Public Accounts Committee

Oral evidence: Personal Independence Payments, HC 1116

Thursday 20 March 2014

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 March 2014

Watch the meeting: http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=15137

Members present: Margaret Hodge (Chair); Mr Richard Bacon, Chris Heaton-Harris, Meg Hillier, Fiona Mactaggart, Austin Mitchell, Nick Smith

Amyas Morse, Comptroller and Auditor General, Gabrielle Cohen, Assistant Auditor General, Max Tse, Director, National Audit Office, and Marius Gallaher, Alternative Treasury Officer of Accounts, were in attendance.

Witnesses: James Bolton, Policy Officer, Mencap, Lesley Hawes, Chief Executive, DABD UK, and Vicky Pearlman, Social Policy Officer, Citizens Advice, gave evidence.

              Chair: Welcome. I don’t think Mencap has previously been before us, have you?

              James Bolton: Not this Committee.

              Q1 Chair: You haven’t, but Citizens Advice certainly has.

              The purpose of this very short session is for you, from your experience on the ground of dealing with the implementation of this policy, to help the Committee to understand where we should direct our questioning. We are not here to challenge anything that you are doing, but this is for you to help us to ask the right questions. I will start with Vicky, if I may. Tell me, from the CAB point of view, what it has been like and what has come up for you. What are the issues that you’ve had that are difficult?

              Vicky Pearlman: I think it is fair to say that the introduction of the new benefit has not been without its problems.

              Chair: Understatement of the year.

              Vicky Pearlman: Currently we have 3,000 outlets across the country and we are getting evidence from all of them, particularly about delays in the process at the moment, and at every part of the process, I think it is fair to say—those managed by the DWP, and those managed by Atos and Capita. That is resulting in two things: people have to wait a very long time to get a face-to-face assessment; and we still don’t really know what the outcomes of those assessments are. We are still very short of any kind of knowledge about what decisions are being made. So our evidence is that you get through the beginning part of the claims process and through the assessment, and then it all goes very quiet, because we have very little evidence about what actually happens at the end.

              Q2 Chair: Do you notice a difference between the providers in your casework?

              Vicky Pearlman: Not a huge amount. We are getting more feedback about Atos in terms of assessment delays, but I am conscious that that might be because its coverage is greater. Certainly we are seeing problems across both Capita and Atos at the moment.

              Q3 Chair: And with the cases when people have limited life expectancy, have you seen any improvement in them over recent months?

              Vicky Pearlman: We are still seeing significant evidence of delays, although it is difficult to tell—there is a bit of a time lag. There has been some improvement with the cases of people with a terminal illness being handled more quickly, although it is still not as quick as the Department expected it to be.

              Q4 Chair: And in the casework you are getting, is there anything that demonstrates that there is a knock-on effect on public expenditure in other services? Walk us through that one.

              Vicky Pearlman: We are aware that there will be knock-ons. Because of the length of the delays, people are waiting nine months or more to get through the process. Most of these people are new claims and they are without any kind of support for their disability needs during that period. If people are being reassessed, they are still on disability living allowance and have access to all those other things. We are starting to see that people not having a decision on their PIP award has impacts on their families’ entitlement to carer’s allowance and access to the blue badge, and I have seen some evidence about concerns over being pulled out of the benefit cap—all those different bits that rely on you having an award of PIP. Discretionary housing payments are being used to support people in their homes while they are waiting for a PIP decision that then passports them on to other benefits, so we are beginning to see considerable impact.

              Lesley Hawes: May I add to that? We are finding in our area that we are getting more people needing food parcels or relying on social fund money to a huge extent. We are being bombarded because of it. All the different anti-poverty strategies that are in place in our area are being used by these people who really have problems. Since last June, we have had 185 claims and of those we have had 15 decisions, and they are still ongoing. That seems to be typical. We have contacted other local boroughs that we work with to find out if their experience is the same, and it is exactly the same.

              Five candidates have been unsuccessful and we have resubmitted. We are going through the process, but with one of them, it has taken since last July to move forward to any sort of appeal. The time scale for waiting is ridiculous. When we challenge the DWP and Atos, they blame each other for the delays and tell us, “No, they are not sending them.”

              We have also had queries when Atos assessments have been by telephone. We are very concerned about that, because what sort of assessment would it be? If you get somebody who is incontinent and you say, “Are you continent?”, they reply, “Oh, yes, I’m fine.” A man of a certain age will not admit it. If you are one to one, you get a full and proper assessment, so I am concerned about the type of assessments.

              Q5 Chair: Have you had a lot of that, Lesley?

              Lesley Hawes: We have had an awful lot of that. I have case studies here that I can let you have at the end.

              Q6 Chair: Go through one or two that bring out the general points. I have some, too. Just to say, obviously I work in Barking and Dagenham with you.

              Lesley Hawes: Someone with severe mental health problems including depression, stress and anxiety requested a form in July 2013. We filled in the form in August 2013. Atos completed the assessment in late November and DWP notified the person that they were entitled to an award, but it was seven and a half months before that award was in. In the meantime, there was significant stress to the client and they ended up needing a hospital intervention because they did not know where to go for help. We were providing them with help, but they were gradually deteriorating.

              In another case, we had a client living with her husband, also with health problems. We requested forms in August 2013 and they were returned. The client did not hear anything more until December 2013, when we rang—

              Q7 Nick Smith: What was that period of time?

              Lesley Hawes: It was from August 2013. The form was submitted in September. The client did not hear anything and rang the DWP in December 2013, and again in January. On both occasions she was told that the assessment would be arranged and that Atos would be in touch but, to date, she has had no communication from Atos over a period of seven months. She has diabetes and gastric problems and requires a specific diet. We have had to refer her to places where we can get food that is relevant to her. She is using the social fund and other services to be able to survive. Obviously, her health in the meantime has deteriorated. Do you want a third example?

              Q8 Chair: Yes, go on; one more.

              Lesley Hawes: A client requested forms in August. They were completed and returned at the end of August. She has not had any correspondence at all about it. She has mental health issues, including psychotic episodes, as well as learning difficulties. She requires extra one-to-one support most of the time. The ESA does not cover her needs, so we are, once more, providing other sorts of charitable things. Otherwise she is using different services from social services and others that we are able to access.

              Q9 Chair: There is not a problem in Barking and Dagenham, as far as I can see, in accessing the points where Atos will do the assessment, is there?

              Lesley Hawes: No, there is not a problem there.

              Q10 Chair: That’s all right. James?

              James Bolton: Mencap represents almost half a million people with learning disabilities who are currently in receipt of DLA. We expect the majority of those people to be transferred to PIP, starting in 2015, but we have examples of people now who are reaching 16 in the reassessment areas who are undergoing reconsideration for PIP. One person in particular stands out. This is a recent case of somebody who turned 16 shortly after PIP was introduced and, because of his learning disability and other needs that he has, can’t go to an assessment centre. When the family member contacted the assessment provider—

              Q11 Chair: Who was it?

              James Bolton: It was Atos in this case. When they contacted them to ask for a home visit, they were told that there were no appointments available for the next six months and no facility to book appointments more than six months in advance.

              Q12 Chair: They were told what?

              James Bolton: That there were no home visits available for the next six months.

              Q13 Chair: Have you had that as well?

              Lesley Hawes: Yes.

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes, and it is not just about home visits; it is often repeated to people who are trying to make an assessment centre appointment, too. It is not uncommon for us currently to see delays of seven months—up from about five or six months—just to get the assessment.

              James Bolton: This family member was told simply to keep calling back until either an appointment was cancelled, or a new one became available.

              Q14 Fiona Mactaggart: Did this person get DLA during that period?

              James Bolton: Yes, because it was someone who was turning 16, but it is more to do with the fear, really. People are afraid of potentially losing their allowance. It is money that they need to survive and to live an ordinary day-to-day life. People are having to wait six months simply to get an appointment after waiting several months to get in touch with the assessment provider, and then we are hearing of delays of two or three months, quite often, once the assessment provider has given the file back to DWP.

              I will give another example. Through working with the Disability Benefits Consortium closely, a colleague at Parkinson’s UK told me about somebody who claimed PIP as a new claimant in April last year and got their decision earlier this month. That is an 11-month period of just waiting while having no money whatsoever and not being able to support themselves financially. We have heard stories of family members having to reduce working hours, or to stop working altogether, just to look after a person until the decision is made. Although we know that claims will be backdated, the extra expense incurred will not be, and no recompense will be paid.

              Lesley Hawes: May I also mention mandatory reconsideration? When it is at the mandatory reconsideration stage following a negative decision, that can take nine to 12 months, even though that is outside the guidelines that are set by DWP. In fact, it would not be unusual for somebody who applied in June 2013 not to get their decision until March 2015.

              Q15 Chair: Because of the appeal process.  Do they get legal aid for the appeal, by the way?

              Vicky Pearlman: Not any more.

              Q16 Chair: So who supports them?  Do you support them?

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes, as far as we are able, as do organisations such as ours, but obviously the removal of legal aid has impacts on the capacity of bureaux across the country.

              Q17 Chair: Take us back through that again, Lesley.

              Lesley Hawes: It is not inconceivable that a client who applied in June 2013, and who receives a negative decision in March 2014 and requests a mandatory reconsideration at the same time, will receive a decision in May 2014.  They then enter the tribunal service programme, in which case they would not be expected to receive an appeal hearing until March 2015.

              Q18 Fiona Mactaggart: In that time, presumably they are surviving by borrowing, using food banks and so on. Do your clients tell you about the costs of short-term borrowing? I am sure that a lot of people turn to Wonga or whatever in these moments. Do you have any evidence about that?

              Lesley Hawes: I can get you the evidence quite easily, yes. Locally, we are referring people to credit unions because we have a good, healthy credit union locally that would help and that we can liaise with.

              Q19 Fiona Mactaggart: And your credit union will lend to people who are not already savers.

              Lesley Hawes: Oh yes.

              Fiona Mactaggart: Good.

              Amyas Morse: Have you had examples of that sort of thing so far, or is it just theoretical—I mean the thing with the tribunal? I understood that there were almost no appeals going through right now.

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes. Because there have been very few decisions, we have seen almost no evidence about reconsiderations and no evidence at all about appeals.

              Lesley Hawes: Whereas we are dealing with—

              Q20 Chair: You are seeing it already?

              Lesley Hawes: Yes, because one of our senior managers also partially works for a solicitor’s as well. He is actually picking up work as well.

              Q21 Chair: What would you like to see changed?

              Vicky Pearlman: Like I said at the beginning, there are problems at every point, partly because of how the benefit has been designed in terms of its delivery, so let’s start there. The new benefit is unique in that it requires people to make a telephone call to make a claim. Other benefits you can claim on paper. We anticipated, and we are finding, that disabled people face significant difficulties in managing that phone call.

              Q22 Chair: You have to make a phone call.

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes, for the most part.

              Q23 Chair: I noticed in the Report that it was said that, for some reason, they abandoned digital applications. I cannot for the life of me understand why, but we will ask them that.

              Vicky Pearlman: It is based on a phone call. There is a paper claim option, but it is proving quite difficult to get.

              Q24 Fiona Mactaggart: What does that mean?

              Vicky Pearlman: You have to ring the claim line to request a paper form, and we have significant evidence of people being refused the form, or it taking weeks to come through—

              Q25 Chair: Is it an 0845 number?

              Vicky Pearlman: I cannot remember.

              Max Tse: New claims are always 0800 numbers.

              Vicky Pearlman: They are struggling to get through and, once they are on the phone, the call can take half an hour or more. The questions are quite detailed—establishing residency and other non-disability focused information. People are finding that difficult to manage—people with mental health problems or sensory impairments, and others who just cannot access a phone, because they are in hospital or various other places. That is complicated further by the fact that it is very difficult for third parties such as CAB advisers and others to help people with it. In reality, what has to happen is that you need to have the disabled person who is making the claim next to you—if I was an adviser, I would need the disabled person next to me and able to verify their identify—to get them through part 1. That part 1 used to be part of the whole DLA form and you just did it on paper and sent it in. That is proving a significant barrier to people. It means that if you cannot get through it with them during an advice appointment, you cannot provide that help. If you are on outreach, it is obviously not appropriate to be having that kind of conversation with the Department. One of the things that we are really keen to see is that system managed better so that advisers and other third parties can help people to make the initial claim. That is their gateway and how the date of claim is established, so it is really important.

              Q26 Fiona Mactaggart: Is the CAB able to keep forms for other kinds of application?

              Vicky Pearlman: Stocks of, yes.

              Fiona Mactaggart: But not this.

              Vicky Pearlman: No. They are all individually barcoded.

              Q27 Mr Bacon: The helpline is 0845. Have you had any complaints about what people are paying when they stay on the phone for a long time?

              Vicky Pearlman: We have had some evidence of difficulty in paying for that.  It is wrapped up in the whole “not getting your benefit” thing—exacerbating that.

              Q28 Mr Bacon: A new claim starts with an 0800 number, but it rapidly goes to being the helpline, doesn’t it?

              Vicky Pearlman: Absolutely. What we are finding is that claimants and advisers are having to make repeated calls to the helpline to establish what is happening, because of the delays. That ramps up the cost and also the inconvenience.

              Q29 Mr Bacon: Is it provided by a third-party provider that takes the equivalent of a premium-rate slice?

              Vicky Pearlman: I do not know.

              Mr Bacon: Okay; we will ask the DWP.

              Q30 Chair: Go on. That was your first point.

              Vicky Pearlman: I got to my first point, but did not go further.

              So we are seeing problems at part 1 and with getting a part 2 form sent out. The part 2 form is telling the story of how your disability affects you. Clients are reporting significant delays.  It is a time-limited process: having completed part 1, you have to return part 2 within four weeks—or ask for an extension, which is not widely publicised, but is available—so bureaux are routinely making appointments for people two weeks into that four-week period in the expectation that they will have the form. The form is not dissimilar in terms of completion to the DLA forms; they take two hours or more to complete, so it is a good chunk of advice time, if nothing else, and often difficult for disabled people to manage. Bureaux are making an appointment two weeks in advance to give them plenty of time to get the form and then to send it back before the date, but they are finding repeatedly that people do not have that form with them. Because bureaux do not have stocks of the form, it is very difficult—it is a wasted two-hour appointment. The disabled person has made it to the bureau—has not gone to work, has arranged child care or whatever—and the bureau in effect loses the two-hour slot as well.

              Q31 Nick Smith: Is it only the barcode that is different about the form?

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes, they are all individually barcoded before they leave the Department. That is new as well and it is causing problems.

              Q32 Chair: James, do you want to add anything?

              James Bolton: Yes. In relation to part 2 of the claim form, we are anticipating lots of people with a learning disability simply not being able to fill in and return the form themselves. There are further issues with that, because the letters sent out with the forms are often not accessible to people with a learning disability. We have asked the DWP several times to routinely produce an easy-read version for the almost half a million people with a learning disability in the country, but as of yet one has not been produced.

              We were quite surprised to learn that Braille, audio and large-print versions are routinely produced as alternative formats, but the half a million people with a learning disability are left in the dark. We anticipate that that means that those people will often not return part 2 of the form within the four weeks allotted. There is quite a strange issue here, because if you do not return that form, your claim is simply passed to the assessment provider without the data, and the responsibility is passed from the DWP to Atos and Capita to proactively contact the people and make an appointment. If we face the difficulty of accessible formats with the letters for part 2, it is most likely that we will face that problem again, and people with a learning disability, who may have minimal support, might simply fall through the cracks and drop out of the system.

              Vicky Pearlman: There was a good reason for introducing those. It is a vulnerable-claimants process. It is designed so that if people are not able to complete part 2, which is the detailed form, at all or in enough detail, they are not lost to the system, because that was a problem with DLA. But our evidence suggests that that is being used much more frequently, and that has a really important knock-on effect because it means that the providers are having to do many more face-to-face assessments than they anticipated, which is obviously contributing to the delays.

              Q33 Chair: Lesley, what would you change?

              Lesley Hawes: It is mainly time scales. They ought to be sticking to the time scales and, if anything, they should be tightened, not loosened as they have been. The DWP and Atos ought to try to work together properly, because the vulnerable people we are talking about are sitting in the middle of two lots of people arguing about whose responsibility is what. That does not help matters. With regard to the tribunals or appeals, there should be some provision for people to have appeals, because we are also finding that people do not want to go to appeal. Point No. 1 is that they can’t understand how to and they have to go to somebody. There is no funding for that; no advocacy is provided. That’s the case only if you hit on local voluntary sector groups or nationals. There seems to be no provision to support the individual through any of this.

              Vicky Pearlman: May I add a couple of things about collecting additional evidence, sometimes known as medical evidence, and about the assessment process itself? One thing that I think is contributing significantly to the delays is the whole issue of evidence, whether it comes from the claimant or from other health and social care practitioners. That is disappointing because when PIP was designed, we got quite excited about the new way of collecting this evidence. One of our key criticisms of the work capability assessment has been the requirement that claimants pay for it themselves and have to get it themselves. With PIP, it’s entirely different, but it’s no better—what a disappointment! We are finding that there is a distinct lack—that the providers are not getting back the evidence that they need from health and care professionals. I would be interested to know from the Department what work it has done—

              Q34 Chair: They are not getting it back or they are not using it? My evidence was that they ought to be getting it, but they are not asking for it or not using it.

              Vicky Pearlman: The evidence that we are seeing is mixed. Certainly Atos told us that at one point it was getting back only 1% of the evidence that it had requested, which is disastrously low.

              Q35 Chair: One per cent?

              Vicky Pearlman: One per cent. I don’t know whether that’s different—

              Q36 Chair: One per cent of what?

              Vicky Pearlman: Of the evidence that they had requested. My understanding is that it’s 1% of the evidence that they have requested from health and social care practitioners.

              James Bolton: Yes.

              Q37 Nick Smith: When you say “other social care practitioners”, are you normally talking about GPs or others?

              James Bolton: At Mencap, we are more concerned with social care practitioners; we are concerned with the educational establishment, support workers—those kinds of professionals, who have much more insight into the day-to-day life of someone with a learning disability. But I would just like to reinforce that point: we also heard that it was a single-digit percentage return within 30 days of additional evidence that was requested. The knock-on effect is that once those 30 days have elapsed, the assessment automatically reverts to a face-to-face one, which is causing some of the substantial delays. From the NAO Report, we know that 98% of claims are done face to face, and only 2% on paper; the original target was 25%. That is causing lots of delays. We are extremely concerned about people with a severe learning disability, who might even be non-verbal in some situations. Through the lack of evidence that is returned, they might have to undergo an extremely stressful face-to-face assessment.

              Q38 Nick Smith: Can I return to this very poor 1% return? This happens with health and social care professionals, not GPs?

              Vicky Pearlman: It could be GPs. On the form, claimants are asked to provide the details of their GP and also of anyone else who knows them well—that is the phrase. That is because of the recognition that, for lots of people, particularly those with learning disabilities, they might have seen their GP only because they had tonsillitis, so that is no help at all.

              Q39 Nick Smith: About this diverse group, do you have any idea of its make-up at all?

              Vicky Pearlman: Of people who are asked for evidence?

              Nick Smith: Yes.

              Vicky Pearlman: It depends on the disability involved, but it stretches across. I think the primary focus has always been on GPs, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and those sorts of people; and then social care practitioners, social workers and community mental health teams—those sorts of people who have day-to-day knowledge of people.

              James Bolton: I just want to point out quickly that GPs are reimbursed for their time when providing evidence, but no other professional is given any monetary incentive at all.

              Chair: They should do it anyway.

              Q40 Meg Hillier: Going back to when people make the initial phone call, Jason Feeney gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee, saying: “Claimants were not getting through the security questions used to confirm an individual’s identity when they made the required initial application by telephone.” If he is saying that, it must be true, because it would filter through to him. How much is that a problem in those conversations?

              Vicky Pearlman: It is a huge problem. We have been picking that up from the start. These are not straightforward questions.

              There is also some behind-the-scenes data matching, which I do not quite understand. That is also causing delays. Disappointingly, that is a backroom process, because those verification things do not really need to be sorted out until you pay the benefit. At the moment, there is a very long time between part 1 and the benefit being paid, so I fail to see why the rest of the front-facing process—the assessment for the decision making—cannot continue while that identification—

              Q41 Meg Hillier: Presumably that could be done with passports or other identity documents—although passports might not be easy for some of James Bolton’s clients.

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes; some of the questions are more difficult.

              Q42 Meg Hillier: I recently helped an elderly friend, and it was quite challenging. His English was poor and it was quite tricky.

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes. Also, you need to have quite a lot of information up front.

              Q43 Meg Hillier: Can I ask James Bolton about some of the clients you deal with? I have, in the past, cared for someone with a learning disability, and I knew more about anything than anyone else, but I would not have qualified as a relative or an advocate to be the professional. Yet of the 13 different agencies at any point involved in that person’s care and support, it would be difficult to pinpoint one, or even a combination, that would have given the full picture about her life, having been born with a disability that she was never going to improve from. You must have people like that. How on earth are they going to get through with this professional advice? Who can do that?

              James Bolton: That is a really important point. We know that, in some examples, the assessment providers are having to contact a range of professionals for seven, eight or nine medical conditions that someone might have, so they are having to contact potentially dozens of professionals. With some learning disabilities, that might have to happen as well.

              That is why we are extremely concerned about the lack of reuse of disability living allowance evidence at the moment. It is not routinely reused. There is a lot of confusion around exactly how that evidence can be reused at the moment. Not everyone is being asked whether they want to reuse it. As far as we know, not everyone is having their evidence reused. For a lot of people we represent, that would be the perfect solution.

              Q44 Chair: These are people who are on DLA and are being moved on to PIP, which are very few?

              Vicky Pearlman: Currently. There will be a lot more.

              Q45 Meg Hillier: Can I ask a general question of all of you? We in this Committee see a lot of what we call cost shunting, where one Department makes a decision and some other Department or body would pick that cost up.

              James, for the example that we were just talking about, you go to a social worker, who perhaps does not have regular contact after the initial assessment of the package—frankly, I had very little contact with the social worker after the initial assessment, unless someone moved house—and then you have, say, in my case, orthotic shoes and the glass eye department at the hospital, but there wasn’t anyone who dealt with the learning disability directly. But all those people would have had to give up their time. Have you done an assessment—you gave us an idea, Vicky, of the costs to the CAB—of perhaps the hours involved? That would give us a proxy of the cost, in the different professionals having to get involved. Is there any way that could be done in a more streamlined way, which we could then recommend when we talk to a Department?

              James Bolton: I think it could take a lot of hours, especially when you consider that people’s learning disabilities often have co-morbidities and the providers have to gather information on all the conditions and contact all the professionals involved. The main way in which we would like to address this is through the reuse of DLA evidence. For everyone with a learning disability who is currently in receipt of DLA, their evidence could be reused, and that could solve that problem. The educational record—possibly one of the most important documents—could be used again, and the original care plans could be used again. It would save a lot of people time and a lot of people money. Within that, the GP is always contacted more or less as far as we can tell and, as Vicky said, for someone with a learning disability, there is really no point. The most useful information that they provide is that this person’s IQ was this when we gave them a test and therefore they have a learning disability, but that is not something that we subscribe to.

              Q46 Fiona Mactaggart: The DWP announced last month that a direct telephone line for terminally ill patients would be introduced. Has it been? Do you know what it is?

              Vicky Pearlman: I think it is just about to be introduced. We have been involved in conversations about the need for it and about what form the words might take. I am not sure whether it has just come in or is about to.

              Q47 Chris Heaton-Harris: It says in the Work and Pensions Committee report on PIP that there is meant to be a telephone option, so when you dial the 0800 number, at the very start there will be options. I don’t know whether you have walked anyone through that telephone call recently to see whether those options are there for terminally ill people.

              Vicky Pearlman: I haven’t, no, but we could do very easily.

              James Bolton: At a recent meeting with DWP, they were discussing changing the options. I don’t know whether that has happened yet.

              Q48 Chair: Is there anything else you want to add?

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes: assessments. We have focused quite heavily on the DWP and some of the things that happen from the DWP end that impact on the delays around assessments, but I think it is important to know how long people are waiting and how difficult people are finding it to make an appointment for an assessment. We have lots of examples. Atos and Capita have slightly different delivery models, but we have seen far too many examples of people who have arranged a home visit with Capita and no one has turned up.

              Q49 Chair: Nobody turned up?

              Vicky Pearlman: Not once, not twice, but three times sometimes. That has not been unusual. That has partly been a problem around scheduling and how different computers work with each other, but in terms of the claimant experience, that is really very poor.

              Q50 Chair: Is that significant?

              Vicky Pearlman: Yes. Sometimes they are told that their assessment will be cancelled, and on other occasions they have waited in and no one has arrived. Certainly in terms of arranging an Atos assessment, people are waiting six months or more, and they are being told, as James said, that they cannot make an appointment and will have to phone back. It is not a regular occurrence, but people do arrive at assessment centres and are told that there is no health care professional to see them, or that their assessment has been cancelled. People have to travel for up to 90 minutes, which is quite difficult to imagine, and how difficult that might be for someone depends entirely on what the journey involves. We get regular reports of people having to make multiple changes of public transport and having to get support at the beginning and end of the journey, and that is proving difficult. In the early stages there were not enough assessment centres, and people were struggling to do the journey within the 90 minutes. There are more now, and I am seeing fewer reports of that part being problematic.

              Q51 Fiona Mactaggart: Are they all accessible to people with mobility difficulties?

              Vicky Pearlman: As far as I know.

              Lesley Hawes: The only thing I would like to say is that of these 10 successful claimants, we sat in—we had advocates—at seven of them, and they were successful. We did not have anybody at the five that were not successful, so we are wondering about the type of assessments that are being done or whether our people being present helps. We are going to do a study of that to see whether we can discover why and how that is happening.

              Q52 Chair: Have you talked to the people who have failed?

              Lesley Hawes: Yes.

              Q53 Chair: And when you talked to them, did you feel that they did not really get what they were being asked?

              Lesley Hawes: Yes. They did not understand what was being asked or did not fully understand and just glazed over it, as people tend to do because of pride and dignity, which they want to keep.

              James Bolton: We welcome the fact that Atos and Capita are both stating on the initial packs that they send out to claimants that they are welcome to bring a companion with them, but we are concerned about the lack of proactive use of a useful stock of accessible formats for certain groups of people. There has been no doubt that, for example, under the WCA lots of people with learning disabilities were going into assessments on their own because they did not know that they could take a companion in with them. It is vital to do that, because for various reasons people with a learning disability often overstate their capacity to do certain activities. If they are asked whether they can prepare a meal themselves, they might say yes, but their companion will step up and say, “Yes, but only once. I’ve prepared and cut all the food and put it in the bowl for you.” It is that kind of nuance that only a companion can really bring out—I do not believe that the health care professionals would.

              Q54 Chris Heaton-Harris: I have a question for Vicky. I want to know about cloaked diseases and illnesses, such as lupus. One minute you can be absolutely fine and the next day—

              Vicky Pearlman: So, fluctuating conditions.

              Chris Heaton-Harris: I guess that not many such people have been through assessments, but do you have any experience of how they are being assessed?

              Vicky Pearlman: I think it is fair to say that we have had very little evidence to date about how the actual assessment is being conducted. The anecdotal stuff we have heard is that most people—if not everyone—have found it better than their experience of a work capability assessment, for example, in terms of human contact and it being a more pleasant experience. We have seen very few decisions so have very little feedback, but we would be happy to update the Committee as soon as we get it—we should get it.

              Q55 Chair: Well, I think we are going to return to this issue within a year.

              Vicky Pearlman: We are a bit stymied by the fact that we have not really got to decisions and do not really know what is happening at the other end.

              Chair: Thank you very much indeed. I think that you gave us a lot of very helpful material that we can use in our interrogation of those who are going to be held to account for what they are delivering. Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Lisa Coleman, Senior Policy Officer, Atos, Robert Devereux, Permanent Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions, Dr Stephen Duckworth, Chief Executive Officer, Capita PIP, and Jason Feeney, Benefits Director, Department for Work and Pensions, gave evidence.

              Q56 Chair: Right; welcome. I going to go straight into this. In my constituency, I have certainly had more cases relating to the delays in PIP than anything else over recent months. It has been absolutely amazing that in the past couple of weeks, miraculously, people who have been waiting six or seven months for an assessment have suddenly been given a date. I wonder whether there is a connection to today’s hearing, but I am very pleased for them that they have finally got a date.

              This is not another bit of bureaucracy, Mr Devereux; this is about people’s lives, and it is about the most vulnerable who really depend on this either to live independently or to be able to work.

              I want to start with Atos. I have seen the tender document that you submitted, particularly for lot 3, which is for London and the south of England. In that tender document, you committed and said that you would deliver the PIP service through an extensive estates network with 56 NHS hospitals, 25 private hospitals and 653 physiotherapy practices. You said that, didn’t you?

              Lisa Coleman: We said that we would have access to those sites, yes.

              Q57 Chair: You said more than that you would have access; you committed. Do you want me to read to you from the actual thing? The document is chock-a-block full of your commitments. You said: “We can deliver the PIP service through an extensive estates network comprising 56 NHS, 25 Private Hospital and over 653 Physiotherapy Practices.” You then went on to name a whole lot of NHS trusts where you said: “We have agreements in place”. You named NHS trusts, but did you have agreements in place with them?

              Lisa Coleman: At the point of the tender document, we were clear that what we were talking about was bidding for all four lots. As you know, we ended up winning lot 1 and lot 3.

              Q58 Chair: I am looking at lot 3, which happens to impact on a number of people sitting around this table, where you specifically stated that you had agreements in place with these sites. I am first looking at the NHS hospitals. I am asking a simple question: did you have agreements in place with the NHS hospitals, as you said you did?

              Lisa Coleman: At the point of writing that tender document, we could not have agreements in place with them because we had not signed a contract with the Department.

              Q59 Mr Bacon: In document 4, part 5, at pages 72 and 73 of your tender document, it states: “We have agreements in place whereby the contractual commitments of a failing partner can be picked up by another”. Are you saying that that tender document was incorrect?

              Lisa Coleman: No, absolutely not. I know that there have been accusations that we lied in the tender document, but we did not lie in the tender document. What we set out was what we were talking to the trusts about at the time.

              Q60 Mr Bacon: Can I just be clear? The reason why I interrupted the Chair just then was because your last sentence was that you could not have had agreements in place at that point. My point is that your tender document said: “We have agreements in place”. You just said a moment ago that you could not have had agreements in place. I am trying to figure out which of the two is true: the sentence you uttered just now or the sentence in your tender document. They cannot both be true, can they?

              Lisa Coleman: So what we had—

              Mr Bacon: They can’t both be true, can they?

              Lisa Coleman: No, absolutely. The way you have described it, they cannot both be true. We had an agreement in place with those trusts and the suppliers that we were talking to at that time to say that we were working with them. We did make a mistake, but we drafted that tender document in a three-week period. It was a very short procurement. We had agreements with them to say that we could name them in the tender document. Once we knew what the scope of our contract would be, we would then put those contracts in place. We were very open with the Department about exactly where we were.

              Q61 Chair: Can I just quote to you from page 9 of your tender document? It states: “Each partner has contractually agreed to providing accommodation to the required specification.” Was that true, or was that not true? Just say yes or no.

              Lisa Coleman: So what we were able to do at that point—

              Q62 Chair: Was it true or not true?

              Lisa Coleman: It was true that we had agreed the specification with them that—

              Q63 Chair: No. You said that you had “contractually agreed to providing accommodation”.

              Lisa Coleman: Yes. Our suppliers are providing accommodation to us.

              Q64 Fiona Mactaggart: At that point, you said that there would be 740 assessment sites across London and the south-east of England, when in fact there are 96.

              Lisa Coleman: We have got 96 now. At that point, we talked about having access to 750. If we took on—

              Q65 Chair: No. Let me take you through them. Gloucester Hospital NHS Trust was one of the ones you said you had a contractual agreement with. In your tender document, you said that you had a contractual agreement. The Gloucester Hospital Trust says that there was no contractual agreement. Are they lying, or are you lying?

              Lisa Coleman: No, they are right. At that point, we did not have a contractual agreement.

              Q66 Chair: Well, then why did you put in your—

              Lisa Coleman: What we talked to them about was agreeing the contractual terms. Should we have won those lots, we would have contracted with them on. We were open with the Department about exactly where we were with all our suppliers.

              Q67 Chair: To be honest, Ms Coleman, you were not. You should not have put into your tender document that you actually had a contractual agreement. Did you write to the trust? Is it true that you wrote to the trust and apologised for naming them?

              Lisa Coleman: We incorrectly named one, and we wrote to it and apologised. We actually contacted all the trusts that we named and got their agreement. Unfortunately, we named Cambridge—

              Q68 Chair: To be honest, that is just not true. Let me take you through them. I have done Gloucester. North Essex Partnership Trust said, “The trust did not give explicit permission to be named in the tender document.” Did you name them? Yes, you did. Mid Essex Health Trust provided e-mails that showed that their negotiations ended before the tender was submitted to DWP, and you named them. Ipswich said, “The trust did not enter into any agreement in principle to deliver PIP assessments.”

              Those are trusts stating publicly in answer to FOIs—that is how that information came out—that you did not have agreement, yet you named them in this document. I could go on. Oxford University Hospital Trust did not agree; they said no. Norfolk and Norwich—yours, Richard—did not agree. In fact, only four out of all those you named agreed. You misled people. In the contract document, you misled DWP about where you were in getting contractual agreements to be able to run the contact. You misled people, didn’t you, Ms Coleman?

              Lisa Coleman: No, I disagree. I am happy to share with you the documentation out of here—

              Q69 Chair: I want you to share it in here in public. One of our great concerns as a Committee is the issue of how we sign up to these contracts and how the public gets duped and doesn’t get value for money. Do you want me to quote to you all the times within the tender document when you said “agreed”? I will go through it, because I will not have this nonsense talked. “The estate required for all four Lots has already been identified, and in virtually all cases is ready to use now.” You said that, didn’t you?

              Lisa Coleman: Yes.

              Q70 Chair: Was that true?

              Lisa Coleman: Yes.

              Q71 Chair: No, it wasn’t. How could it have been true?

              Lisa Coleman: When we contracted with the providers, they were either in the process of putting the accommodation in place or the accommodation was already available. One of the things we wanted to do was to look at how to deliver the service in a different way and add value by using existing NHS accommodation that was not delivering value to those trusts. That is one of the advantages of what we put in place.

              Q72 Chair: But you hadn’t got agreements. You claimed in your tender documents that you were ready to go with 700-odd locations that would have been close to where people had to go, but you hadn’t got those agreements.

              Lisa Coleman: At the point of the tender document, we couldn’t sign a contractual agreement because we didn’t have a contract.

              Q73 Chair: Then you should not have said that they were ready to go and that you had contractual agreements. You used the term in the tender document that you had a contractual agreement with trusts. You have since said that you did not. You have only managed to work with a quarter of the trusts you named in the documents. If one or two had fallen out, I could have accepted your argument, but only a quarter agreed to be there.

              Lisa Coleman: We had sufficient coverage. If we had used all 750 sites, each of those sites would have been doing about three assessments per week. The coverage that we have right now gives us the sites we need. It means that in 40% of cases people are travelling less than 45 minutes, based on our latest analysis. At the point of going live, we did not need 750 sites.

              Q74 Nick Smith: Can you go back to that? You said 45 minutes in—

              Lisa Coleman: The analysis that we have done so far—we are doing some more—shows that about 40% of people are travelling less than 45 minutes, and another 20% travel less than 60 minutes.

              Q75 Chair: Did you fill in the subcontractor declaration that DWP required of you?

              Lisa Coleman: I believe so, yes. We would have done.

              Q76 Chair: What do you mean by “I believe so.”? If you had filled in the declaration, each of your subcontractors would have had to sign up to say they were going to deliver the service. I go back to the fact that only a quarter of NHS trusts had signed up. The two private hospitals you mentioned in the tender document haven’t signed up either, have they?

              Lisa Coleman: It is not unusual that, between the point when we do a tender—

              Q77 Chair: Is it usual to lie in a tender, Ms Coleman?

              Lisa Coleman: Absolutely not, no. We did not lie—

              Q78 Chair: So how can you say that you have got a contractual agreement, when you hadn’t?

              Lisa Coleman: We said that we had access to—

              Q79 Chair: You said you had a contractual agreement. You cannot say something different today from what you said in your tender document.

              Lisa Coleman: I can refute it again if you would like me to. We did not lie in that tender document. We gave a view of exactly where we were at that point in time and with the list of suppliers. We have got the backing information that says that we corresponded with all of those suppliers, and they were happy for us to name them.

              Yes, you are right that we did not take them all through to completion, but we did not need to. It is not unusual for that to change before we have actually got a contract. We did not contract for all four lots: we contracted for lot 1 and lot 3. We had the people in place that we needed when we started.

              Q80 Nick Smith: Ms Coleman, it seems that you are playing fast and loose with the truth, but may I come back to the point you were making about distance to attend? You said that it takes up to 45 minutes for 40% of people. What percentage take more than an hour to get to one of your places?

              Lisa Coleman: At the moment, it is around—I am using the stats we have got now, but we are doing some more analysis—

              Q81 Nick Smith: Answer my question, please.

              Lisa Coleman: I will. Currently, we are seeing 40% at less than 45 minutes, about another 20% up to 60 minutes and then over an hour is the remainder, so that is about 40%.

              Q82 Chair: Say that again.

              Nick Smith: Slowly please.

              Lisa Coleman: It is 40% less than 45 minutes—

              Q83 Nick Smith: Yes, we got that. How many people take more than an hour?

              Lisa Coleman: About 40% take more than an hour.

              Q84 Chair: Again, in your contract, what did you commit to? Just tell the public.

              Lisa Coleman: We talked about what we thought we could achieve—

              Q85 Chair: No. What did you commit to? When you submit your tender, it is not just chatting about something; it is saying, “This is the specification that I will deliver.” That is what you are responsible for.

              Mr Bacon: What did you commit to in the tender document?

              Lisa Coleman: I have got to be honest: I would have to look at the document—

              Q86 Mr Bacon: I am looking at it. It is surprising that you are not familiar with it. It says that “because PIP claimants have heightened mobility challenges we have designed a solution which means that between 75% and 90% of claimants will be within 30 minutes’ travel of a local centre.”

              Lisa Coleman: And that is absolutely right. We are not there yet. I am not going to sit here and say that we are; we are absolutely not.

              Q87 Chair: Why did you commit to something that you then failed to deliver?

              Lisa Coleman: We did not have data around where those claimants would come in from at the point of putting the tender document together.

              Q88 Chair: Say that again.

              Lisa Coleman: We did not have the data. These are new claimants. We don’t know. What we were able to use—

              Chair: Oh, come on! Don’t tell me that. This is ridiculous. You have been in this field—

              Q89 Fiona Mactaggart: That is very far from what you said.

              Lisa Coleman: It is, yes.

              Chair: You have been assessing claimants since 2005. To sit there and say, “We didn’t have any idea about where they would be and what they would be”—

              Q90 Mr Bacon: Actually, you say in your tender document: “The large number of local centres that we have”—I think “we” means your company in that sentence—“means that approximately 90% of claimants will be less than 30 minutes’ travel from a convenient consultation centre, with the remaining 10% under 60 minutes.” You could not have written that sentence unless you knew something about where your local centres were and how many of them you had.

              Lisa Coleman: You are right. What we were able to do at the point of tender—we had the data, you are right, as we have been doing disability living allowance for a number of years. We had the data about where the existing DLA population currently is. We reviewed that data and made some assumptions based on using that population and looking at where we knew the centres were that were being provided by the people that we thought that we could contract with. That is what we talked about at that point. What I have shared with you is what we are seeing right now. That does not mean to say that we are happy with that—of course, we want to improve that further.

              Q91 Mr Bacon: Can I just check something about the quality of the assessment centres? These are assessment centres for people who have disabilities. In Norwich, you have one that is not accessible for people who are disabled.

              Lisa Coleman: I believe that you are talking about the WCA centre in Norwich.

              Q92 Mr Bacon: I am talking about St Mary’s House.

              Lisa Coleman: I think that that is the centre we use on a WCA contract; that is not the centre that we use on the PIP contract.

              Q93 Mr Bacon: I have a photograph here of a lot of disabled people protesting outside it because they cannot get into it. I have been corresponding with DWP for quite a long time about it, as have other Norfolk MPs. The most recent response from DWP, which is dated end of February 2014 is: “It would not be a cost-effective use of public funds to relocate the Norwich medical assessment centre at this time.” What I am interested in is: why would you choose a building to do disability assessments that was not disabled accessible?

              Lisa Coleman: I think it is important that I clarify that we don’t use that centre on the PIP contract. That’s a WCA centre only.

              Q94 Mr Bacon: Only?

              Lisa Coleman: Only. We are not actually using any of the accommodation that we use for WCA. That is one of the things that we were able to build into the design from day one on PIP. We were very clear that we wanted to ensure that any of the challenges that we had about disability access to some of the sites—Norwich, for example, is one that has been there for a number of years in advance of when ESA was introduced—

              Q95 Mr Bacon: But you are telling disabled people to Cambridge or Ipswich, which isn’t a lot of help when you are disabled.

              Lisa Coleman: Again, I think you are talking about the WCA cases there. What we do on PIP is we were looking very much to do something very different and to look to send people to local sites that they were very familiar with. An example that I can give you is that I was listening to some contact centre calls just recently, and a lady was concerned that she was going to have to go to Truro. We were able to say to her that she was able to go to her local site, which was the local GP practice, which she recognised and she knew. That is what we have tried to do. I accept that we are not there in terms of the travelling times yet. We do need to bring more centres on site, and that is what we are doing.

              Q96 Fiona Mactaggart: But you are saying that, at the moment, 40% of your customers are travelling for more than an hour by public transport. My experience of disabled people trying to use public transport is that just making one journey, let alone making an interchange, can be very challenging for people with intellectual impairments, mobility difficulties and so on. We are saying that nearly half of the people who are trying to get to your centres are making a journey that would take an able-bodied person more than an hour. Let’s be honest, because a disabled person will usually take longer and will have to arrange things like access to platforms and all those things that add to the journey time. How can you be satisfied with that?

              Lisa Coleman: I don’t think I said that I am satisfied. What I said is that we want to improve that further. What we looked at was the 750 sites based on full volumes under mandatory reassessment. We are not there yet. We need to improve.

              Q97 Chair: I am going to read out two of your quotes just to get it on the record. First, on page 76: “We have agreed with our partners that their accommodation…will be available throughout the term…and they have agreed to this requirement.” That’s not true. “Each partner has contractually agreed to providing accommodation”. I have read that one before. I want to quote you because all the misleading in the contract led to Ministers then misleading Parliament on false information that you gave them. When Lord Freud answered a parliamentary question from Lord Alton in the House of Lords on 22 July, he said, “Atos have demonstrated through their supply chain contractual arrangements that they have full geographic coverage with an additional capacity of at least 15% in each of their supply chain partners, as well as back up options across their network, should volumes prove higher than expected.” That wasn’t true in July, and it remains untrue today, doesn’t it?

              Lisa Coleman: We still have access to more sites than we are using right now with the supply chain.

              Q98 Austin Mitchell: That is a tautology.

              Lisa Coleman: We do need the practitioners to go in them, though. So what I don’t want to do is open an empty site. That wouldn’t add any value to anybody.

              Q99 Chair: Well, why do you have a contractual arrangement with them?

              Lisa Coleman: Because what that allows us to do, where we have the capacity and where we have people in that geography, is actually use those sites, but what we need to be able to bring together is the claimant, the practitioner and the location. So we have the locations right now. The assessments are taking us a lot longer, so that means we are not able to optimise them because we have not got as many practitioners as we need—

              Q100 Chair: I am going to ask you one more set of questions, which is on the assessment. The assessment is taking a ridiculously long time. In my constituency I have two cases of people who are terminally ill with cancer and miraculously, literally last week, they finally got appointments for assessment. They had been waiting for, I think, six or seven months. I will come back to that later. When you put forward your tender document, and when you committed to it contractually with the DWP, you said that you had enough health professional staff, didn’t you?

              Lisa Coleman: Yes, based on what we understood of the assessment.

              Q101 Chair: Have you?

              Lisa Coleman: Right now, based on the duration and volume of the assessments that are coming through to us that we cannot deal with in advance of a face-to-face assessment, we do not. That is one of the things that we are trying to improve. The assessments are taking twice as long as we expected—we didn’t know that was going to happen—and we are seeing 20% more people going through to face-to-face assessment than we expected or understood at the time of the tender as well.

              Q102 Chair: So why did you put in your document: “In Lot 3”, which is the one that lots of us are concerned about, “our solution reduces the recruitment effort to 63 direct HP recruits. The balance of the capacity requirement, equal to 840 HPs, is sourced from an increased utilisation of our supply chain partners’ resource pool of HPs”? That wasn’t true either, was it?

              Lisa Coleman: That was true actually.

              Q103 Chair: If it were true, you would not have to be recruiting now, would you?

              Lisa Coleman: There are two things. One is yes, we have to recruit, because we are doing a lot longer assessments. That means we need more people to do audit—

              Q104 Chair: To be honest, you cannot say that either, Ms Coleman. With the greatest respect, if you look at the NAO Report, the number of cases coming through the system is not greater than the number that was anticipated when this was modelled. It is just not true.

              Lisa Coleman: You are right. They are coming through at the same level, but they came through later than we expected, so we were not able to get the HPs trained quick enough. They could not do enough cases to learn quickly enough. What we are now seeing is the actual assessment—

              Q105 Nick Smith: They came through later, but you still did not have people trained quickly enough?

              Lisa Coleman: There are three factors, really. One is that the assessments themselves are taking twice as long as we expected. We expected them to take just over an hour and they are taking two hours, and two factors are involved in that: one is the actual face-to-face part of the assessment, and the other is making sure that we write the reports up to the right quality standard.

              The second part is that, of the cases that are coming through, we expected that around 25% would be dealt with at the front end of the process, so through a paper-based review. What we are actually seeing is that around 96% or 97% are having to go to face-to-face assessments and that takes longer.

              Q106 Nick Smith: But somehow there are four times as many people.

              Lisa Coleman: In effect, if we wanted to do it the other way round, it would mean the same thing. We need double the capacity we expected because everything is taking twice as long, and there are more of them to do.

              Q107 Fiona Mactaggart: I was wondering whether that was because of the issue that was raised by our earlier witnesses about evidence from previous DLA assessments not being used in this process.

              Lisa Coleman: Evidence is certainly a contributing factor. One of the things that we saw when we did the controlled go live—and if I may, I would like to come back to the terminally ill cases, because we are processing people under terminally ill cases and the special rule cases. We have ring-fenced people, so—

              Q108 Chair: You are not. My two cases, if I could find them among my documents, are both terminally ill with cancer.

              Lisa Coleman: I am happy to take those offline, but—

              Q109 Chair: Don’t take them offline—don’t make a statement to the Committee that I know to be untrue from my constituency case load.

              Lisa Coleman: We are processing 98% of cases for the terminally ill within the two-day requirement that we have.

              Q110 Chair: Hang on a minute, I’ll take the two Barking and Dagenham cases. This is just a nonsense. It really makes me so cross, because this is my original point. These are really people in terrible, terrible need. One woman was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in June 2013. She is having chemotherapy and she also has a debilitating brain condition. She applied for PIP in August 2013, seven months ago. Miraculously, last week, she got a date for a medical assessment in Atos for 28 March.

              Another case is of another woman who was diagnosed in April 2012 with bowel cancer, which has spread. She applied for PIP in September 2013 and had not heard anything. Then, miraculously, last week, she was given a medical assessment appointment on the first of the fourth. That is a seven-month wait. You sit there and tell us that you are doing 98% of cases, when this is an example from just one constituency MP—I have other cases, but those are the two that should have been on your fast-track system. I just do not believe it.

              Lisa Coleman: I will absolutely look into those cases.

              Q111 Chair: No, it is not a question of that. Don’t make these general statements if they are obviously not true.

              Lisa Coleman: We demonstrated this to the NAO when they came and had a look—we have been fully transparent. We are processing terminally ill cases and special rules within two days.

              Chair: It is not true, Ms Coleman.

              Q112 Chris Heaton-Harris: How long have you been processing terminally cases in two days?

              Lisa Coleman: All the way through. If you go back to the statistics, the statistics show it. I do not know those two cases. Like I say, I am really willing to have a look and see whether they fell under special rules, because I would be very interested to see whether they did, but we are processing terminally ill cases and special rules cases within two days. It is absolutely right that we have got backlogs on normal rules, but definitely not on special rules.

              Q113 Chair: Can I just give you one final opportunity, before I go to Mr Devereux? Can you confirm or not whether you had got agreements in place at the time of submitting this tender document to the DWP? Did you or did you not have agreements in place, as you said you did in the tender document, with all the NHS trusts and the private hospitals, to deliver services? Did you have contractual agreements in place?

              Lisa Coleman: We did not have signed contracts at that point, no. We could not, because we did not have a signed contract with the Department. We had agreements in place about the scope of services that they would deliver, and we had agreements in place about what that would look like.

              Q114 Chair: With all of them?

              Lisa Coleman: No, because we did not need all of them.

              Q115 Chair: I would just say to you, Ms Coleman, misleading a Committee is very serious.

              Lisa Coleman: I am not misleading the Committee. We did not need all of them. When it came to contracting, a number of things changed between the point when we put the tender document in and the point when we contracted.

              Q116 Chair: You only, in the end, have got agreements with four out of the 16 NHS trusts that you claimed in this document you had agreements in place. You have not got an agreement with the two private hospitals.

              Lisa Coleman: We do not use the—

              Q117 Chair: So to tell the Committee you had agreements in place to deliver and to say that what you said in this document is true is not actually correct.

              Lisa Coleman: One of the private health providers that you—

              Q118 Chair: Is it correct?

              Lisa Coleman: It is correct that we had agreements in place at that point, based on what we knew. We did not have a contract. We could not sign contracts. We did not have a contract. We did not know what lots we were going to win.

              Q119 Meg Hillier: A case has been raised with me about somebody in Tynemouth undergoing cancer treatment. They made an application in January with you. You acknowledged receipt by 15 January, so that was good, and advised that a claim would be decided by 14 February; but a month later, on 18 March, your parliamentary liaison team—because by then the local MP had taken this up—acknowledged that a home assessment had yet to be arranged, and failed to deny that the constituent may have to wait until June ’14 for a payment. You have been telling us that you have been trying to improve. Is that what improvement looks like?

              Lisa Coleman: No. None of us would say that the delays that we have got right now are acceptable—far from it. What we are now able to do, which we have not been able to do until quite recently, is actually give claimants a much better view of how long those delays are going to be. That is where we were very uncomfortable—we just did not have the right information to tell them. We can now say that to people, and set their expectations. That was clearly unacceptable, but what we are able to do is give people an expectation of when we can see them. What we are also doing is building our capacity in parallel and taking a number of actions to make sure that we can deliver more face-to-face assessments.

              Q120 Chair: Mr Devereux, just on this, and then we are going to go more general, because this does go to the heart of how you manage and determine contracts: what checks did DWP complete on what Atos were telling you in their tender document? What checks did you carry out?

              Robert Devereux: The process that we have gone through is to take what people say in a document and then seek to assess it against a variety of conditions: one about what price they are saying, one about the quality of what is going in there—how do we know about it. The teams then have a look through it—go through and seek to make the best assessment of it. If you want to know the precise checks we have done, I will have to go back and check for you. I have not brought that with me.

              Q121 Chair: I would suggest to you that you did not check whether or not they had the capability and capacity in place to deliver the contract, and it led you, for example, to give Lord Freud the wrong information when he gave a parliamentary answer to Lord Alton in July.

              Robert Devereux: Perhaps I may just say: what is the single thing that is causing most of the problems you have heard about today? The single thing that has caused most of the problems is that the test—the assessment—that is being taken is taking much longer than we had anticipated.

              Chair: Everything is taking longer, not just the test. Everything is taking longer. It is a nonsense to say it is just the test. Everything.

              Austin Mitchell: The assessment is taking longer. The delays are enormous.

              Chair: Can we stick to this point? I will tell you why I am really interested in this.

              Robert Devereux: I am trying to answer the question.

              Q122 Chair: Answer this question.

              Robert Devereux: The answer to the question is that in both cases we were testing whether or not there were, on the ground, enough people to do this work. If you then, as I have observed, find that the actual amount of time that it takes to do this is much larger than it otherwise would be, then in practice the volume of resource on the ground is not large enough. So what is going on at the moment is that we do not have enough, as it were, delivered capacity there; but that is because of facts that are now apparent about how long the test takes. Both the Department and the suppliers went in with an expectation of how long it would take, together with some margin around that, but it is taking much longer in practice.

              Q123 Mr Bacon: But if you had tested the process end to end and had given yourself enough time to test it, you would have found that out. Can you think of any other examples of where the Department or other Government Departments did not test things end to end, which subsequently led to problems?

              Robert Devereux: In many of the examples in your own excellent book, you talk about things being switched on right across the entire stock of things, such as with tax credits.

              Q124 Mr Bacon: Tax credits, yes. The Criminal Records Bureau is another one with no adequate testing.

              Robert Devereux: The Report concludes that we are about to do 3.6 million assessments over the next four or five years. We have done 5% at the present time, so we are currently in the early stages, as the NAO said. The level of service is not what we would want to have, but we have not in any way gone down exactly the same track that you were coruscating about in respect of the other ones where the entire shooting match was turned on. I have an issue to resolve here to ensure that the unacceptable backlog is brought back down again, but I have not tipped the entire stock of DLA into this straight away. I have not sought to do all the reassessments straight away. We have made adjustments to the profile to try to avoid precisely the things that you have correctly observed about the past.

              Q125 Fiona Mactaggart: You have taken in all new claimants.

              Robert Devereux: I have.

              Q126 Fiona Mactaggart: And the consequence of that is that people who depend on being assessed that they are qualified for PIP in order to access other benefits, such as carer’s allowance, are waiting not just weeks but months for their cases to be determined. As a result, they are getting into debt and are not accessing other services that they genuinely require. How are you going to change that within weeks, not months or years? At the moment, it feels like, “Oh, we’re all trying very hard,” but the person who cannot pay a carer, who is racking up debts with Wonga and who is not getting access to other services cannot wait that long.

              Robert Devereux: When the Chair started by saying that this is about real people, I absolutely agreed with that. This level of service is not the level that I want to continue with. We are trying, with both providers, to have more health care professionals brought to bear on the problem, because the amount of work is more because the test takes longer. It takes a finite time to acquire people, but those people are now being acquired so that we can start to clear more cases than we send to the providers, and in due course—

              Q127 Nick Smith: How much trialling of these assessments took place?

              Robert Devereux: Two sorts of trialling were done. The principle thing that we did in the period between the policy being announced and actually going live was to work very closely with medical professionals and disability organisations to try to define the test in the first place and to construct a replicable test. We are in danger of glossing over all the things that we have had to do, but one thing was to construct a test that you can actually get a health care professional to do and that will reliably come up with the right answer. That took us a long time. We went through a number of consultations and did a lot of testing.

              Q128 Nick Smith: So that’s what the test looks like. Let’s be specific. How often did you trial the assessment itself? How much effort did you put into that—the real gubbins?

              Robert Devereux: The Report correctly identifies that our plan for the roll-out, which we had already changed by delaying national roll-out and by pushing—

              Q129 Nick Smith: Mr Devereux, you are not answering my question. How much trialling of the test itself did you do?

              Robert Devereux: We had done very little of it—hundreds of cases. The process actually started in the controlled roll-out in April. By the time it actually got through to the providers, it was relatively few, but we knew that when we started.

              Q130 Nick Smith: What do you mean by relatively few?

              Robert Devereux: It is measured in hundreds.

              Q131 Nick Smith: Just hundreds?

              Robert Devereux: Yes. Can I make another observation? Any time that you introduce a brand new system—

              Q132 Nick Smith: How many hundreds?

              Max Tse: Figure 11 on page 31 of the NAO Report shows how many people have gone through each step of the process.

              Q133 Nick Smith: Can you please remind us of that, Max?

              Max Tse:  By 10 June, which is the end of the April to June first phase of trialling, around 9,000 people had started claims and around 360 had had decisions made.

              Q134 Nick Smith: So 360 was the basis for your roll-out of the assessment programme.

              Robert Devereux: It was not the basis of the roll-out because, as you will all immediately detect, that cannot possibly be the case. We established, whatever was in the tender documents, exactly how many people we believed were necessary to be present in June and that the suppliers were capable of producing. We were testing and checking that, as the NAO concluded we did. So we went live knowing a whole bunch of stuff about the early part of the process and making a judgment about the capacity of the system to do the latter part of the process.

              You are absolutely right; we did not run a process that had an entire year of running that north-west control period all the way through to the far end, doing all the appeals and so on. We did not do that.

              Q135 Nick Smith: But it is that assessment that you say is the crux of the difficulty you have today.

              Robert Devereux: That is, indeed. We are all happily, with the benefit of hindsight, now able to say that that was obviously the area, but—

              Q136 Chair: It is so obvious—

              Robert Devereux: I am sorry; you roll your eyes, but let me just check a moment. The assessment that we are doing here is not, on the face of it, dissimilar from WCA and some of the tests that the providers do in other areas. The judgment we were making is that we have a view about it and we do not know precisely what it is, but there are two things we know about assessments: one is that, in the hands of people doing it repeatedly, people speed up quite quickly. If you look at the evidence on the WCA, for example, when we introduced the requirement to write a written statement, the time that professionals took to write it went right up to about 80 minutes or so, but then it came down over the next few months back to about 50. You can make big changes through repetition.

              Right at the start of a process you would be hard pressed to be confident that you knew how that worked. Our judgment was that, actually, because there was some margin in the system—because they had indeed recruited people ahead of time—that would be enough. That has turned out to be false. If it had not been false, we would not have a backlog.

              Q137 Chair: I want to get on to general things, but do you mind if I just finish with the Atos contract? We can then go on to the more general things, but otherwise we will lose it.

              I just want to understand from you.  It seems to me, in any way that you read it, that Atos told you in the contract that it had a list—a supply chain—of NHS trusts and private hospitals that it was contractually committed to and that would deliver the service, right? So it had the sites and the people, because the trusts bought not just sites, but people. It has been put to me that you—DWP—knew that it did not have that, although it was in the contract, and that you suggested that it put that in anyway because it would make the tender look better. Is that true or not?

              Robert Devereux: I have not heard that allegation; I would be astonished if it was true. It is not in my interests to have a supplier falsify information.

              Q138 Austin Mitchell: It does look as though you were in so much of a hurry to get this thing up and running that you did not bother to check the assertions in the contract or to assess the difficulties and the time scale of the assessments and the number of assessors. The Report states quite specifically: “The Department adopted a challenging timetable for introducing a large programme.” And paragraph 16, on page 8, states: “The Department…left little time to test whether it could handle a large volume of claims.” In other words, you were in a rush to get the thing up and going, so you did not check adequately.

              Chair: Just on this contract.

              Robert Devereux: Well, you are conflating several things here. By the time that we got to that critical decision to turn on the national roll-out, we had a good idea of how many people we believed both parties needed to have deployed, and in which buildings they were operating and whether they were disabled-friendly to get into. We had done all those calculations. Whatever the story is about what we had or had not done in the tender, the reality was that, at the point we pressed that button, we knew how many people they had and whether they were in the right glide path to deliver this service, on the assumptions that we had about how long the test would take.

              Q139 Chair: But if you enter into a contract, Mr Devereux, when the person submitting for the tender gives you contractual commitments, there are two things: one is due diligence—

              Robert Devereux: I have not contracted on the tender, have I? I have contracted on a contract. The question you are asking me, which I will happily go away and check, is, “In the contract that I have given, what factors have I brought to bear on the things you have just been grilling Atos about?”

              Q140 Chair: And I would like you to come back on that.

              Robert Devereux: And I am observing that, by the time we got to the critical decision—when the Secretary of State and I were sitting together to decide whether we should turn this on—the evidence that we had from both providers, tested by internal audit and looked at by the Major Projects Authority, did not conclude that this was a crazy proposition and that we were in a hurry and should not carry on. We actually decided that this was a reasonable judgment for a reform which, let us be clear, is an important reform. I do not want, and Ministers do not want, benefits determined simply on paper evidence—

              Q141 Fiona Mactaggart: But Ms Coleman herself claimed that one of the reasons why the tender document included these claims, which have been challenged, I think rather effectively in this Committee, was that it was only a three-week process.

              Robert Devereux: The process that we were going through—very deliberately, as the NAO recognised, but it is right at the back, so you have probably not seen it—is such that the Department has actually learned from its ability to do contracts. It thought about this. It put in place a framework arrangement, and rather than just going with single source, it put in multiple lots. We have gone through these steps. The steps provided for a period of time in which people could bid.

              I come back to the critical point. Whatever the exchange we have had about the nature of the tender document, the question about performance hinges on whether or not there were enough people at the point at which we turned on the—

              Q142 Chair: Can I just ask you another question, because this is, I think, what astounds most ordinary people?  Atos, since 2005—again, this is from an answer to a parliamentary question—has had £750 million-worth of contracts just from DWP, so you would have thought there would be some experience in contracting with Atos in DWP. You have taken a decision to relieve it—or it has walked away—from doing a number of the contracts that it is engaged in on assessments for ESA. It has walked away from that.

              You have said to us this morning that this work is very similar to the ESA work, which is why you thought you did not have to pilot it. What on earth was going through the brains of people in DWP responsible for advising Ministers on whom to give contracts to that you thought Atos, which was were failing in one area of work and giving it back to you, would be ready to provide an effective service, which it clearly has not, in another area of work? What went through your brain? I just don’t get it. I cannot imagine myself being a Minister or official in that Department and thinking, “They’ve failed here, but we’ll give them two of the biggest contracts we’ve got in DWP.” One was for nearly £207 million; the other was for £184 million, give or take a bit. Two huge contracts, yet Atos was failing on a very similar contract in a very similar area of work.

              Robert Devereux: The assessment about people’s capacity and disability is a different test; I was observing that it is similar in terms of its length. With the process we went through, we ended up with—I think, from memory—a number of people on the framework. We had loads of bids for these out of that framework, and we were assessing them as to quality and price. Our assessment was that these were better, not least—

              Q143 Chair: Mr Devereux, can we just have an honest conversation? It was failing on delivering on a contract that required a very similar sort of assessment. I know it was a different tender, but can’t you have regard to its failure to deliver on a very similar contract when determining whether it has the capability—which it clearly does not have—to deliver on this contract?  What on earth are we about if we cannot get this contracting right? You are dooming this attempt to bring in outside providers to deliver public services. It is the worst ad for using private contractors to deliver public services—it really is; it’s awful. It is a real dereliction right the way through.

              Robert Devereux: At the risk of repeating myself, both these providers have been seeking to provide enough capacity to do a test of a certain length—

              Q144 Chair: But they were failing.

              Robert Devereux: At one point you said that they are clearly failing on this contract. The reason why we have a backlog at the moment is that the right number of people have been deployed to do a test that is half as long. On this particular one here, the issue is to do with the amount of time that has been taken. On the other Atos one, we are, as you know and as Ministers have announced, seeking to bring in further suppliers, but we were making a judgment based on the bids in front of us. 

              Q145 Mr Bacon:  What I do not understand is why you did not include on your risk register directly—this is paragraph 3.26—the risk that providers would underperform. Paragraph 3.26 says: “Given the challenging timetable for implementing the programme and achieving savings, the Department relied on assurances from assessment providers about their readiness for roll-out.” It goes on to say that the Department “tracked the risk that assessment providers would not provide appropriate assurance”, so you wanted to make sure that they had given you enough warm words, or that is what it sounds like. But the Report goes on to say: “It did not include directly on its programme risk register delays caused by assessment providers, or assessment providers failing to meet contractually agreed performance levels.” Surely that would be a really obvious thing to include on the risk register.  I understand why you would include risks about the delivery of IT systems, the readiness of the Courts Service and so on but, surely to goodness, if you are issuing a contract like this, the risk that the contractor will not provide properly is a central risk that should have been included directly right at the beginning on the programme risk register.

              Robert Devereux: It is, absolutely. I am afraid that this is a piece of the Report and its language about how the risk is calibrated that I wanted to spend some time on. In practice, the effort going into this is on exactly the things you would have expected if I was worried about the provider not delivering. The things I was checking, consequent on the words I actually had—whatever words you would have preferred me to have—were exactly the same as you would have done: have they got the people; have they got the buildings; do they have a training programme; has it been properly approved? This discussion about whether the nature of the words on the risk register are right or wrong is, I think, misleading. The actions, even under the risk that you have just defined, were identical to the ones we were actually doing. We used a particular form of words that actually said, “Do we have enough confidence that they will deliver?” I could have worded it differently, but I would have done the same things, and that is exactly what I did.

              Q146 Chair: I will bring in Amyas and Meg and then we are going to go more generally, but it is complete nonsense. What were your four things?  Have they got the people?

              Robert Devereux: Have they recruited the people, do they have appropriate training in place, do they know how they are going to deploy them, have they got the buildings?

              Q147 Mr Bacon: They told you they had and they didn’t.

              Robert Devereux: No, with respect, I come back to my central point. The thing we were tracking was whether or not they actually had the numbers of people we expected they would need.

              Q148 Chair: But you knew they didn’t on this other contract, which is your contract. You knew they didn’t.

              Robert Devereux: If you keep chopping around, I can’t answer the question. On the question that you have just asked me—about whether I knew this—I was tracking precisely the things I said, and the answer to this question, as demonstrated by the heads on the ground, is correct. The thing that has happened is that the amount of time that it takes to do this test and the quantity done face to face is much higher than the Department or the suppliers expected—[Interruption.] And, if I may continue, the margin that we knew was already there—because both providers recruited ahead of the volumes that they were expecting—turned out to be too small for the change in the length of the test. So there is one central factor here. The test itself is taking much longer, and you cannot adduce from that reality that somehow or other the provider—

              Q149 Austin Mitchell: We have just had a statement from welfare support organisations that assessments were being done by phone, yet you say they are taking an enormously long time and you didn’t expect it.

              Chair: We will come back to the phone issue.

              Robert Devereux: I heard that and I did wonder to what extent the lady—

              Q150 Chair: We will come back to that. Let’s just deal finally with the contract.

              Amyas Morse: I have a question for Robert Devereux about the tender. Was there a question that you felt you didn’t understand the status of the resources available to Atos at the time? The tender was addressed to you. Did you feel that you understood, or didn’t understand, the level of conditionality or whatever? Did you feel it was clear and open to you or not?

              Robert Devereux: That is the same question the Chair asked me five or 10 minutes ago, and the answer is that I need to write to you to say what I was actually basing my assessment on. If your hypothesis is that I blindly read this and thought,  “That looks fine; tick—”

              Amyas Morse: No, that is not my hypothesis. I was giving you an opportunity to say whether you thought that or not.

              Robert Devereux: Lisa says that there were a number of exchanges about clarifying what was in the tender with us, and the judgments that the Department makes are not reached simply by reading this in a locked room on our own and eventually being misled in the way you have expressed it. I have offered to come back and tell you the sorts of checks that we were making on it, so I will do that.

              Q151 Meg Hillier: Jason Feeney, when he went to the DWP Committee, talked about the assumptions being wrong. To quote from that Committee’s report: “Jason Feeney told us that Department for Work and Pensions’s original estimates were ‘that it would be a 12 to 15-week timeline in terms of getting through the process, right through from application and initial phone call to the decision’”. I have a dossier of information from MPs saying it is taking six to seven months and we have gone through some of that. The report goes on: “However, in practice ‘the process is taking longer than that in most cases’ because ‘the assumptions we made about how long different parts of the process would take have not been reflected in live running’”.

              You go on to explain the reasons: the first phone call; the fact that it is taking claimants longer to return the form; and that the providers are not delivering it. Although we focus on the Atos contract, you have acknowledged that there is a problem with that. I can quote a number of cases of people who have been waiting in very difficult conditions: people waiting for liver transplants—that is somebody in Ilford. There are other people with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma who need to go to hospital for treatment and cannot get carer’s allowance without it; someone with throat cancer—these two cases are in Scotland. A number of people have had appointments cancelled. These are all problems with contractors, but some of these people could be fast-tracked through. Have you given any thought since April to taking information from existing systems to fast-track this and save some of the misery they are living through?

              Jason Feeney: Yes. The statement I made to the Select Committee on 11 December still stands. We are still in that position. I hesitate to introduce new information and new data as to where we are today. We have seen significant improvements on terminally ill cases and we have concentrated a lot of energy and focus on improving that and fast-tracking those cases. Those clients are not required to fill in a claim form; they are not required to go to a face-to-face assessment if they have been diagnosed as terminally ill—by “terminally ill” we mean that they have a life expectancy of less than six months. It is important to be clear what we mean by terminally ill. We have a fast-track process for those very vulnerable customers and our performance on that is significantly better than when Max and colleagues examined us back in October.

              In terms of other customers, I have made it clear that we expect the process to take 12 to 15 weeks. It is not taking that. We expected it to be three to four months; it is now six months-plus for many customers. We are not happy with that. We acknowledge that. We are taking a number of steps in the Department and with providers to increase the capacity to address the fundamental issues of the number of cases that we see face to face, and the number of cases that are assessed on paper and the length of time it is taking health care professionals to become familiar with the assessment.

              So, in answer to your question, in terms of using additional information, the whole process of PIP—we talked about it in the first session—is that we are trying to get as much information and medical evidence as possible at the early parts of the process so that the health care professional, when they sit down opposite a claimant, has a deeper understanding and we get a better assessment and a better decision at the end of the process.

              Q152 Meg Hillier: Clearly, Mr Feeney, that is not working. Some of these cases could be fast-tracked. With someone with rapidly progressing MS—another case from Aberdeen—eventually the doctor was able to say that they were terminally ill with a six-month prognosis. Someone who has a degenerative illness is not going to get better enough to work. It is fairly obvious; a medical consultant could write a letter about something like that. We had some compelling evidence from Mencap about people with a learning disability. If a client has a lifelong condition, there are ways of finding that out without needing to have an assessment. Building in the cost of a reassessment every two years is an expensive approach, but there is no attempt to fast-track people. Some of these people will be under 16 and only just beginning to come through, but if you have a child of 15 or 15 and a half, you are going to be really worried about this process taking several months and no money coming in during that time. If that child was born with a disability, they are not going to get better. It is quite straightforward, surely, to put them straight on to PIP. I agree with reassessments for a lot of people, but for somebody in that situation, it is just an expensive waste of time.

              Jason Feeney: There are an awful lot of points there. For those people who are what we call rising 16s—people who are 16 who have been in receipt of child DLA—they continue to receive DLA, so they are not waiting without money. They continue to receive DLA until we assess them on to PIP.

              You mentioned earlier in your contribution about people who will not get better to work. That is not what we are assessing in PIP. We are not assessing people’s ability to be able to work. If people are diagnosed as terminally ill, having started the process under what we call normal rules—that is because they have a disability and a condition—we fast-track from that point. You threw quite a lot of points at me there, but that is three or four that I wanted to come back on.

              Q153 Meg Hillier: Yes, sorry—I have been waiting to get in. On things like the phone call and the fact that that slows things down, you must have realised that that would be problematic for a lot of clients at the beginning. Did you build time in for that?

              Robert Devereux: When we designed this, we didn’t go about it trying to make the process more cumbersome than it was previously. We were trying to make sure that people know, first of all, whether they are actually going to be entitled to the benefit at all. Some of the questions we are asking at the start are to make sure that people have the right benefit to apply for, rather than filling in 54 pages and being told, “Actually, you failed on a nationality claim,” or something like that. The first part of this is trying to sift it through to get things straight, and making sure that people are properly signposted. The form then goes out when we know that these are people who are, at least in principle—

              Chair: That was what you were trying to do.

              Q154 Meg Hillier: It is not working.

              Robert Devereux: I was being asked about why I had a phone call. That is a “trying to” question.

              Q155 Meg Hillier: But it is not working.

              Robert Devereux: Sorry, what is not working?

              Meg Hillier: The phone call. If, for example, you have a learning disability or are perhaps a very nervous person on the phone, you often have to have someone with you to help—that is setting up an appointment; we heard this evidence earlier. You have to have someone at your elbow to help you through that process. You have to have an awful lot of other paperwork to prove things, including things such as a passport to prove nationality, but not everybody will have one of those. Those could all be dealt with as a paper situation when someone’s clearly got a disability that is very likely to mean that they will be able to have an appointment.

              Robert Devereux: You have said twice now that you don’t see why everybody should be assessed face to face. The answer is that they may not need to be assessed face to face.

              Q156 Meg Hillier: But 96% are being, because of these problems.

              Robert Devereux: One of the things that we are working on with the providers is why so many are going down to face to face. Actually, the first question is: what is the quality of the paper evidence? Returning to a question I was trying to answer earlier on, the lady at the end was observing that in some cases they have a phone call from the provider. If you are doing a paper scrutiny and you just want to check something with the claimant, it is perfectly legitimate to call them. That doesn’t mean I have just done a face-to-face assessment over the phone; it means I have gathered some information to prevent precisely the face-to-face assessment that you correctly say we do not need to do.

              One of the things the Department is trying to do is to work out what extra effort can be put in to make sure that all those people who really could be determined on paper—as that is what we used to do with DLA—can be done that way, thus reducing the burden on face to face. As I have said repeatedly, that is the key constraint in the current system.

              Q157 Fiona Mactaggart: Mr Devereux, were you surprised, as I was, by the evidence from Citizens Advice about the problems that having to do this via an initial telephone call were creating for their clients?

              Robert Devereux: Was I surprised? I might ask Jason to explain this, but it is worth repeating the arrangements for what you can do if the phone call is not for you. I don’t think we have got into that.

              Q158 Fiona Mactaggart: What she was saying was that having the identification process and all that up front is creating a barrier for people who approach their citizens advice bureau for help.

              Robert Devereux: If I might hypothesise, would you prefer me to make a 50-page form available as the alternative to having a phone call?

              Q159 Fiona Mactaggart: Yes, via a citizens advice bureau I would, because citizens advice bureaux do not hand out 50-page forms to people who aren’t the real people. It seems to me that there is a partnership here with the voluntary organisations that you are used to and that you have for other benefits.

              Robert Devereux: I observe that we have put in a brand new benefit. I might hypothesise that, by design, for a lot of people having a knock-out question at the phone call stage is actually quite straightforward. If your observation is that we may have gone slightly too far and that a stack of forms at the CAB might be a good idea, that is a very good bit of learning that we can go away and have a think about.

              Q160 Fiona Mactaggart: Good. One of the things that I feel about the NAO Report is that it does not sufficiently highlight the problems that are within the Department, rather than within the providers or with people. If you look at figure 12, you will see that the Department is taking three additional days from the start of a new claim to print and post evidence-gathering forms, which is 300% over what was expected. There is quite a bit of emphasis in the Report on the fact that the people who are applying are taking three additional days to send it back, but no emphasis on the Department doing that. The Department is taking six additional days to make a decision for non-terminally ill clients, which is a 60% increase, and—I suspect partly as a consequence of all this—there are twice as many calls to the inquiry line as you expected. What are your plans to get rid of those bits of inefficiency, which are your responsibility, not that of your contracted partners?

              Robert Devereux: First, the entire thing is my responsibility.

              Q161 Fiona Mactaggart: Yes, but you have direct levers to control, Mr Devereux.

              Robert Devereux: We are talking about a new benefit. We have written down the “should take” times; those examples are not reaching them, and we are working on them. Let me give you some examples, because we are capable of doing this. In the past year, we managed to take out six days—nearly a third of the time it takes to process JSA and ESA volumes, on much bigger numbers than this—and we did it with fewer staff. The Department knows how to improve service and reduce phone calls, and that is precisely the process that we are going through.

              Q162 Fiona Mactaggart: I am asking you what you are doing about it.

              Robert Devereux: Forgive me, we are a few months into the brand new process, and day in, day out, we are working—

              Q163 Chair: Why doesn’t Mr Feeney answer that, because he is dealing with it?

              Jason Feeney: I am happy to answer. At the beginning of the process, when we started taking those phone calls, 80% of the calls we took had a mismatch between the data we captured from the claimant and the records we held centrally inside the Department. It could be something simple. For example, we capture nationality on the PIP system, and if that nationality is not recorded on the central system, it is thrown up as a mismatch. Some 80% of the claims were throwing up a mismatch, but it is now down to 20% because we have automated some of the matching and overwriting. I could give you further examples about the decision making at the back end. We are improving as we go along, and that continuous improvement is shaving minutes, hours and days off the bit of the process that we do at the beginning and the bit we do at the end.

              Q164 Chair: You are improving, but people are waiting a heck of a long time.

              Jason Feeney: I agree.

              Q165 Meg Hillier: I asked colleagues whether they had cases that they thought were pertinent to this inquiry. A dozen colleagues wrote to me and others stopped me in the corridor, so I have multiple cases. The average time is seven months. That is mostly for an assessment, but some payments have come through in that time.

              Robert Devereux: At no stage in this hearing have I said anything other than that is true and regrettable. The question we were asked was about whether we are making progress and whether we are changing it. Getting those months down depends on a raft of activity in the Department and the providers, and we are doing that work. Jason has given you some examples of what we are doing.

              Q166 Nick Smith: Mr Feeney, I wonder whether you can help. Vicky Pearlman from the CAB said that there was a big issue with collating evidence and that some health and social care practitioners were not providing enough evidence. She gave a figure of just 1% across the board. Can you tell us more about what you are doing to ensure that evidence providers do a better job to provide the evidence you need for the casework you are looking at?

              Jason Feeney: There are a couple of things. First, as I said earlier, the whole process encourages people to get as much evidence as possible early on in the process—before we get to the point of the assessment. We have not seen evidence being produced later in the process, often post-decision or at appeal, as we did with the work capability assessment, which caused some of the difficulties with WCA. The whole design is geared up to getting that evidence earlier in the process.

              Q167 Nick Smith: Okay, I accept the point that you are trying to get information earlier rather than later. We have heard about the problems that happen later. What have you done to get the evidence earlier?

              Jason Feeney: It is not essential that the health care professional has additional medical evidence. They can conduct the assessment without the evidence.

              Q168 Chair: Well, they could, because it might save the face to face.

              Jason Feeney: The more medical evidence there is, the more chance it will be a paper-based assessment rather than a face to face.

              Q169 Nick Smith: So what are you doing about that?

              Jason Feeney: The Department’s chief medical adviser is working with the professional bodies to encourage health care professionals, which is a broad group of people—

              Q170 Nick Smith: So he is still working on it. It is work in progress.

              Jason Feeney: We are still trying to encourage those people to respond to requests for further medical evidence. As was said in the earlier session, the assessment providers pay GPs for the time it takes them to produce evidence.

              Q171 Nick Smith: What about OTs, physios, speech and language therapists, social workers—all those people?

              Jason Feeney: We are working through the professional bodies to encourage them to do that.

              Q172 Nick Smith: When did you start that, what stage are you at now and when do you expect to have an agreement?

              Jason Feeney: I will have to write to you about that because it is being handled by the Department’s chief medical adviser.

              Q173 Nick Smith: Did you not anticipate that you might need to get evidence with those other health professionals when you set up the process?

              Jason Feeney: Yes. If you look at the work we did in designing it, the implementation stakeholder forum—the advisory group that we had to design the test—contained a broad range of health care professionals. It was always understood that we would need their co-operation and support. We had that, but the agreement and support from professional bodies is sometimes difficult to replicate in day-to-day practice.

              Q174 Nick Smith: So you got it from the GPs. How did you manage that?

              Jason Feeney: We paid them to provide the service.

              Q175 Nick Smith: Did you not anticipate that you might have to pay other health professionals to provide the same service?

              Jason Feeney: That is not something we routinely do.

              Q176 Nick Smith: Do you think that you will have to do it in the future?

              Jason Feeney: I wouldn’t like to say at this point in time.

              Q177 Nick Smith: Ms Coleman talked about how long it takes for a patient or claimant to get to an assessment centre, and she said that 40% take an hour or more to get to an assessment centre. Do you have any data on that? Do you agree with Ms Coleman’s statement?

              Jason Feeney: I agree with the assessment that Lisa provided.

              Q178 Nick Smith: Again, Ms Pearlman says that there is an issue with the complexity of the original form. She said that that means there are more face-to-face assessments. Are you going to do anything with the form so that the paper-based assessment will be right first time, rather than requiring future face-to-face assessments?

              Jason Feeney: Yes. We have made changes not just to the form, but to the covering letter. In the last month we have also introduced a flier that we send out so that there is another piece of information saying, “These are the types of further medical evidence that it would be really helpful if you had to hand.” As part of that, as well as the information on medical evidence, we are providing additional information to claimants on the length of time that we expect the process to take.

              Q179 Fiona Mactaggart: Are any of those items available in an easy-to-read format?

              Jason Feeney: Yes.

              Q180 Nick Smith: Why didn’t you do that first time round?

              Jason Feeney: Do what?

              Nick Smith: All the things that you are now talking about.

              Jason Feeney: Similarly to what Robert was saying, when designing the form and covering letter, we involved a broad range of stakeholders, including some of the organisations that were represented in the first session. We engaged with more than 6,000 organisations. We had an implementation stakeholder forum of more than 20 national third-party and disability representative organisations, all of whom contributed to what makes a good design for the form. We learned the lessons from the WCA, and we took on board some of the recommendations from Professor Harrington on the amount of transparency and opportunity that the claimant needs to be able to tell their story. It isn’t just a tick box; it’s a mix of easy-to-complete tick boxes and free text. We learned the lessons from WCA and Harrington in designing that, and we took on board lots of comments and made a number of changes in response to the findings of the implementation stakeholder forum, but in any new process, when you are introducing something as new and complicated as this, you will not get it right on day one. It will take you several months to get it right.

              Nick Smith: I get that, but because you have identified lots of changes that you have since had to make, it seems as if you could have done a better job and tested it better first time round.

              Q181 Chair: You could have piloted it. I am going to bring Capita in because Stephen has been sitting patiently and I think we recognise that he has a different model. Stephen, can you tell us whether that model of home visits allows you to make money out of it? Does Capita still make money out of the contract?

              Dr Duckworth: The length of the assessment period has resulted in an additional investment by Capita that is about 50% over and above the sum that we originally anticipated. Over the lifetime of the contract, it will become profitable, but at this stage we are not making money.

              Q182 Chair: Because you will just get faster at doing it over the lifetime of the contract? Why would it change? I am probably being silly about this, but explain it to me.

              Dr Duckworth: There will be an increase in the speed and performance of the health professionals. At the moment, in the home environment, health professionals are able to do three assessments a day. In the clinic environment, they are doing four assessments a day. The opportunity that we now have to enable our health professionals to do overtime on Saturdays and Sundays increases those figures. The experience we are seeing in the home that is different from the clinics is also important. The fail-to-attend rate—claimants not being able to turn up for whatever reason—is much lower in the home-based environment than at clinics. That is having a very positive effect.

              Q183 Chair: When did you let the Department know about the backlog?

              Dr Duckworth: We started to discuss it with the Department towards the end of August or early in September.

              Q184 Chair: And you could not have done that earlier? We are all getting slightly hot under the collar for the claimants, because for them—you will know this more than most, Stephen—this is a hugely important way in which they can maintain their independence, and for some it is a way of getting to work. So it was really important to sort it out.

              Dr Duckworth: In response to the question why we did not start talking about it earlier, the “go live” was in June and it was six to eight weeks before we received our first referrals from the Department.

              Q185 Chair: So there was a delay in referring.

              Dr Duckworth: Other than for those who were terminally ill, yes.

              Chair: There was a delay in referring.

              Dr Duckworth: There was a delay in the application process at the front end.

              Robert Devereux: There is a chart in the Report that I am just trying to find—

              Q186 Chair: Do you want to answer that, Mr Feeney, while Mr Devereux is looking?

              Jason Feeney: We went live with national new claims on 8 June. As the figure in the Report says—I think it is either figure 10 or figure 12—there were the initial problems that we have discussed with the telephones taking three or four days, or longer than we expected. The bulk of the time between June and the referrals reaching the assessment providers is taken by the claimant taking four to five weeks to fill in the form. There is not a delay in referral—it is a built-in part of the process. We did that on the advice of disability organisations to allow people time to get the support that they need. If people say that four weeks is not long enough, we give them a further fortnight to return the form. It is a natural part of the design that there is a gap between going live on 8 June and taking claims and their reaching the assessment providers at the beginning of August.

              Q187 Meg Hillier: Some of the problems with all this are quite simple to solve and relate to the general poor admin involved—I am talking to Capita and Atos, although part of this is for Jason Feeney and Mr Devereux. If someone is going to have a liver transplant, what is the point of having a face-to-face assessment—what can an assessor determine that a consultant cannot? It seems that that could be fast-tracked—why is that not the case? Colleagues have provided me with these cases. Another is of someone who had a brain haemorrhage and was referred on leaving hospital. They are all waiting for assessments, but surely the one thing you need to know is that they have that medical condition—from the consultant. Surely that is enough.

              Robert Devereux: One observation: this is not a test for a medical condition. I could have a liver transplant but not be entitled to PIP.

              Q188 Meg Hillier: Not afterwards, perhaps, but while you are waiting for it and are not able to work.

              Robert Devereux: It is not a benefit for being out of work, it has to do with people’s disability condition. Do you want to add to that, Jason?

              Jason Feeney: It is exactly that—it is about how your condition affects you in terms of daily living or your mobility. People will have a range of conditions with differing degrees of severity, and their individual capability to cope will be different. The assessment is not about asking whether someone has X or Y condition; it is about how that affects their daily life—

              Q189 Meg Hillier: Which I fully appreciate when it is all up and running properly, but given the fact that there is this a huge backlog, surely there is some financial reason—and some human reason for the people suffering in the meantime—to find some sort of fast-track system. There is a real cost-shunting going on. We are hearing that the discretionary housing payment is taking things up—that is DCLG money—and we are hearing about charities stepping in. I have heard cases of people being supported by family members on other benefits—

              Robert Devereux: We agree with you. We have already identified one of the things we are seeking to do, both with providers and internally, which is to identify all those things that we could do on paper, using the exact same sort of logic you have applied, but only in respect of the proper test. If it is self-evident that somebody is going to get this benefit, there is no earthly reason why we should waste time assessing them. However, we have to make sure that it is still done rigorously and properly, because understandably, you want to make sure that the right people are being paid, too. We are going to get most traction earliest by finding those people in the backlog who, on paper, we can rapidly determine could be put on to the benefit. That would go quite a long way towards answering your question.

              Q190 Meg Hillier: One other point is that it seems that as soon as an MP gets involved and points these things out, things get—sometimes—speeded up. Going on to the point about poor admin by Atos and Capita, let me give you some examples. One involves a man from Ilford, who is waiting for a liver transplant. He applied for PIP on 27 June. Atos said that it received the claim in August. Now, after some intervention by the MP and the Minister, he has an appointment for assessment on 10 March, but no payment yet. There was some delay in even the form getting to Atos, which is an interesting one.

              A number of constituents in Leicester have been advised to ring up each week to see whether there is a cancellation. I am not sure who has the Leicester contract—

              Dr Duckworth: That is us.

              Meg Hillier: That is clogging up the helpline, and it’s just not efficient, is it? In Corby, Capita has the contract. There are numerous cases of Capita cancelling constituents’ home assessments and in one example, the home visit was originally arranged and then cancelled 24 hours before the appointment. There are repeat examples of that. Eventually, when it was rearranged, and someone had taken time off work, no one turned up.

              Chair: One more, Meg.

              Q191 Meg Hillier: Another case is from Wolverhampton. Capita offered an assessment date in a letter dated 29 January, but the assessment offer was between 6 and 11 January. That is just incompetent admin. What excuses have you got for that?

              Dr Duckworth: There was a glitch in our original scheduling system that had the impact that you referred to in the last case. In terms of the cancelled home visits, we were originally scheduling home visits at four a day, but we found that the health professionals could only cope with a maximum of three a day, because of the complexity of the whole process. Sometimes it takes a lot longer. Health professionals come traditionally from a therapeutic background and they are being asked to adopt a more forensic approach, following their training, to analyse the impact of the impairment on daily living and mobility. It is inappropriate, and rude to the individual concerned, for a health professional to walk out of a home visit just because they have another appointment. We found that, on the days that we were scheduling four appointments a day at home, some appointments had to be cancelled because the health professional was still completing a previous assessment. That has now moved forward and it is a different situation.

              Amyas Morse: I want to ask a forward-looking question, if I may. We have been hearing about two very different methods of delivering. You rightly say that we are in the early days. Is there a point at which you will be able to compare and contrast? Given the significantly different methods, and that a flow of evidence will come to you about how those methods compare with each other, do you see a point in the future when you will be able to take a view on whether one is radically more effective than the other? Do you have that in mind yet, or is it several years down the road?

              Robert Devereux: I am not going to say that it is several years down the road. The focus of everybody’s attention on this panel, at the moment, is getting the next week right, and the week after that right. 

              Amyas Morse: I realise that. 

              Robert Devereux: So yes, it must be the case that when this is in a steady state, that will be a perfectly legitimate question to ask, but right now, I can assure you—

              Amyas Morse: I am not expecting you to have an answer. I am just looking for roughly when we might expect—

              Jason Feeney: The evaluation sub-group on the implementation stakeholder forum that I referred to earlier has a programme of evaluation which will principally be about customer experience. It will be about the effectiveness of the design and the costs associated with the different delivery models.

              Q192 Chair: When is that going to report?

                            Jason Feeney: We have a programme of evaluation, but it will take several—

              Q193 Chair: So you are doing it. You have already got an evaluation in place.

              Jason Feeney: It will take several months and years, because, as we all acknowledge, we need to get more cases through the process, end to end. It includes things like the outcome of mandatory reconsiderations and the outcome of appeals. There is a whole programme of evaluation on something as big and important as this, but it will be a two to three-year evaluation. The contracts are five years long. Clearly, we will want to have the results of that evaluation before we enter into the next contractual process.

              Dr Duckworth: May I add to that, from a contractor’s perspective?

              Chair: Go on.

              Dr Duckworth: We have undertaken a full business process review and it is still ongoing at the moment. We have used our help advisory service to look at the experiences of the health professionals and build that into our learning. We are going to undertake some independent validation of the timings, using lean methodology, to identify how the interfaces between ourselves and the Department can become more efficient. We are working closely with the Department, looking at the potential of reviewing the process, going forward, so that we can drive some of the time out of the system. But to achieve an efficiency improvement from the four assessments a day in a clinic to five assessments a day, you have to see a 25% improvement across the board.

              Robert Devereux: May I just come back to the phones, then? We had an entire hearing on phones previously. The thing that I need to tell you is that on Monday, my daughter’s birthday, we turned 73 of our principle benefit inquiry lines into dual 0845/0345 numbers.

              Q194 Chair: Good, but not this one. Or is this one in it?

              Robert Devereux: From the start of April, 95% of our 0845 calls will be covered by alternative 0345 numbers, and so on. At the same time, because we have been incredibly good in the rest of the organisation in stopping things bouncing around, the volume of calls has plummeted across the organisation. I am really looking forward to you asking to have another hearing on call volumes.

              Chair: Good.

              Robert Devereux: You asked me last time whether we were meeting private sector benchmarks for answering 80% of calls within 20 seconds. We are now doing that.

              I have introduced the 0345 numbers, we are answering in the right space and call volumes have collapsed as a consequence.

              Chair: Okay.

              Robert Devereux: This will be the case on this benefit, too. Give us some time to sort it out.

              Q195 Chair: Well, you should always pilot these things.

              There have been serious—both contractors have not met their contractual obligations. Are any sanctions being applied?

              Robert Devereux: Yes. There are conditions in the contract about how many claims they have to return in a given period.

              Q196 Chair: Have they lost money?

              Robert Devereux: We have already raised service charges for them.

              Q197 Chair: How much?

              Robert Devereux: There is an item in the report, which tells you how much.

              Max Tse: About £1.1 million, I think.

              Q198 Chair: From Atos?

              Max Tse: From both.

              Robert Devereux: Paragraph 3.32 states that the service credits accrued are “£0.8 million against Atos; £0.2 million against Capita”, subject to the last sentence.

              Q199 Chair: That is a bit out of date. Is there more since then?

              Robert Devereux: There will be, but you asked me not to send you new information, so I have not done so.

              Chair: Touché. Can I ask you—

              Nick Smith: It is a small figure.

              Robert Devereux: It is a small figure. I have been waiting for it all morning.

              Q200 Chair: There was a savings target under this programme, which you are now not meeting. Are you looking for cuts elsewhere? Or where are you getting that from?

              Robert Devereux: One of the things that you will have noticed was announced yesterday.

              Chair: I did not; oh, in the Budget. Go on.

              Robert Devereux: The Chancellor has announced a welfare cap. PIP is within the welfare cap, so the numbers that he has now announced mean that, if there are any changes, the expectation on the Government is to make changes to make long-term savings.

              Q201 Chair: You have avoided the question. You have not met your savings target here, as it says in the report, by some—

              Max Tse: Yes, but for the current spending review period it has gone down by about £140 million.

              Q202 Chair: Are you making cuts elsewhere to get the savings to which you were committed as a Department?

              Robert Devereux: The savings to which we were originally committed, you will recall from the chart and the diagram, run to some £2 billion a year in the later years. In the period in which we have been re-phasing this, which is one reason why the short-term savings are lower, we have also identified larger long-term savings. So, as a whole, the Government have proceeded with this on the basis that there are savings in it.

              Q203 Chair: Are you making alternative cuts in this review period, to meet your savings target? We can all say “2018”. Are you making more cuts elsewhere? You have just got to say yes or no to that.

              Robert Devereux: You are familiar with the fact that benefit spending is outside the control system.

              Q204 Chair: But there is a cap now.

              Robert Devereux: I think that is what I answered to start with.

              Q205 Chair: I know. So are you going to make cuts elsewhere, because you are not making them here?

              Robert Devereux: Because the welfare cap has been set on the basis of today’s forecasts, the things you are talking about are now in the cap, so I would need to make further savings in the event that it deteriorated further, not because of the things that you have already referred to.

              Chair: You will have to make savings elsewhere. That was all I really asked.

              Robert Devereux: I am sorry. You have just summed up entirely not what I just said. What I said is that the change in the savings that we have experienced are already now inside the defined welfare cap. So future changes to PIP would have a bearing on the welfare cap and, under the regime of the welfare cap, would require offsetting savings. But not the ones we have already, because they have been baked into the cap.

              Chair: Okay. Very quickly, Austin, because I think some of our members have got to go.

              Q206 Austin Mitchell: I am concerned about the long delays we seem to be finding in Grimsby and I don’t see the reason for them. The Report says: “The Department cannot currently measure how long it is taking to make decisions on individual claims or the time taken at individual stages of the process”. Your alarm bells should have rung loudly at the kind of delays that we are finding as constituency MPs. Why can’t you measure them?

              Robert Devereux: Clearly we have measured it because we took action. So when Stephen explained that in August it was apparent that the length of this assessment—

              Q207 Chair: No, what you are not measuring is your own departmental performance, as I understand it. Isn’t that right, Max ?

              Robert Devereux: I am sorry, but Mr Mitchell went on to say it was because we were not taking appropriate action on it. Jason, do you want to explain?

              Jason Feeney: We have management information that tells us each step of the process, otherwise we wouldn’t have been able to support the NAO in doing their analysis, and there are figures inside the Report that show each element of the process.

              Max Tse: The management information improved over time, so there was less at the beginning and then it got better. So there was more ability to separate between standard claims and terminally ill claims, and so on. That improved over time.

              Q208 Austin Mitchell: My office says that delays are occurring because things are batted between Atos and the Department.

              Jason Feeney: People making inquiries are sometimes directed between ourselves and the assessment providers. We are undertaking activity to make sure that that doesn’t happen. We need to be very clear about who owns the case and therefore who answers the queries at each step in the process. What we do not have is the assessment form—about how your disability affects you—going backwards and forwards between the providers.

              Q209 Austin Mitchell: You are eventually saving money at the cost of a great deal of worry for disabled people and those in a very difficult situation. Why can’t you tell claimants how long they are going to have to wait? We have large numbers just sitting around helplessly.

              Robert Devereux: The Report says that we ought to be saying more. We have now started putting information to claimants so they know the sorts of times that you have all expressed concern about today, which we are also aware of. So that particular recommendation—done.

              Q210 Austin Mitchell: Finally, on additional support, there are various organisations—we heard from them at the start of this session—providing help and support for claimants whose claims are delayed, who face difficulty or who are making new claims. Have you provided any extra help for those organisations to deal with the issue?

              Jason Feeney: Only through engagement and information, not financial help.

              Q211 Austin Mitchell: Why not financial?

              Jason Feeney: The Department is not there to fund the third sector in that sense in its supporting role.

              Q212 Austin Mitchell: Those organisations are not there to do your work for you, either, but you are asking them to do that.

              Jason Feeney: We think it is helpful for individual claimants to get what support and help they think they need to take them through the process.

              Q213 Austin Mitchell: But not helpful enough to pay for it?

              Robert Devereux: I can envisage a rather difficult problem. How on earth would you work out what was needed? I could have another hearing on the efficacy of the spending, probably.

              Q214 Chair: Will all the other benefits to which you are entitled once you get your PIP—the blue badge, carer’s allowance and all these other things that people talked about—be backdated too?

              Robert Devereux: That is a good question that occurred to me when we heard the earlier evidence. I don’t know the answer.

              Jason Feeney: It might vary between individual benefits. There might be a difference, for example, between the blue badge and carer’s allowance. We can find more information on that.

              Robert Devereux: Let us go and check that. Given that there is an issue there, that is worth doing.

              Q215 Chair: The very final question on something else that I am sure you are expecting: will you let us have your internal review of the Work programme?

              Robert Devereux: My internal review of the Work programme?

              Chair: Your internal review of the Work programme that has been sitting in the Department since September.

              Robert Devereux: I just want to know which review we are talking about.

              Q216 Chair: There is a review that you have done about how well the Work programme is or is not working, which has been leaked to various people. All I am saying is that it would be a courtesy to let members of this Committee who are going to come back to the Work programme have a copy of it.

              Robert Devereux: My understanding is that the National Audit Office is planning a further hearing on the Work programme. My understanding is that the National Audit Office has complete access to all my paperwork, so—

              Q217 Chair: Will you let members of this Committee also have a copy?

              Robert Devereux: I am slightly struggling to understand what this thing called an internal review is. We are constantly looking at this.

              Q218 Chair: I am sure you do know about this. It was all over the media last week.

              Robert Devereux: I am sorry, I have not read that. I have been preparing for this.

              Q219 Chair: I do not believe that. I suggest you go back.

              Robert Devereux: It is true.

              Q220 Chair: It was an internal review that was ready for publication on the Work programme last September and I would like to see a copy of it. It is pretty critical of the Work programme, but I think it would be beneficial for us to have a totally objective view when we come to look it.

              Robert Devereux: Is this a research report?

              Max Tse: Yes, it was an evaluation report, I think, that was referenced generally.

              Robert Devereux: It is a piece of work that we have commissioned externally.

              Q221 Chair: Can we have it please?

              Robert Devereux: Let me find out.

              Chair: Pardon?

              Robert Devereux: Let me go back and refresh my memory of what it is. I am sorry.

              Q222 Chair: Well, I do not believe you don’t know it. I bet you have read it.

              Robert Devereux: I have not read it, Chair. You can make assertions about whether I am being truthful, but they are false.

              Chair: We would like to see it. It is an evaluation—thank you. You called it research rather than a review. It is an evaluation of the Work programme which I understand was ready for publication in September. I think the Committee would like to see it.

              Robert Devereux: I understand.

              Chair: Thank you.

              Oral evidence: Personal Independence Payments, HC 1116                            25