House of Commons - Public Accounts

Select Committee on Public Accounts Fifty-Fourth Report

2 The performance of the Authority and the Panel since the Committee last reported in 2000

11. The National Audit Office reported on the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme in April 2000, and our predecessors took evidence on that Report. At that time, we found considerable scope for improvement, but performance has declined in the intervening period. The average time taken to resolve a case has increased from 12 months to 17 months (Figure 3); the number of cases resolved per staff member per year has decreased from 179 to 125; the number of cases waiting to be resolved has increased to some 84,000 by October 2007; and the total cost to the taxpayer has increased by 27% from £22.4 million to £28.5 million in real terms.[11]Figure 3: The time taken to resolve cases had increased since 1998-99

Source: National Audit Office

12. Neither the Authority nor the Panel had focused sufficiently on performance management and targets had not been particularly relevant or stretching. For example, one of the Authority's key targets was to resolve more cases than it received. The target was set below even this figure for 2006-07. Even if this target had been met, it would not have allowed the Authority to reduce the number of cases waiting to be resolved. There had also been very weak individual and managerial incentives to meet targets, resulting in poor performance. For example, in the eight years between 1999-2000 and 2006-07, the Authority had only a 50% success rate in resolving more cases than it received, and never met its target to make 90% of first decisions in 12 months. The Panel's targets also focussed mainly on internal processes rather than the customer experience. [12]

13. The targets which have been set also do not reflect the entire process, and were set by the two bodies in isolation, rather than jointly to cover the time taken to hear appeals. The Authority makes the initial decision on eligibility and the correct level of award. It reviews the decision at the request of the applicant, where the applicant feels that the initial decision was incorrect. If, after the review, an applicant still disagrees with the decision, they can request an appeal from the Panel. Applicants had little understanding of the difference between the Authority and the Panel and cared far more about their experience of the entire process. [13]

14. The Authority found that around half of the applications it received were not eligible for an award under the scheme. It had recently put in place a system for responding immediately to applications that were obviously incomplete. This had, however, resulted in the immediate return of just 2% of applications. Over a quarter of disallowed claims were ineligible because the injury was not serious enough to qualify for the minimum award, and 15% because the injury did not result from a crime of violence. Whilst the Authority will, in many cases, need to carry out some checks before it can be sure that either or both of these conditions apply, it is likely that in some more cases, an experienced caseworker or decision maker would be able to ascertain this from the application form alone.[14]

15. The Authority relies on information from third parties, mainly police forces and medical professionals, to establish the eligibility of the 98% of cases that were not returned immediately. The Authority uses a paper based approach: writing to the third parties requesting information and chasing up late responses only in writing. The time taken to respond from initial requests for information about the incident was 74 days from the police, 41 days from General Practitioners and 67 days from hospitals. The police did not respond to almost a quarter of requests for information. The Authority had piloted new ways of working including developing closer working relationships with third parties, particularly the police forces, and using e-mail and telephone to request information and chase up responses.[15]

16. The Authority's case work process has been bureaucratic and repetitious, involving numerous handovers of cases and sometimes long periods of inactivity on individual cases. Each case was the responsibility of a caseworker, with decisions made by more senior decision makers. This system has resulted in:

cases waiting, on average, 5.5 months to be allocated to caseworkers, with minimal activity being undertaken;
cases being returned by decision makers to caseworkers for more information in 18% of initial decisions and 24% of review decisions; and
inconsistency in the way that information from third parties is chased up between different caseworkers, and periods of inactivity on cases.

The Authority had piloted a new casework process and planned to roll out a modified version of this process by July 2008.[16]

17. Whilst it is important to provide answers quickly to applicants, it is equally important that the decisions are correct. Since 2000, the Authority had introduced a number of measures to increase the robustness of the decisions, but these have adversely impacted on the time taken to resolve cases. For example, in cases where there was an ongoing court case, the Authority started waiting for the results of the court case before deciding whether a crime of violence had occurred. This practice unfairly penalised applicants where the police had been able to bring a case. It also effectively meant that, in these cases, the Authority was applying a 'beyond reasonable doubt' burden of proof rather than the 'balance of probabilities' required by the scheme. Despite these changes, 39% of decisions were changed at review and over half were changed at appeal, indicating scope to improve the quality of decisions. The Authority had, in 2007, ended the practice of waiting for the results of court cases and, as a result, had been able to make 800 decisions immediately.[17]

18. Compared to when our predecessors reported the Authority had resolved fewer cases each year. At the same time the administrative costs (excluding awards) have increased by 2%, after allowing for inflation, to £23.63 million in 200-2007, mostly due to a 40% increase in staff costs. This has resulted in a real terms increase in the unit cost of administering each resolved case of 54%, from £259 in 1998-1999 to £400 in 2006-2007.[18]

19. The Panel ceased to be a Non-Departmental Public Body in its own right in April 2006 and was merged with the Tribunals Service. This merger should have reduced the administrative costs of the Panel as it shared overheads with other tribunals. Its costs, however, rose by 5% from £4.62 million, in 2005-06, to £4.85 million, in 2006-07, at the same time that the number of cases resolved dropped from 3,585 to 3,273. This resulted in an increase in the unit cost of £195 or 15% in a year.[19]

20. The Authority had a database holding a wealth of information on applicants and cases that it could have used, for example, to analyse how the processing of cases changed over time, and to compare the delays due to the Authority and those due to third parties. The Authority had not, however, made full use of the database in this way and, in fact had very few staff with the skills and knowledge to extract data from it. The Authority planned to increase the numbers of staff able to do this work and to make use of the Ministry's research centre to analyse that data.[20]



© Parliamentary copyright 2008	Prepared 20 November 2008