseeker's Allowance interview they are not actually allowed
to access Crisis Loans in the first place. So the hardship that
has been caused by the delay in trying to get hold of them is
then exacerbated by the fact that because of the delay they are
not allowed to get emergency support. Can you explain what arrangements
are in place to back people up so that they do not have those
problems?
Mr Nicholas: I think we may not
have given this enough publicity, so that we are not working as
effectively as we might have done with advocacy organisations
to make customers aware of that. For the kind of customer you
are talking about, those most in need, we do have emergency appointment
systems to get them into our offices to work with them on the
forms to short-circuit it so that they can get in and get their
payments more rapidly. I think that is something on which we will
have to continue to work in making sure that is visibly available
and targeting those most in need. For example, I know that we
used that extensively in Sheffield (which is one of the six areas
where the Contact Centre was not operating effectively during
the summer) so that our most in-need customers were getting their
benefits paid more rapidly.
Q53 Jenny Willott: I represent part
of Cardiff in South Wales and one of the problems that I have
actually had brought up in my constituency is that there is an
example of a youth project where most of the people they work
with are on extremely low incomes. They came to me because there
was a consistent problem with Crisis Loans, that people were unable
to get through on the one 'phone number that there was for the
South Wales area and when they went into offices to fill in a
form they were told that the offices were not able to receive
it and it had to be done on the telephone. If you then went online,
printed off the form and filled it in and took it in the office,
as they were told they could do, the offices would not accept
them unless it was after half-past three, in which case they would
process it the following day. This was consistent; it was not
a one-off incident, it was a consistent problem that they had
experienced. One of the issues that they brought to me was not
only the process but the fact that the people who were dealing
with the situation did not seem to appreciate the fact that a
delay of 24 hours meant that that individual was not able to eat
for 24 hours, for example. There did not seem to be an understanding
amongst the staff that when you are dealing with Crisis Loans
a couple of hours here or there or a day here or there actually
makes a significant difference. What are you doing to tackle that
element of the situation?
Ms Strathie: Your constituency
is interesting because Wales is where we have been developing
the new standardisation of process for the Social Fund and Crisis
Loans, and its other elements. So apologies, first, for customers
that have not received the service we would want them to get,
but we have been looking at, as part of our efficiency measures,
how we can deliver better within the social envelope for Social
Fund across the piece, and we have been piloting that, working
with our operational policy developers and business designers
and people on the ground in two of our districts in Wales. I think
one of the issues (and Kevin might want to come in later and say
what we are doing about this) is our legacy telephone systems.
We are a vast organisation built out of two previous businesses
with very many different telephone systems of different ages over
the period of time. That has meant—not just in Wales, we
had a similar problem in a part of London—engaged telephone
tones to the customer but not ringing in the office, just to quote
an example. In many instances locally people have been trying
to move within the perceived direction of travel, so we are building
a Social Fund model that would be part of our benefit processing
centres to make that more efficient, to get better standardisation
of decision-making, quality and accuracy of payment and the reduction
of fraud in this area as well. What people have been doing is
putting more of that into the telephone but not having the capability
to manage it. So that is an issue we know about. Kevin, you might
want to talk about the telephony and what we are doing to try
and improve things.
Mr Bone: What has become apparent
to us, as we have gone through this, is that the telephony infrastructure
that Jobcentre Plus is using, not only in the office infrastructure
but in some of our centres where we are centralising work, is
a very old system, as Lesley has said, inherited from the previous
two agencies. It is starting to cause us problems in dealing with
our customers, so we have actually got in process at the moment
a top-to-bottom review of telephony right across the organisation.
It is going to cover not only our strategic Contact Centres, because
we need to make sure that the direction of travel we have got
for those is right for the future, it has got to cover where we
are going with our benefit processing centralisation, and what
we need for that, and it has also got to cover the office infrastructure
and look at all of that. That is due to report back to the board
by the end of the year. Out of that we will get a series of recommendations
about how we can take our telephony forward. We do understand
that is causing us a lot of problems with customers and we are
trying to address that as fast as we can.
Q54 Jenny Willott: Are you also putting
out guidance that where the telephony systems are failing the
old-fashioned paper forms are actually able to be processed, and
ensuring that staff are aware?
Ms Strathie: I spoke earlier about
trying to move too quickly because of the Efficiency Challenge
we have—at the end of the day we have to live within the
resources we have been allocated for each of the years in the
Spending Review period—but because we are trying to change
customer behaviour as well as change our staff's behaviour in
developing standardised ways of doing things that have already
been proven to be the most efficient way of doing them, we have
driven people towards: "This is the new model, this is how
we want you to do it." What I do not think we did well enough
was say: "But there will still be customers and there will
still be occasions when someone turns up and says `I cannot get
through on the 'phone and I want to do this', the answer is not
`Try the `phone again'; the answer is: `Here are the forms, how
can I help you to do it'". So we are still trying to bring
about the changes and educate both staff and customers in new
and more efficient ways of working, but we cannot do it overnight.
Q55 Greg Mulholland: One related,
quick question on a different issue: the previous Committee has
considered the issue of the IT interface between Jobcentre Plus
and the CSA. I am sure you acknowledge there have been problems,
obviously, but current figures show that there are still 81,000
cases referred by Jobcentre Plus that the CSA cannot progress.
What is being done to address that? Are the problems that were
there still there? If so, what is being done about it?
Ms Strathie: Is it 81,000 cases
have been referred to the CSA and they cannot deal with them?
Q56 Greg Mulholland: Current statistics
show there are 81,000 cases that cannot be progressed at this
stage.
Ms Strathie: Because they are
waiting for somebody from Jobcentre Plus to do it? Is that it?
Jenny Willott: No, they have been referred
by Jobcentre Plus.
Q57 Greg Mulholland: They have been
referred by Jobcentre Plus and either because they have not been
sent the information, which has been one of the problems—I
do not know exactly why—but those are the current figures.
Ms Strathie: Do you recognise
these numbers?
Mr Nicholas: I do not recognise
that figure.
Ms Strathie: I do not recognise
the figure but I do know that we identified there were a lot of
cases in the system that potentially were CSA-interest, and we
have had a piece of analysis work done on that which significantly
reduced the number. We then sat down with the CSA and put an action
plan in progress to identify how we phased the referrals in a
way that they could manage it. I am absolutely satisfied that
the CSA is not struggling for work and that we are not slowing
the CSA down; we are trying to manage this in a way for both agencies
and for the end result. We also developed a new management indicator
this year with the CSA which set a standard of 20 days for us
to identify and get all the information from the parent with care,
including taking good cause cases into account, to make that referral
to the CSA. We have not hit that indicator yet in those months;
we have been around the 21 to 23 days' mark since we introduced
it in April, but it is our aspiration and agreement to get to
20 days, including bringing in the backlog of cases identified.
So I am sorry I do not recognise the 81,000.
Greg Mulholland: Can we communicate what
that figure is and where it is from? The fundamental thing is
that if the cases are being referred without sufficient information,
that is the real concern, I think, rather than the fact that you
are nearing the 20-day target.
Q58 Chairman: If you could liaise
on that.
Ms Strathie: We are absolutely
clear on what are our responsibilities as a sister business and
our relationship to the CSA, and we are very engaged in their
improvement plans and how we play into that.
Greg Mulholland: There has been a suggestion
here that Jobcentre Plus is not fulfilling what the CSA needs.
Q59 Natascha Engel: I know you are
going to be really pleased, but I am going to ask you about Contact
Centres, quite specifically. I know we keep going back to it and
you have spoken a lot about it already, and I think everyone appreciates
you cannot do this overnight, but I specifically wanted to ask
you about what you were talking about earlier, about changing
attitudes, both of the people working in the Contact Centres and,
also, of the claimants. There is a really serious issue—and
Jenny and a lot of other people have touched on this—about
face-to-face contact and telephone contact, and the way that that
has been rolled out and, as you have mentioned, in 6 out of 25
of the Contact Centres, rolled back again. What exactly is your
criterion, and how are you making decisions about where to have
face-to-face contact and where to have telephone contact? I think
that goes right to the heart of what the Jobcentre Plus changes
are doing.
Ms Strathie: Could I just provide
a bit of context first, in terms of volume and scale? We are round
about the 74/75,000 mark in staff at the moment and our aspiration
is to be at 66,000 full-time equivalents by 2008 when we have
completed the transformation. Of those numbers, at the moment,
3,500 staff have moved to Contact Centre work, and by 2008 that
will be roughly 7,000. So 5% of the workforce at the moment, 11%
of total staff by 2008. That is just to get in context the volumes
that are in Contact Centres versus where people are in the rest
of the business. A very large proportion of our staff are in benefit
processing, and that is where we need to realise big efficiencies
through the centralisation programme. So the end-to-end business
process, as we have talked about, was designed a long time ago—before
Jobcentre Plus was created what it would look like to have this
new working age agency and what the processes were. That is what
CMS was built to support. It was designed a very long time ago,
because it takes a long time to bring these big systems to bear,
so the design dictates the number of people and the job roles.
We are constantly reviewing that because we have had to review
it in the light of Efficiency Challenge and we have had to review
it in the light of what you design at the laboratory end and what
the reality of the customer interface is. We have a picture where
each of those 66,000 people will be—we have that picture
now—but that is not to say it will not move around with
what we learn and what other changes or externalities hit us.
Mr Bone: As Lesley explained,
we have got a business model that we are working to which actually
lays out when we will have face-to-face contact with our customers,
whether we want them to contact us by telephone, and, specifically,
on the first contact claim process, as you know, we are going
to first contact by telephone. The reason we are doing that is
our experience up till now is that customers filling in a very
complex claim form very often get it wrong, and on average that
claim form is going backwards and forwards between us and the
customer probably four or more times. So that was a very inefficient
process, not only for us but for the customer as well. By taking
the claim on the telephone we can actually get the information
right first time and therefore speed the process up for the customer.
Turning attention back to the Contact Centre, as Lesley said,
what we are doing is we are taking people from our network organisation
into those call centres and training them to do telephony work.
This is entirely different to how a private sector company would
do it, where they would actually evaluate and see if people have
got the aptitude for call centre work—whether they have
keyboard skills, whether they can type and talk on the 'phone,
and those sorts of things. So a lot of our employees we are taking
into the Contact Centres we are having to train to do these things
and some of them, I think it is fair to say, are struggling with
this sort of work, so we are having to go through retraining and
things like that. That is why we are having a lot of problems
at the Contact Centres. We are focusing very clearly on making
those far more efficient, and one of the things we have recently
done is brought in someone into Jobcentre Plus, to head up the
action plan on fixing our Contact Centre issues, who has got extensive
private sector experience—
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