Work and Pensions Committee
Oral evidence: Safeguarding Vulnerable Claimants, HC 402
Wednesday 12 February 2025
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 February 2025.
Members present: Debbie Abrahams (Chair); Johanna Baxter; Mr Peter Bedford; Steve Darling; Damien Egan; Gill German; Amanda Hack; Frank McNally; John Milne.
Questions 59 - 100
Witnesses
I: Rt Hon Sir Stephen Timms MP, Minister for Social Security and Disability, Department for Work and Pensions; Neil Couling, Director General, Fraud, Disability and Health, and Senior Responsible Owner Universal Credit, Department for Work and Pensions; Elizabeth Fairburn, Customer Experience Director, Department for Work and Pensions; and Dr Gail Allsopp, Chief Medical Adviser, Department for Work and Pensions.
Witnesses: Sir Stephen Timms MP, Neil Couling, Elizabeth Fairburn and Dr Gail Allsopp.
Q59 Chair: A very warm welcome to the eighth and final oral evidence session for the safeguarding vulnerable claimants inquiry. We are delighted to be joined by the Minister, Sir Stephen Timms, former chair of this Committee. It is a real privilege to have you with us, and of course your officials as well. I wonder if, starting with Neil, you would like to introduce yourself and which title you have.
Neil Couling: Hello again, Committee. It was only two weeks ago that I was here. I am Neil Couling. I am the director general for fraud, disability and health and the senior responsible owner for Universal Credit.
Elizabeth Fairburn: I am Liz Fairburn. I am the customer experience director.
Dr Allsopp: I am Dr Gail Allsopp. I am the chief medical adviser at the Department.
Q60 Chair: Fantastic. It is nice to welcome you all again. It is not your first time at the Committee, so I know you are very familiar with everything that we do, but I would like to start with questions to you, Sir Stephen.
The Committee, as you know, has had this inquiry going for a number of months. It follows on from the previous Committee’s work as well. Can you say if you feel that there is a difference in how safeguarding is approached within the Department in this new Government?
Sir Stephen Timms: Thank you very much. I am delighted to be back, albeit with the tables turned. Thank you for inviting me. I very much welcome the fact that the Committee has decided to resume this inquiry, which we did not manage to finish before the election. I am very aware that you played a key role in setting the inquiry up in the first place with the previous Committee. It is worth making the point that I have been in the Department now since July. I have seen from the inside that this inquiry has been really useful to the Department. It has provided some very useful new ideas and helpful insights for the Department, and we are very much looking forward to seeing what you conclude in the report that is to come.
There is a change of approach. What we want is for trust in the Department to be rebuilt. I think everybody would acknowledge that trust in the Department has been at quite a low level. We need to be much more open than has been the case in the past. Things that ought to have been published and made public have been hidden, and that has contributed to a loss of trust. We need to change that. We do need to—we very much want to, and we will—take a fresh approach to safeguarding.
I would like to say a little bit about what we are envisaging. The Department needs to show that it is learning when things go wrong, that it is listening to what people are saying, that it is taking people’s needs seriously. As the needs that we are dealing with change and people’s needs change, we need to change in the Department as well. We are reviewing the whole approach to safeguarding. We are planning to introduce and to publish a DWP safeguarding approach so that everybody can see what the approach we are taking is. That will set out the support that is available to people, how to access that support and what they can expect from us when they come to the Department.
The Department has used the word “safeguarding” in the past, but a former Minister banned the use of the term in the Department at all, so we will reintroduce it. We think it is a good word and a word that we should be clear about what it means and how we seek to deliver it. We will be setting up a multidisciplinary team to develop this safeguarding approach. We will be bringing in expertise on safeguarding from outside the Department to help us with the work. I am hoping that when it comes to the Department responding to the Committee’s report, I will be able to give much more detail about how this is going to look.
As you know, we have a Green Paper coming up quite soon now in the spring. There will be a White Paper, I hope, before the end of the year. I am hoping in the White Paper that we will be able to provide a much more substantial update and that all this is going to move us towards much greater transparency about how we are doing things. I hope one of the benefits will be that we will start to rebuild trust in the Department, which has been so badly lost in the past.
Q61 Chair: Thank you. I am very conscious of time and the Committee is very conscious that you have to leave at 10.30. I will follow this up briefly. It would be interesting to find out, for example, how this is applied at a systems level, such as in the development of policy, in the Green Paper on disability reforms and so on. That would be very interesting. I appreciate you may not have the detail now, but that is something very much that we are looking to, and the role of a pre-assessment, if you want, in the potential impacts around safeguarding.
Sir Stephen Timms: I agree it is an important element of the thinking behind the Green Paper.
Q62 Chair: Thank you. I will move on very quickly now to the safeguarding duty that we discussed. I was very heartened by what the Secretary of State said to us in November when we posed this question to her, and I have the text: “I am open to the suggestion…I know the Permanent Secretary agrees—I do not just want people to be safe, which is the bare minimum, I want the best possible standard of care and support for people who rely on us.” How has that progressed since she made those remarks back in November?
Sir Stephen Timms: That is the intention behind this approach that I have referred to—a new safeguarding approach in the Department to be embedded right across the Department in all the things that we do. The Secretary of State made the point that we certainly have not ruled out the idea of a statutory duty, but that is not something that is on the cards at the moment. We want to get this proper safeguarding approach in place. We want to define what exactly it should look like. We want to embed it in the Department and see how we get on. If that solves the problem, that will be fine. If not, we will have to think again about what more should be done. It is a big piece of work—a big commitment on the part of the Department—and one we are determined to deliver on.
Chair: Thank you, Sir Stephen. I will hand over now to John Milne.
Q63 John Milne: Good morning. The Committee has heard contrasting evidence about whether it would be a good idea to have a definition of vulnerability or a description of vulnerability. Broadly, with a description, the negative is that it might not be precise enough or clear enough so people would not know when to use it, but if it was a definition, you might get the opposite effect where it leaves out people around the edges who do not quite fit the narrow definition. The DWP seems to be taking the view that a description is the preferable option. Is that still your view and, if so, why?
Sir Stephen Timms: I will ask Elizabeth to comment on this.
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes. In broad terms currently, the Department defines vulnerability as an individual who has complex needs and requires additional support to enable them to access our services and use them safely. In my opinion, that is a robust definition, but we always maintain the fact that we need to demonstrate flexibility. If a customer presents to us either through one of our telephony channels or in person in a jobcentre, our people are empowered to take the right approach for that person at that time. We know that vulnerability can be in that instant or it can be a longer-term vulnerability. We ask that that definition is embedded in our documentation, our instructions and guidance, and we encourage our people to use that when they are interacting with our customers.
Q64 John Milne: Related to that, do you track any information about vulnerable clients such that you could see people in the database and then understand the impact of DWP services or actions?
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes. The way to do this is through our systems and our modernisation agenda and the thinking to be able to track that is there. For some of our services, we are at the mercy of legacy systems, but every single one of our benefit lines has a way to record that. In Universal Credit, we have our additional support area where we can capture and track customers’ needs. In our other areas, it might be done through pinned notes, but that will evolve as we move through our modernisation agenda. We are trying really hard now to use the datasets that are available to us, especially where they are structured, so in Universal Credit, for example, to overlay that with our customer research that we can better understand our customer needs.
Alongside that, we are also investing in what we describe as journey mapping capability, so encouraging the Department to look at the journey of the customer through the eyes of the customer. That is really useful for us. We can use our internal data to support that information, but we can also work with external partners as well to say, “What is your view? What are your customers experiencing and how do we feed that in?” We are not there yet, by any stretch, but we are certainly moving in the right direction, and clearly modernisation will be the key to us having a robust solution to that.
Q65 Gill German: The previous Committee heard evidence from the Public Law Project that it believes there should be more onus on the DWP to identify vulnerable claimants, rather than rely on self-declaration or people disclosing themselves by the very nature of those vulnerabilities. Do you think that DWP colleagues have enough opportunity and skills to identify whether a claimant has additional support needs? I am thinking about people such as work coaches, Universal Credit case managers and phone agents. Is there enough opportunity there and, indeed, time and the professional curiosity that is needed to identify where there are vulnerabilities?
Neil Couling: You are right, Ms German. The professional curiosity is one of the keys here. We spend a lot of time training our folks about a whole plethora of support needs that our customers could have, and how to identify some of those things. I have been before the previous Committee talking about the work that we have done around domestic violence and how to spot some of the signs of that and of coercive control and such. We train our folks up. We do rely on people opening up in conversations with us. It can often be the third or fourth engagement where this may become apparent. We work with other professionals in this area to know whether somebody has a particular problem.
I think you have heard from our ACSSLs in the Committee; they will have links both for us to communicate with other professionals but also to act as a conduit where they have concerns about people on benefits. It is a mixed approach. It is neither one nor the other. We need to be open to both and understand that this is often a dynamic relationship with a customer where things will become apparent that are not on first presentation or first claim, because they will not trust us. You have to build trust here, as the Minister was saying earlier.
Q66 Gill German: Once that has been identified, is there something in place that means that that vulnerability is flagged to other colleagues that the person will have contact with, particularly if they are not in face-to-face contact? Anecdotal evidence from my constituents has told me that going through things again and again can be quite distressing and actually put you off going back to the Department at all.
Neil Couling: We have a test and learn approach in Universal Credit. I have talked about it before to this Committee. The additional support area comes out of a piece of test and learning. We were pinning notes on cases, but they were not visible enough.
The additional support area covers accessibility, any arrangements they have made for explicit consent, appointment unavailability and support needs, and then it breaks support needs down into eight different categories: care leavers, armed forces, ex-offender, homeless or risk of homelessness, limited digital ability or accessibility, difficulties with English, drug and alcohol misuse and an “other” box. That is quite important because that is where you can record other issues such as mental health.
We are developing those, so we are working with customers on expanding the additional support area and what might be useful for us to know and them to know too. It is proving to be better because it is right at the top of the page as you look as an agent when you go in, so it immediately beams at you that there is a support need here, so you should go and find out what that is, or that there is an issue about attending an appointment at this time, so do not book an appointment at this time. It is developing and it will continue to develop.
We are also exploring with customers about the fact that some of those categories they can declare and some of them they cannot. But it is really in the detail because if you say ex-offender, there is a broad range of ex-offenders. You have somebody who has just been to prison five years ago, is rehabilitated and does not really need any support, or somebody who is actually under conditions about their release. It is not a labelling thing, and markers and labels are really not the way to go here, but about the quality of information that you hold in the service, and as you put it, being accessible so people do not have to retell their stories and relive the trauma again and again in interacting with us.
Chair: Thank you. Damien Egan wants to have a quick follow-up here.
Q67 Damien Egan: Yes, a quick one. It actually builds on that very point. Are there opportunities around—obviously not something you would want to rely on—technology and AI in terms of identifying people with additional support needs? I suppose that would work only for people who do not have regular contact with frontline workers if other agencies are flagging things. Are there more opportunities to go down the tech route to aid work coaches?
Neil Couling: As I have tried to explain before, AI is fantastic and has lots of potential, but it works off data, or the large language models do. Unless you have the core data in the service, there is nothing for AI to do its magical stuff on. We have an emphasis at the moment in the Department on building our data and asking—sometimes Parliament; we have a Bill currently at the moment—for more data to allow us to do our jobs effectively. Here the data exchange working between the various professional organisations is vital. Whether a piece of AI would help you across the top of that, I do not know. At the moment, we need to make the flow of data better before you get into a big tech solution.
Sir Stephen Timms: On that, there is one use of AI that is quite interesting, which is scanning incoming letters—handwritten or typed letters. We look at those and AI is used to find out whether the letter is revealing some element of risk or vulnerability around the person. We can do that on the day the letter is received so that you can then alert somebody that there might be an issue here and the Department can respond appropriately.
Neil Couling: The issue is 25,000 letters come into the Department every day and they do all get looked at, but it takes a period of time to get to them. What this piece of AI does is bring the cases of vulnerability to the surface. Particularly, say, if there is a suicide risk, it gets that straight to an agency to say, “You have to do something about this.”
Elizabeth Fairburn: It is worth mentioning in addition to that we have our call listening service as well, which does what that solution does but for our calls. We have it on 40% of our calls. Through our next period of modernisation we will expand that, but it means that somebody can intervene if there is a specific distress just to check that we have actually done what we need to for that customer and, if we have not, we can intervene on that as well.
Sir Stephen Timms: Are we using AI for that?
Elizabeth Fairburn: It is just a call listening service, so it is a word screen.
Neil Couling: In theory, if you build that data strongly enough, you could lay some AI across that to improve how it operates, but job one is to expand it from 40%.
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes.
Neil Couling: There is no point applying AI until you can do that.
Q68 Amanda Hack: We have talked an awful lot about how we are responding to somebody with an individual vulnerability. Can you talk to me a little bit more about how that is recorded, but more importantly, once it is recorded, what do we do with it? Having worked for a housing association that provides support for a lot of people with vulnerabilities, it is not necessarily knowing that a person is vulnerable, but how you change your service on the basis that they are vulnerable. I am really interested to hear a bit more about that.
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes. For each of our benefit lines, as Neil said, we train our people to spot vulnerability. If I use that example that Neil gave about the additional support area, if we record an additional support piece for a customer on our UC system, for example, on that page where that flags up there are links then for the handler to follow. If they are serving a prison leaver, for example, they would have links to what support is available. That could be some online guidance, it could be onward referral to another agency, or it could be, in an acute vulnerability, something like our advanced customer support teams. We do not leave our people just to record that; we then actively encourage them to interact with the material that is on our intranet pages to see what they can do to support that customer. Clearly, we can develop that over time, and we can make it more intuitive as we get more tools and technologies to do that, but at the very basic level at the moment we are actively encouraging people to record it and then to refer to the online support.
We have talked a lot during this inquiry around the layers of support that are in the Department. Our frontline is always that first line of defence, then our advanced customer support teams that are there. I know you have met them as part of this inquiry, and they cover all the country. Those layers of support are there, and we actively encourage people to engage with those when they are faced with a customer in the moment.
Q69 Amanda Hack: If you were due to apply a sanction or a deduction, how would somebody’s vulnerability be included in that decision-making process?
Neil Couling: For Universal Credit, which is where most of the sanctions are, you have the additional support area, so you have vulnerabilities there.
Amanda Hack: These are the tier 1 and tier 2 APAs?
Neil Couling: Exactly, and then the decision maker is meant to ask themselves questions about the nature of the potential sanction, why might it be applied, and what the impact might be. For example, for certain categories of folks, say with mental health difficulties, there is a higher bar to applying a sanction there because of the risk that could pose to that individual. In general, with mental health difficulties, it is very exceptional to get over that bar and the decision makers know all that too. There is guidance about that as well as information on the system about the individual in front of the decision maker.
Q70 Amanda Hack: When a sanction is applied, obviously when somebody has money withdrawn, that would automatically increase their vulnerability. What thought process goes into that decision making?
Neil Couling: The law itself provides for sanctioning. In terms of what Parliament intends, Parliament clearly intended in circumstances such as that for sanctions to be applied. The discretion applies before the sanction decision. Once somebody is sanctioned, there are hardship provisions then that they can access—a hardship loan—if the reduction in their income is too much for them to bear. With some sanctions, of course, once you start to comply, the sanction is then lifted. Some sanctions are for fixed periods, so it would depend on the circumstances of the case.
Q71 Mr Peter Bedford: How far do you believe it is the responsibility of the DWP to inform claimants of the additional support available versus the responsibility of the claimant themselves to find out that information?
Sir Stephen Timms: We need to do a good deal more to make sure that people are aware of the help and support that is available, and we are on the case at the moment to seek to do that. The Department needs to understand better the barriers and challenges that people run into when they use the benefit system, and we need to change the services that we are providing in the light of that understanding. I have talked about rebuilding trust. We do need people coming to the Department feeling that it is safe to come and that they are able to tell us what it is that they need and not feel that they are putting themselves in some danger when they do that.
We need to be outside of jobcentres. We need to be in communities, libraries, community hubs, GP surgeries and so on to be able to do that well. We need to be trauma aware. I know the Committee has taken some evidence in this inquiry about that. We need to be properly responsive to people when they raise these concerns. We need to be ready to try out new ways of engaging to make sure that we are doing the best possible job that we can do. We need to publish more information about the support the Department can provide. We need to put in place reasonable adjustments, and we need to strengthen the links that we have in the Department with organisations who speak for people who use our services. There is a lot to be done, and we are determined to do it.
Q72 Mr Peter Bedford: In doing some research for this Committee, I see there are a lot of different mechanisms of support available, such as the special benefit rules, discretionary housing payments, Universal Credit hardship funds, Universal Credit advances, benefit debt recovery, alternative payment arrangements, and so on. A lot of those things will not necessarily be freely available or accessible to the general public. I just wonder specifically about ensuring that potential claimants are aware of those particular areas of support. What more could the Department do to publicise them?
Sir Stephen Timms: Of course, some of those things do not come from the Department, which makes it more complicated. Discretionary housing payments, for example, come from the local council. It is a very good question to raise. What I am hoping is that when we have this new safeguarding approach that I have referred to, which we will publish, that will make it much clearer what resources can be provided by ourselves or by councils or other agencies to hopefully overcome the quite significant problems that you are right to raise.
Q73 Mr Peter Bedford: One of the issues I have raised at this Committee quite a few times is my frustration around the siloed approach of Government Departments and agencies. You have your responsibilities; the local authorities have their responsibilities. We have to ensure that all those agencies actually speak to each other and work together to ensure that we are doing the best for the public. What more do you see the Department doing in that space?
Sir Stephen Timms: Gov.uk provides an opportunity for whole-of-Government information to be provided in a way that is not siloed—it is all there in one place. We obviously have to make sure that people can find their way to it, but the provision of online information gives us quite a good opportunity to overcome that very real difficulty.
Q74 Mr Peter Bedford: Turning to work coaches, the Social Security Advisory Committee expressed concerns about the use of discretion by work coaches to mitigate the consequences of DWP policies. Do you agree with those concerns?
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes, it is right to raise concerns. We have talked a little bit already about what we are doing to make sure that staff in the Department are able to spot vulnerability and respond appropriately to it. There is specific training and guidance right across the Department on all this. There is also the customer additional needs campaign that is being rolled out at the moment across all benefits. There is quite a big effort being made to make sure that staff, work coaches and others are equipped to deal with the quite difficult circumstances that their job requires them to handle.
Q75 Mr Peter Bedford: I just wonder how the Department is going to ensure that that is consistently applied across the country. Often in Government Departments, they do well in a particular region or a particular part of the country. How is the Department going to ensure that that is more broadly, fairly and consistently applied across different regions?
Neil Couling: My previous response to Ms Hack’s question is partially relevant here. Discretion is both advantageous and disadvantageous, as your question was suggesting, in that if you want the same approach everywhere across the country, you minimise the amount of discretion. Given the extreme variability in people’s conditions, lives and experiences, discretion can be a real asset in allowing an approach to be modified where the circumstances dictate it.
To your initial question—whether I agree with the Social Security Advisory Committee—I will give a civil servant’s answer: yes and no. It depends; I would not want to extinguish discretion, but I would want to try to ensure that people are applying the rules consistently. There needs to be some subtlety in that. Now, for big organisations, subtlety is a problem. We take 36 million phone calls a year. We have done nearly 7 million medical assessments since 2019. You have to understand it is a big-volume business.
Humanity inside an organisation comes from giving people the ability to exercise some discretion, but clearly you want it to be within a framework that is visible, as the Minister is saying, and that people outside can understand and hold civil servants to account for so that that discretion does not become a personal tyranny over somebody. That is important. The Social Security Advisory Committee’s concern was that if the discretion goes too far, you get into situations where the person is no longer a public servant, but is actually exercising control over people’s lives, and that is not what we want in the Department.
Q76 Gill German: One of the most important and, indeed, ambitious set of reforms that this new Government has set out is, I believe, the Get Britain Working plans and what is set out in the White Paper. I see so much wasted potential around in my constituency, for myriad reasons, but that includes people who have disabilities of a really broad range. I am pleased that there is going to be a panel of disabled people who can look at co-production of this policy, and I know that organisations like Mind and the National Autistic Society have said exactly the same about how important that is. Can you set out what that panel would look like, what the plans are as they stand at the moment, and what you envisage will happen with that?
Sir Stephen Timms: This is crucial, and we will say more about it in the Green Paper. I first took responsibility for disability benefits as a Minister in 1998. One of the things I was responsible for at that time was the launch of the New Deal for Disabled People. I remember nobody really knew how to set about helping people who were on incapacity benefit, as it was then, into work, so the New Deal for Disabled People was a series of pilots, really, and trying out new things. It was very interesting that the disability employment gap, which was much higher then than it is now even, quite quickly started to come down.
Last Friday, a constituent came to my surgery, someone I had not met before, and he told me he lost his arm in a road accident at age six. When he became an adult, he had a real struggle getting a job. Finally, in the year 2000, he was able to get a job through the New Deal for Disabled People. He has then worked for 23 years, all the way through until November 2023, when he lost his job. He came to see me because he cannot find a job now. He said, “Why is there not that thing that helped me in the year 2000?” He is right. We should again be providing the support that enables people to get into work.
We need to work with the disability employment panel and the organisations that you have talked about. Scope is another organisation that does an excellent job in supporting disabled people into work. We can again, I hope, provide effective support that is going to make a difference to people, but doing it with people is going to be crucial. I hope we will be able to say more about how we are proposing to do that in the Green Paper.
Q77 Gill German: Are there plans ahead for regular feedback to this Committee about how that work will look? Clearly, it is important that we can see how that pans out in the future and that it is actually doing that role that we really want to see happening.
Sir Stephen Timms: We will welcome opportunities to come back and talk about how we are getting on as things progress, yes. I will be delighted to have the Committee’s interest.
Q78 Amanda Hack: You have covered most of it in Gill’s question, but the New Deal for Disabled People was revolutionary in supporting people back into employment. How do you see that that will progress to make sure that disabled people have access to work in the future?
Sir Stephen Timms: There are a number of initiatives that have already been announced. There is the Connect to Work programme, which will be rolling out this year. What that is doing is taking an IPS approach— individualised placement and support—which we know has worked well for people with serious mental health problems and is increasingly being seen as applicable to a wider range of health impairments.
What we will be doing there is bringing together groups of local councils—I think it is 43 across the country altogether—that will come together and commission a service in their area, so it is a much more devolved approach than we have taken in the past. Those groups of local authorities can bring in support from charities or particular expertise that happens to be available in their area, and they can design the support to give access to the opportunities that there are in that particular area, which will be perhaps different from opportunities in other areas. That will start being rolled out from April and it will be in place across the country by the end of the year.
It is a thoroughly devolved approach, so that means we need to watch very closely how each of those contracts performs. We will not be controlling it—we will not be commissioning it, which is what happened in the past from the centre—but we do need to monitor it and make sure that all 43 of those devolved initiatives are delivering for disabled people in those areas. As I was saying a minute ago, I will very much welcome the Committee’s interest in how that is going. There is also a series of inactivity trailblazers that are starting in April, which is another set of initiatives. I hope we will be able to do more and to set out in the Green Paper a bit further how we see the whole thing looking.
Q79 Steve Darling: I will cover both areas in one hit because I know we are really limited for time, but thank you so much for giving up your time so generously today, all of you. First of all, one of my favourite hobby horses is trauma informed, and from written evidence, there is clearly an unpicking of trauma informed at a policy level. How is that being rolled out at a more operational level and how can you touch and taste that?
The other area that I want to explore with you is about vulnerable clients, which is what we are exploring. My fear is that the Department, through its delays in processing, exacerbates vulnerabilities, such as in Access to Work. A constituent who is already in work told me yesterday that she had applied for some support and she was told it would be six months before that claim could be processed. Another individual I am aware of was saying that she was on the edge of an employer withdrawing a job offer because it had gone on for months with Access to Work failing to process the claim. We want to help people back into work and yet the Department is part of the problem. Have you set a target of a 28-day turnaround for Access to Work for new claims and processing? People can be thousands of pounds in arrears of themselves when claiming for support or taxis and it is impoverishing people because the Department is failing to deal with that in a timely manner.
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes, the trauma-informed approach, and trauma awareness, is something that the Committee has taken fairly recent evidence, is that right? Certainly, we took evidence when I was here about the trauma-informed approach and how that is being rolled out across the Department. Perhaps I can ask Liz to say a little bit more about how that is going, but it is proceeding. I was quite impressed when I was chairing the Committee by the presentation we had about that, and it is quite a thoroughgoing approach that is being taken.
Let me touch on Access to Work before asking Liz to comment further on the trauma-aware approach. Yes, there is a problem here, and the problem is that there has been an enormous surge in applications for Access to Work. A number of us will remember that we used to talk about Access to Work as the best-kept secret because nobody really knew about it and employers did not know about it. That seems to have changed in the last two years and there has been an enormous surge in applications for Access to Work.
The Department has done its level best to keep up. More people have been put on to process the applications and so on, but as you say, the situation is not in good shape at the moment. What we will need to do—and we will touch on this in the Green Paper as well—is make some fairly significant reforms to Access to Work, look again at the whole approach we are taking, and look at whether employers could do more. There are legal obligations on employers to make reasonable adjustments. I am wondering whether there is more we can do there.
As you might know, the Secretary of State has commissioned Sir Charlie Mayfield, who used to run John Lewis, to carry out his independent Keep Britain Working review looking specifically at what employers should be doing and can do to improve opportunities for disabled people and people with health impairments to get into work, stay in work and do well in work. There is quite a big issue here and the current style of Access to Work is unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. We have to come up with something better and more effective, given the current very high level of demand.
Neil Couling: Could I add one thing? Mr Darling, for people who have a job offer, we prioritise those cases above the backlog that we have. On that particular constituent case you raised, if you send me some details or send the Minister the details, we are very happy to get on to that because we do not want the backlogs to stop people getting jobs.
Elizabeth Fairburn: On trauma informed, you are right, Sir Stephen, we did give evidence in the Committee, and we sent a letter to you in January as well. That is our current position that is outlined, but there were a couple of things in your question about how you touch and feel that. We are continuing to embed those trauma-informed principles as we design and explore our local services in the future, so they are underpinning that design. As we work through Get Britain Working and launch our work coach academy, those principles are in there. For any learning material and instructions that we do, those trauma-informed principles will be considered in there, so there are a couple of good examples of how we are embedding those into that future design, but that letter of the 22nd will give you the most up-to-date position.
Q80 Amanda Hack: This is to Dr Allsopp. When you appeared last month, you said your team reviewed all policy changes within the disability services area, and that was from a clinical perspective. Is anybody responsible for reviewing changes outside the disability services area from a clinical point of view?
Dr Allsopp: From a clinical point of view, yes. Last time I was here, I spoke very much about the disability space, because that is where I am based in the Department. Ultimately, it does not really matter where I am based; my team is available for the whole Department. We tend to look at three things. We look at the policy aspects, we look at the clinical profession, which is embedded across the whole Department, and we also look at the governance that is across the whole Department from a clinical point of view. Now, we are quite a small team. It is impossible to do everything, which is why we have clinicians embedded in each area, and that is why we have experts who are in those areas who we then liaise with and work with.
Q81 Amanda Hack: Sir Stephen, how do Ministers use the advice provided by the chief medical adviser and her team in policy going forward?
Sir Stephen Timms: Advice is crucial. I have referred a number of times to the Green Paper that is coming up. We are working on that at the moment and Gail is part of those conversations. The advice that she gives is a very important part of the input that we are drawing on to put together our proposals.
Chair: We will have a short break now and reconvene in five minutes.
Sitting suspended.
On resuming—
Chair: I will hand over to Frank McNally.
Q82 Frank McNally: Good morning. I want to pick up on the Help to Claim scheme. In January 2022, the previous Government took their decision around the new contract with Citizens Advice and focusing that on telephone services and digital services. That brought about a fair amount of criticism from a number of organisations and Citizens Advice itself has expressed some concerns in written evidence in December. It highlighted that home referrals are extremely rare and that the DWP directive is they should not be used regularly. It went on to state that a high number of vulnerable claimants, as we have touched on through this session and the wider inquiry, find it challenging to engage on the phone and some of them struggle to access digital services. How widely used are home visits for UC claimants and what is the process for making such a determination? Sir Stephen, based on some of your comments today around some of the challenges within the Department, how do you see that being reviewed moving forward?
Sir Stephen Timms: First of all, I think Help to Claim is a very important service and Citizens Advice does a good job in delivering it. As you say, it was, to begin with, to a fair degree a face-to-face service; the current contract is just about telephone and online support. It is not something that I have looked at very much since July. My sense is that it works pretty well. I will ask Neil whether he has any comments about that.
Neil Couling: Yes, I am the owner of the contract in the Department. It used to be face to face, then—you are quite right, Mr McNally—the Government in 2022 decided, learning from the pandemic, that they would move it to online and telephony only. Those channels existed before. It is a very good service. Citizens Advice, what does it do? We are leveraging a bit the independence of Citizens Advice—we have made no secret of that— and the trust and confidence that some customers have in Citizens Advice. It is a good partnership; it really works well.
You asked about the visiting officers. We do about 30,000 visits a month if you add in the move to claim visits. We have expanded our visiting officer numbers by nearly 400 in order to cope with the extra demand that we will see through the move to UC work. In terms of the volume before move to UC, it was about 15,000 visits a month and we are doubling that for the purposes of bringing new cases on.
Sir Stephen Timms: Is the 400 additional a doubling? Do you know what the number was before?
Neil Couling: Is it a doubling? No, it is less than that.
Elizabeth Fairburn: Just under—I think we have moved from about 350 to about 700 in total.
Neil Couling: It is still growing. The numbers are growing as we expand the number of Employment and Support Allowance cases that are moving through that need more home visiting than previous cohorts of claimants.
Sir Stephen Timms: It is true as well that the Department is experimenting with how to use those visiting officers and where they should be. Maybe they should be in a place that a number of people come to, which is not the jobcentre, as well as actually going to people’s homes.
Q83 Frank McNally: I suppose that is an interesting point about where those services are being provided. One of the challenges that Citizens Advice highlighted around the Help to Claim scheme as it is currently set up is that their advisers can undertake a much more thorough examination about the claimant’s circumstances and provide that more bespoke advice particularly on UC versus legacy benefits, and that is not the case when they are at a Jobcentre Plus and engaging with the work coaches. How would you assess the adequacy or the breadth of support offered to those claimants via Help to Claim compared with the offering at Jobcentre Plus?
Neil Couling: Help to Claim is about the initial claim. It is a service from making the initial claim to receiving the first payment. I have said before to this Committee that it is not just about getting the claimant to make the claim; it is about making sure they safely go through that first month and provide all the information needed to support that claim so that they get an award at the end of the month. That is what Help to Claim does.
The jobcentre service is a bit broader than that, so that could be help with the ongoing claim if issues arise in month 2, month 7 or month 12 of the support there. Of course, the jobcentre can provide help with claiming online. For example, we have computers in all our jobcentres now that customers can use to make applications for Universal Credit. The services are complementary; they are not exact copies of each other. We spend around £20 million a year with Citizens Advice for the Help to Claim service. It helps around 5% to 7% of new claims—it goes up and down. As I said, as a Department we are very happy with the way in which Citizens Advice is exercising its responsibilities under that contract. We have extended it many times since it was first done as a reflection of that satisfaction.
Q84 Frank McNally: Thank you very much for that. I will move on to talk about that migration from ESA to Universal Credit. Certainly for me, it was a welcome move in the Budget to accelerate that, as is the need to ensure that enhanced support journey for those who require it. You may be aware of evidence to the Committee from the Child Poverty Action Group, which outlined its safeguarding concerns around managed migration and the ESG in practice. It claims that phone calls and home visits simply signpost claimants to Help to Claim unless it is determined that the claimants need an appointee, at which point it can be escalated effectively. What assistance is available for migrating claimants who require extra support but do not require an appointee?
Sir Stephen Timms: This is a very important subject. We are getting towards the end of the migration to Universal Credit and some of the more vulnerable people who need to be migrated will be migrated over the next few months. I will ask Neil to say more about exactly how that is being done. A point that intrigues me about all this is that I remember the launch of the Universal Credit White Paper in 2010. It said that the transition to Universal Credit would take seven years. That is 15 years ago now and we are still not entirely there. There are some lessons for us about how long it has taken. This particular bit of it is particularly sensitive. We are working really hard to make sure we do not run into the problems that we readily could. I will ask Neil to explain.
Neil Couling: I thought the former chair of this Committee was going to return to questioning me about this. It has taken a while, Minister—yes, you are quite right. It is 10 and a half years that I have been doing this now. First of all, we take what CPAG say very seriously; we have meetings with them. Their monitoring of what we are doing is incredibly helpful. I do not agree with them on everything they say, but they do point out some things that we then attend to. This is not defensiveness on my part.
About 69,000 people have now gone through the enhanced support journey so it is a well-travelled path. Almost all the ESA cases will get an enhanced support journey if they do not claim by week 12 of the migration notice period. The vulnerable claimants we have identified on income support for the most part have had enhanced support journey cases. I will explain what that is, because there is a prompting that goes on there. We try three times to contact the claimant by phone and ask them why they have not claimed. That is when we might refer them to Help to Claim and let them know that Citizens Advice or Citizens Advice Scotland are available to help and support them in making a claim. That could be an appropriate thing to do.
Of that 69,000, 28,000 so far have been referred for a visit. They have not responded to the telephone calls, perhaps we have not been able to contact them, or they have just said that they do not know what to do, so we have put them out for visits and we are now working our way through those visits. The plans for the rest of this year and the coming year have this enhanced support journey at their core because we must do everything we can to ensure that claimants on ESA, who are typically more vulnerable than the previous cohorts we have been working through, make their way safely on to Universal Credit. We are very focused as an organisation on making sure that happens. We have put the resources behind all this activity. We are ready to do it.
I am not saying—and I have said this to CPAG—that there will not be changes in those processes because we are learning all the time about what works and what does not work as well, and we tweak the system. This is what test and learn is all about. As we spot an error or spot a flaw, we try to get in quickly and fix that.
Sir Stephen Timms: Can I just add that the Department meets regularly with quite a large group of national stakeholder organisations—68, according to my briefing—who have expert knowledge about the needs of vulnerable people. CPAG is one of them. I was on a very useful call with Neil a few weeks ago. I am not sure how many people were on that particular call, but it was around the transition to Universal Credit.
Quite a lot of local organisations—it was not all national organisations; there were also local organisations—were talking about what they were seeing in their area about the problems with the transition to Universal Credit that they were aware of, and Neil was taking careful notes of what they were saying and giving answers to some of their queries. The Department does quite a lot of talking—that was a Zoom call—to people around the country about what is going on and trying to make sure we learn lessons when there are problems.
Q85 Frank McNally: I am conscious of the time. I will finish with this final short point. In evidence to this Committee, one of the areas of concern that CPAG flagged was linked to the discretion to escalate a case at the end of that enhanced support journey and a lack of understanding around the criteria that was used to make such determinations. But I imagine if you are in ongoing dialogue with them on a regular basis, that area will be clarified with them.
Neil Couling: What they would like me to do is to start the enhanced support journey earlier—so earlier than 12 weeks. The reason why it is at 12 weeks is that we know there are two peaks for people claiming Universal Credit in that three-month migration window. It is right at the start—so about 25% of people claim as soon as they get the migration notice—and then about 60% to 70% claim in weeks 12 or 13. If we pushed the enhanced support journey too early, it would not be effective. People would say to us, “Yes, but I have another five weeks yet and I intend to use those five weeks that the law allows me.” I think you heard some of that, Minister, on the call. That is their perspective. I have a different perspective because I am running a big-volume challenge here about how to do this, and the most efficient way is to do it at week 12.
What we do not do at week 13, if we have not made the phone calls or the visit has not happened, is cut the claim off. We have the facility to extend claims, and in those circumstances we extend the migration notice period. In very rare examples, we do have the power under the law to withdraw the migration notice and start the whole process again later. We have had some cases, which we call exclusions, where we might not have built the service necessary.
For example, the Braille service for tax credit claimants was ready only by October last year, so we excluded where we could—where it was visible to us from HMRC—tax credit claimants who needed a Braille service. We now have that Braille service in place, so we are letting those cases through. Some cases will have got through, though, before then because HMRC did not tell us or did not know, or it was not visible on their system that there was a Braille need. On those cases we would withdraw the migration notice and not extend the period, and we would say, “Look, I’m very sorry. We shouldn’t have contacted you. We’ll come back to you later on in the process.” It is more dynamic than you probably read in some of the briefings, but it is all intended to support the customers on this journey. We are not trying to catch anybody out. Success for us is not that people have not claimed. Success is that people have made a claim.
Chair: Thank you. We might write to you on numbers, if that is possible, just to clarify again. This is such an important area. I know we have discussed this in the past, but a regular update would be very helpful.
Neil Couling: We would be very happy to.
Chair: I am going to move on if that is okay.
Q86 John Milne: Thank you. Over the last few years, customers in receipt of severe disability premium have experienced difficulty moving to UC because it is not automatically included in UC. Hopefully, the current solution is now working. I wanted to ask: how many people has the Department identified as being eligible for the transitional severe disability premium element, who moved to Universal Credit before 14 February 2024 following a change in circumstance, and how many have been paid? Are you confident you have got everybody, basically?
Sir Stephen Timms: I will ask Neil to pick that one up as well.
Neil Couling: Yes, I shall do that. There are two sorts of transitional protection, which often confuses. There is transitional protection for cases that move as part of the move to UC process—the so-called managed migration. That has been built. That works pretty well and we are not experiencing any trouble with that.
Then you talk about the transitional severe disability premium element. Those are people who have moved through a change of circumstances on to Universal Credit. They have already moved to Universal Credit. They were not part of the managed migration. The Government’s intention from 2018 was for those cases to get a transitional severe disability premium element. It then got confused by about three court cases that have now worked their way through the system. The courts have decided on all those and we are now moving to implement the various judgments of the courts in those cases.
We see them in three cohorts. Between 2018 and 2020, we set up a clerical system to pay the transitional protection. There are about 15,000 cases in that group. After 2020, there are about 35,000 cases who were automatically paid it as part of their Universal Credit. Then there are about 7,000 cases who were on Universal Credit and are no longer on Universal Credit but would be entitled to some back pay for that. Why do we need to do some back pay? Because the courts decided that the transitional protection we were providing was not large enough and it needed to cover other elements.
We are currently working through those three cohorts of cases. The first cohort, the easiest cohort to do, is the 35,000 cases. These are the ones who were on the protection from 2020 and were on the system, so I have a system record available. We are working through them. We started that process in January—I think the Secretary of State wrote to the Committee and said that—and we are working through those cases. The next cohort we are working on are the cases who were on the clerical system before 2020. They have a mixed clerical and digital record. I need to work out a way of calculating all those cases. Once we have done that, we will then do the 7,000 cases who are no longer on Universal Credit and go back over them. There will be a mixture of clerical and digital cases and we will make payments on those. We are aiming to do all that by August this year. Apologies for the length of the answer there.
John Milne: No, that is great.
Neil Couling: You may say to me, Chair, “Could you write that down in a letter?” to which the answer would be, “I would be very happy to.”
Chair: That would be very helpful, yes. Thank you.
John Milne: Thank you for your very comprehensive reply.
Chair: Thank you. Yes, if you could reply. Now over to Damien Egan.
Q87 Damien Egan: I have questions about how DWP works with the safeguarding adults boards. Last year, you had the agreement of a memorandum of understanding. There are two parts of this question. How is the Department ensuring that it complies with the memorandum of understanding? The other element to it is your thoughts on whether it would be useful if there was a requirement for safeguarding adults boards to have a representative from DWP on them.
Sir Stephen Timms: Let me start with that. I think it is very useful. The memorandum itself has been a helpful initiative. It has been in place nearly a year now and seems to be working well. I wondered, actually, whether the Committee might like to see it. It is a helpful document to read and says a fair amount about the approach that the Department is taking to safeguarding.
We reckon—Gail and I were just talking about this—that about 80% of safeguarding adults board meetings are attended by one of our ACSSLs. We think all of them will attend some of those meetings at some point. It is a very important part of their work, and I think the initiative and the collaboration has significantly improved our safeguarding approach and delivery.
Q88 Damien Egan: I am glad you pronounced “ACSSLs” because that is my next question. How does the Department get the balance right between allowing the ACSSLs to work flexibly and giving that consistency across the country?
Elizabeth Fairburn: The great thing about the role of the ACCSLs is that they are plugged into their local agenda and what is happening around them. We see that as a strength.
We enable the ACCSLs to be a direct point of contact for those safeguarding adults boards. That gives the safeguarding adults boards that ease of contacting the Department so that we can help them to navigate the Department as well. While we have that blueprint of an ACCSL role—the aim is to be that safety net for vulnerable customers—we also recognise that part of that role is interacting with these boards. As Sir Stephen said, we would love—with the Committee’s support as well—to get all those boards attended. We see it as valuable and we are getting some great feedback as well. Local feedback that we get from where our ACCSLs attend is that they are adding value to those boards.
Q89 Damien Egan: Do you think it should be a requirement?
Elizabeth Fairburn: We are happy to do it. We are striving to get everybody there.
Q90 Damien Egan: I have two points on the roles of the ACCSLs themselves. Are they required to share their contact details with key partners like local welfare—
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes, they would directly.
Sir Stephen Timms: A big part of their job is engaging with people outside the Department, including giving their phone number and just making sure that they are able to provide an effective link.
Q91 Damien Egan: Fantastic. Then the other bit is: is the Department undertaking work to make it easier for those partners to feed into the ACCSLs and to report concerns?
Elizabeth Fairburn: We talked already about the operational stakeholder engagement forum, where we said the 68 bodies attend. We welcome people to attend that. Where there are those relationships—absolutely, as Sir Stephen said, they are out there. Their focus is that local agenda, and where they can make strong connections, they are encouraged to do so. But we also have that central connection as well through that operational stakeholder forum, which is very effective. Again, we get good feedback from the people who attend about the level of engagement, the things that we engage on, and how we take their input and use it.
Q92 Steve Darling: I will just put out the three areas that I want to explore. Given that the true scale of death and serious harm, including suicide, is not clear for those who engage with the Department, who are of working age and who claim benefit, how could you better collect that data? I would welcome your thoughts, Minister, on whether the Health and Safety Executive should have undertaken an investigation into the Department in the light of some academic studies that have identified that there are numbers of suicides of benefit claimants. Also, would it be helpful for coroners to record whether people are of working age and claiming benefits on their death certificate, to help us to understand where there are challenges with systems impacting on people’s wellbeing?
Sir Stephen Timms: Should there be better data? I would certainly welcome there being better data. The question, I suppose, is how such data would be gathered.
The Department works quite hard to gather information from as wide a range of sources as possible about what is going on. You may want to talk to me about the Serious Case Panel this morning. That is an important part of the work that the Department does and that takes in information from all sorts of places: from coroners’ reports, from internal process reviews that arise from cases where we are aware that a particular tragedy occurred, from complaints and from people writing in those letters I was talking about earlier on. We try to use all the information available to us to provide feedback and improve our services.
I think you asked the Health and Safety Executive—was it last week when they came?—about whether they ought to have been investigating. I do not know quite what its answer was, but the Health and Safety Executive is focused on health and safety at work, which is rather different, I think, from the concern that we are discussing this morning.
In terms of working with coroners, this is an important area. Let me just ask Gail to comment on how that is working.
Dr Allsopp: Specifically about working with coroners, we have strengthened that. Prior to my arrival in the Department, it was pretty strong anyway, with Liz’s team working on the Prevention of Future Deaths reports. We have strengthened that now. I co-sign as a single, senior civil servant looking at all those reports so that we can start to try to draw themes. The numbers are small so we have to be very careful about doing that. We have now taken the first step of bringing that to our clinical governance board to look at those themes. We have done that in January. That will, in turn, feed up to the Serious Case Panel as well.
What is important to say about suicide is it is never one thing, and I think that is an important thing to remember. You also have to remember that some of the risk factors for suicide, particularly for working-age people and particularly for men, are loss of work and loss of income. In terms of those risk factors for suicide, of course people who are on benefits will be at risk, but it does not necessarily mean it is the Department that is the only trigger for that suicide. What is important about the cases we look at, both from my perspective and particularly for Liz’s team, is that we look at that holistic approach to what is going on.
The coroners’ Prevention of Future Deaths reports that come through are important because they also give us an idea of the different number of services that people are interacting with. In the ones that I have seen thus far, we are never the sole agency that is working with people, who often have chaotic and very difficult lives, and I think that is important to take into account when we are thinking about this.
Q93 Chair: Steve mentioned suicide, but we are very aware as a Committee that that is not the only cause of death of claimants. I think what is behind Steve’s question was particularly the fact that we do not have a true scale of deaths of claimants. Although we know that you have investigated, I think, about 80 or 90 over the past year, we do not know whether that is a true reflection of the number of claimant deaths that we need to be aware of. I think that is behind Steve’s question. They are not all suicides: Errol Graham did not die of suicide; he died of starvation.
Dr Allsopp: With the sheer number of people who our Department touches and the lives that it touches, there are, of course, going to be lots of people who die in the process every single year who are in touch with our Department. Sometimes there will be a trigger within the Department that makes something worse, but there will be lots of people who die where there is no trigger within the Department, so finding out the number of people—
Chair: Absolutely, and it is about trying to understand that. On death certificates, there is no way of recording whether that person was a claimant—it is occupation and previous occupation. Whether we should have a better understanding of the working-age people who are dying was behind Steve’s question. I will leave it there if I may, but I think this is a point that we will return to. I am going to move on now to Jo Baxter.
Johanna Baxter: Thank you to the panel. Turning to the internal process reviews, I am conscious that the DWP introduced new criteria to determine if a case should be considered for an IPR in 2021. We have heard evidence or seen concerns regarding how cases are identified for an IPR. Daphne Hall, the vice chair of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers said, “There is nowhere near enough transparency. The process to refer into the IPR was one of the questions on your consultation that I googled and I could not find it anywhere…the DWP accounts were published. Embedded in the…accounts is the referral process for IPRs and how it works”—but that that was “the only place” where the information was. Can you talk us through the criteria that the Department have for identifying cases for an IPR in the first instance?
Sir Stephen Timms: Let me start. It is very important that there is much more openness in the future around this whole process. You have asked about the criteria and that is one area, but also about what is learned from these reviews and what the upshot of them is as well. That has been pretty opaque in the past and that needs to change. On the criteria, Liz, are you able to pick that up?
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes. We have covered this, I think, several times with the Committee but just for completeness, the criteria—I am going to read it just to make sure that it is correct—are, “there is a suggestion or allegation that the department’s actions or omissions may have negatively contributed to the customer’s circumstances, and a customer has suffered serious harm, has died (including by suicide), or where it has reason to believe there has been an attempted suicide”. That is the first part. Or, “the department is asked to participate in a Safeguarding Adults Review (SAR), a Significant Case Review”—that is a sub-element of that for Scotland—"a Domestic Homicide Review…or is named as an Interested Party at an Inquest. An IPR will be conducted regardless of whether there is an allegation against the department” when that second part applies.
On the point of referral, we actively promote across the Department that any of our people can refer. Of course, our external partners can also refer, as can the safeguarding adults boards if it is required, but we normally proactively take that as part of our participation in those boards.
Q94 Johanna Baxter: Are there any circumstances in which a family member could request an IPR?
Elizabeth Fairburn: It would normally be triggered by a family member contacting the Department. That is what the trigger is. If a family member contacted the Department and said, “My family member is at risk of serious harm,” or has unfortunately taken their own life or has died, and there is a suggestion that that is because of something that the Department has done, that would trigger an IPR. That is what happens.
Q95 Johanna Baxter: Are you still considering ways to share certain information from IPRs with family members of those affected?
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes.
Johanna Baxter: Yes?
Sir Stephen Timms: We are looking at this. There is an argument for a more proactive approach here, but we do have to work through the various legal issues. It could involve providing information to a family member who did not previously know about a particular thing that was going on, and all that needs to be thought about. However, in principle, I think the Department being a bit more proactive here and willing to share with family members would be the right thing to do. I think Liz wanted to add something to that.
Elizabeth Fairburn: It is worth noting as well that on the point of sharing our IPRs, we often get asked through FOIs to share IPRs. Within the next couple of months, all our IPRs will be shared. Clearly, they will be anonymised, but from a transparency point of view I think that is a good step forward.
Q96 Johanna Baxter: Definitely. Just on the back of that then, obviously the Department has said that when a case is referred for an IPR but does not meet the necessary criteria, there is a process to encourage learning and raise awareness. Can you talk us through that process? These are cases that do not meet the criteria but there is still learning that can be—
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes. We have a tiered approach to learning but at a very fundamental level, where the cases that you are talking about would fall, it would be in our service line improvements. My team, who conduct the IPRs independently, would then meet regularly, when there are cases to discuss, with the right leaders of each of the business areas to feed back the learning that has come about. They would swarm around a specific case and they would discuss what has happened, why it has happened and what improvements can be put in place.
To take that forward—because it is my team that co-ordinates all this—that can then feed into what we call the complex needs steering group, and at that level it is attended from across the Department. Where there are things that other areas can learn from, even though it has happened in one particular benefit line or a particular team, we can share the output of what we have seen through those service line improvements.
Then at the very top, as you all are aware, we have the Serious Case Panel. When we talk about seeking evidence, my team go beyond what we have seen to say, “Is that thematic across the Department? We have seen it in this case, but what evidence do we have to suggest that’s happening elsewhere?” As Sir Stephen has already covered, we take complaints, we take operational MI and we might take ICE—the Independent Case Examiner—outputs and so on to build a picture of what is happening and whether it is something that we take to the Serious Case Panel for the most senior people in the Department to look at and endorse the actions that we want to take.
Q97 Johanna Baxter: Thank you for that. That is helpful. Going now to the Serious Case Panel, does it have full visibility and consider all serious cases that involve the DWP or is it only a select number of cases that are taken forward by the executive team? I guess is my question is whether there is a filter to them.
Elizabeth Fairburn: There are two parts to it. We share all our serious cases with the executive team as and when they come in. There is full visibility. We do not screen or not share anything with that team, and they are often actively involved in the responses, especially where coroners are involved and so on. Neil, you have just taken this agenda so you have first-hand knowledge of what happens there.
In the Serious Case Panel, what we try to do is bring what we have learned from serious cases. That is all of them, not just one. If a serious case has happened, what are the learnings and how do we bring that through? We try to bring the voice of the customer into that forum. We try to bring an evidence base to say, “This is something more broad and we need to take some action.” We will bring recommendations to that board as well for them to endorse—is there a different way, a challenge and so on? Neil, I do not know if you want to give your perspective.
Neil Couling: It is just understanding that in the Serious Case Panel we will focus on the themes, not the individual case. However, in the conduct of my responsibilities, one of my directors runs our Personal Independence Payment processing teams, for example, and if a case went wrong there I would want to see it. I would want to understand what had happened and if something is systemic or if it was just some human error. You will get human error here, as well as things being wrong with the process.
Sir Stephen Timms: It is, on the face of it, quite surprising that the Serious Case Panel does not look at serious cases. It looks at themes, as Neil has said. It does not look at individual cases. That is one of the things we just need to reflect on—whether that is right or whether there is something missing in the system that we ought to address.
Again, I think more should be published around this whole process and more information should be made available. Now, obviously there are constraints there, given the personal information that is likely to be in the cases, but we are going to have a serious look at the design and the purpose of the Serious Case Panel.
Neil Couling: I think the thing we would like to do—I said I would like to do that when I got your report, because that will help me understand where your concerns are and how, in any reforms we might make, we might address some of those, as well as some things I am worried about like the serious cases.
Q98 Chair: That is very reassuring. Within that, I am conscious that in addition to the two criteria that Ms Fairburn mentioned, which are external concerns from external organisations, there is also the opportunity for any DWP staff to raise a case or refer for IPR. I know I raised this last year but I do not think we bottomed this out. Of the 75 IPR referrals that were made between April 2023 and March 2024, only 53 were seen as meeting the criteria. What criteria are we talking about? Are those all external? Were there no internal referrals?
Elizabeth Fairburn: They are all of them, any referral from any—
Q99 Chair: Okay. Who were they from? We do not know what the internal criteria are for any member of staff to raise—
Elizabeth Fairburn: That is the first bullet point that I read. That is the internal criteria. If you want us to look and see where those referrals came from, we could break down those numbers for you.
Chair: That would be very helpful, thank you. I am sorry if I—
Sir Stephen Timms: Where the 75 came from—is that the information?
Elizabeth Fairburn: Yes, where they were referred from.
Chair: Yes, and why only 53 were deemed to meet the criteria.
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes, we can do that. Just a general point here about openness: there is a strong case for the Department being more open about this whole process than has been the case in the past, and I think if we do that, that will be quite an important step in rebuilding the trust in the Department.
Q100 Chair: Indeed. Thank you so much, all of you. You have been incredibly forthcoming and it has helped us in determining the future for this particular inquiry, so thank you very much.
Sir Stephen Timms: Can I make one further point, sorry, before you all leave?
Chair: You can, of course. I was in full flow there.
Sir Stephen Timms: If you just indulge me for a moment, I just wanted to make a comment about John Pring’s book, “The Department”, which I have read and others may well have read, subtitled, “How a Violent Government Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds and Hid the Evidence”. It is obviously a very strong allegation that is being made. My view is that John Pring is entitled to a good deal of credit for drawing attention to these things over a long period through his work on the Disability News Service. I have read the book. I think every MP was sent a copy of it. I found it a very interesting book and it does include meticulous accounts of 13 deaths, most of them suicides but, as you said, there was Errol Graham, who died of starvation. They were not all suicides.
There is absolutely no doubt that that book highlights serious mistakes made in the Department. This is a very important contribution to this whole debate. However, the book does not produce any evidence of the conspiracy that is implied by the “violent government bureaucracy” point. I have said already that I was a Minister in this Department first of all, or its predecessor, 27 years ago. I think this is my fifth ministerial stint. I was a shadow for five years. I chaired this Committee for four years. I have never seen anything that makes me think there is a conspiracy going on in the Department. Certainly, there are mistakes. On John Pring’s complaint about hiding the evidence, as I have already said this morning, I think there is a very strong case for us being much more open in a lot of these areas than has been the case in the past—but it was not the Department that hid it. Ministers chose that things ought not to be open.
The trouble is if you think it is a conspiracy, that means you do not have to bother with the hard graft of working out how to solve these problems in the way the Committee now is and the Department is as well. We do need that hard work. The Committee, the Department—between us, we need to work out how to stop the mistakes that John Pring is right to draw attention to. I want to say that his work has been important and valuable, but I just do not think it is right or helpful to give the impression that there is some huge conspiracy going on here because there just is not.
Chair: Thank you. You do have the final word. With that, I close the meeting.