Oral evidence: Benefit delivery, HC 372-i
21 October 2015
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 21 October 2015.
Members present: Rt Hon Frank Field (Chair), Heidi Allen, Mhairi Black, Ms Karen Buck, John Glen, Richard Graham, Mrs Emma Lewell Buck, Craig Mackinlay, Jeremy Quin, Craig Williams
Questions 1-122
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters, Head of Policy, National Housing Federation, Rhiannon Sims, Policy Co-ordinator, Citizens Advice Scotland, Clare Jephcott, Islington Law Centre, and Sarah Seeger, Head of Customer Accounts, Curo, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Clare, might we start with you, to go round and introduce yourselves for the sake of the record? I hope our system is working here, the microphones, but if people do not hear the questions or are not following the argument, could they just please just say so? Clare, can we begin with you?
Clare Jephcott: I am Clare Jephcott from Islington Law Centre. I am a welfare rights caseworker.
Rhiannon Sims: I am Rhiannon Sims. I am from Citizens Advice Scotland.
Sarah Seeger: I am Sarah Seeger and I am from Curo. We are a housing association based in Bath.
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: I am Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters. I am Head of Policy at the National Housing Federation.
Q2 Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck: Good morning, everyone. I want to ask about errors. As we all know, under-payments can often leave people destitute, having to turn to food banks, unable to pay their bills. I am curious as to what the panel think are the most common causes of those kinds of errors. I am happy to start with either Clarissa or Clare and just work along.
Chair: Yes, because of our time restraints, if other people have said what you want to say, we would be grateful if you just agreed. We would love to hear any disagreements.
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: I am happy to start this off, if that is helpful.
Chair: Please do.
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: I suppose one of the common causes of error is no appropriate support in place for claimants when they are filling out the claim form at the beginning. One practical thing that the DWP could think about doing when it rolls out the digital service is to put a save function on the claimant forms so that if the claimant does not have all the information they need when they are filling out the form in the first place that they can come back to it or they can seek some advice.
The other area that is a cause of errors is where there is a change in circumstances. For example, there were interim arrangements put in place earlier this year when there were rent changes, that kind of bulk data information change. However, if that interim arrangement were not put in place, that could have been a cause of error and we would certainly like to see similar arrangements put in place for the rent change coming in the forthcoming April.
Q3 Chair: Can I just follow up on that? Under the previous system when there was rationalisation—whatever you want to call it—of staff, I understood when you went, in the old term to sign on, you would have a preliminary stage where you were producing the data you needed to sign on, then you met another officer who started the 20-minute interview with you. Am I right in assuming that those functions have now been combined so that at your first interview, you also have to shuffle around the papers to make sure you have them—and as you say, you may not have them—and also prepare your first attempt to find work; that that has all now been concertinaed? Is that right or am I wrong on that?
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: That is how I understand it to work as well. I am sure the panel will correct me if I am incorrect, but yes, that is how I understand it. I suppose part of that is that is a huge amount of information for a claimant to take in, to have to go through the process in one sitting and then have a discussion about work search. As I understand it, I do not think there is a huge amount of information given to the claimant to take away as well to look at and to think about going forward, so that is an issue as well.
Q4 Ms Karen Buck: If I could just ask you about whether you think claimants understand where they need to tell people about a change of circumstances and whether all benefits are compatible, because some of my experience is that people understand when they have to make a change to a tax credit, but not necessarily to the Housing Benefit, and they operate on different timescales. Is that part of the problem?
Clare Jephcott: Yes. In the old legacy benefits, you have to tell each office and if you do not, you will get an over-payment. I think clients are confused still, even though it has been policy for several years, that they do not realise they have to tell every single authority. They do not and it does lead to over-payments.
Q5 Ms Karen Buck: Are benefits and tax credits the same in terms of how often people have to report and what kind of changes of circumstances?
Clare Jephcott: Credits you only have to tell once a year, whereas the other benefits you have to tell within 28 days, especially the Housing Benefit, or as soon as practically possible. So, yes, it is different.
Q6 Ms Karen Buck: In my experience in central London Housing Benefit is usually by far the largest payment that people have, so if people do not realise they have to inform within 28 days, even sometimes when they do, by the time the payment is calculated, they can then find themselves owing £4,000 or £5,000 very, very quickly.
Sarah Seeger: Yes, rent is high; absolutely, yes.
Q7 Ms Karen Buck: Is that a common experience? Do you think that Housing Benefit and its size and the nature of the benefit in terms of how often people have to inform about change of circumstances is a particular problem?
Sarah Seeger: It used to be the case many years ago that Housing Benefit claims were reviewed every six months and it would pick some of these issues up more quickly. Some of the changes of circumstances that claimants have to report are not ones that they necessarily see as a change of a circumstance, such a child leaving education or reaching their 18th birthday. Those errors then can run on for a very long time, creating large over-payments that they do not have the capacity to pay back.
Q8 Chair: Can I just step back before John comes in? Do you think it is impossible to have an application form that is the application for all the benefits to which you might be entitled?
Sarah Seeger: No, I do not think that is impossible. If you wanted to develop something like that that worked, you would absolutely need to start that journey working with some claimants. Do not design it and give it to them as a fait accompli. Work with them and check their understanding as you build it as part of your project.
Q9 Chair: Could we ask any or all of you this: might you begin to undertake that exercise for us with groups of claimants? We might want to do it in our constituencies, but I began with lads on day release to design forms for applying for Income Support, which in the end ended up as the CPAG’s benefit book, which was then for a market it was not meant for; it was meant for the people themselves. Do you think you might begin that exercise for us of how a form could look?
Sarah Seeger: We will happily do anything to facilitate a good customer journey, because it has such an impact on our income stream as a housing association, so we would be willing to do whatever we could to support that work.
Chair: Clare, do you want to come in, and then on to John?
Clare Jephcott: I respect it as a request, but we are overloaded with the delays and errors in getting the benefits in payment, but to then be guinea pigs in developing a form, I think the Law Centre may be a little bit—
Chair: Yes. I was not asking for a huge effort, it was whether one or two of you who thought you had members and colleagues who would be interested enough just to do that as an exercise. John and then Craig.
Q10 John Glen: For any of you, one of the issues that I have contemplated is the notion that some people want to avoid making a claim; they rely on their own resources; there is a stigma associated with it. They put it off, put it off and then are put off and shocked by the delay and the fact that they go in, make a claim and then there is a processing error. Do you encounter that in any significant amount of time or not?
Sarah Seeger: Yes, certainly my colleagues feed back that their customers leave work with the best of intentions; they want to get another job very quickly and they expect to do that. If for any reason that does not work out, they may be two or three weeks into not having a job and then they discover they have a six-week wait.
Q11 John Glen: Exactly. So that is a reasonably common occurrence, is it?
Sarah Seeger: Yes.
Chair: Did you want to come in?
Rhiannon Sims: The DWP written evidence submitted to the Committee showed that the majority of Short-Term Benefit Advances are made at the beginning of a claim, which shows that often people are in quite precarious financial circumstances when they come to claim benefits, which I think just goes to show that having a five-week waiting period at the beginning of a Universal Credit claim is problematic. I think it is going to lead to a huge number of these benefit advances, which adds extra time and resource to not only the DWP but also advice agencies as well.
Chair: That is helpful, thank you.
Sarah Seeger: The majority of our customers are not leaving work with a full month’s salary. Many of them work part-time, zero hours, have done some temporary work, so they do not have a month’s pay that they can stretch a bit longer for that six weeks to see them through.
Q12 Craig Mackinlay: Perhaps for Ms Seeger: you mentioned one of the reasons for over-payments is when a child reaches a staging date birthday; I think for tax credits it might be 16 and for other benefits it might be 18. Do councils have that database record of when these children are going to hit these staging dates, so perhaps it could be almost automatically adjusted, rather than build up a big over-payment that people then struggle to pay back?
Clare Jephcott: For that point, it is not about the date of birth, it is about whether or not someone is still in education, so even if the date of birth is there, getting tax credits, if you are a qualifying young person, you can still get it until the age of 16. Although Islington Council do often use it as a trigger figure, it should not be, because it is about being in education, it is not about the date of birth.
Q13 Craig Mackinlay: No, I realise that. I am just wondering whether it would be safer to do an automatic cut-off and then you have to ask for it rather than build up a big over-payment that will lead to personal problems in the future.
Sarah Seeger: It would be safer for payments if the expected date for leaving education triggered a review of the claim.
Craig Mackinlay: Yes. Okay, that is very useful.
Q14 Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck: Can I just go back to something you said, Clarissa, at the start, that there is not enough support for claimants at the beginning, at the outset? How do we change that then so all the issues that we have just discussed are not happening anymore? What are your suggestions for making a difference to that system?
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: I think it is important that the right support is put in place at the beginning of the claim, of course; that is absolutely crucial.
One of the pieces of feedback we received from housing associations working their tenant claimants is that personal budgeting support, while it is fantastic that it is a central plank of the system, is not always either offered or understood that it is offered and tenant claimants come away saying, “I was not offered that or I did not feel I should take it up”. So thinking of ways that we can promote that and that we can make that really clear, about the tenant even being able to ask for that when they go in. For housing associations, they do a lot of pre-tenancy work and they do a lot of signposting and advice giving that can help with that, but clearly there is also an onus on the work coach to be forthcoming and to explain very clearly what the options are for the claimant.
Rhiannon Sims: I think there also has to be proper exploration of the claimant’s circumstances at the claimant commitment stage, so when the work coach is meeting for the first time with the claimant, to ask them questions around any care responsibilities that they have or anything that might make it more difficult for them to carry out their work-related activity, because I think CAB evidence shows that often this process is done too quickly, without proper care and attention.
Clare Jephcott: I think the work coach should also have training in working with people with mental health and physical disabilities, because they need to understand the kind of support that someone who is trying to look for work needs. I do not feel there is adequate training in that regard and also there is not adequate training in what the Jobcentre staff know about the benefit system and what the claimants are entitled to. There are gaps. For example, the Carer’s Allowance and the underlying entitlement is often overlooked. If you are a carer, you can get a carer’s premium on your benefit.
Q15 Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck: So essentially you are saying it comes to is training for the staff doing that initial assessment of the claimant?
Sarah Seeger: I think is important that work coaches, as they get to know their clients better and build a bit of trust and understanding, revisit whether they managing financially, because quite often at the start of a claim, the claimant has good intentions. Because of the things that the work coach can do, such as apply a sanction, claimants are quite fearful of saying anything that their work coach might perceive as bad, rightly or wrongly, and it takes a while for them to build up enough trust that they might engage in a proper conversation with their work coach about debt. It absolutely is a barrier for people finding work, because they are consumed with the worry and the stress of all their creditors, then they are not focusing on their work-related activities.
Q16 Craig Mackinlay: Leading on from what you said, Ms Jephcott, I think you said Citizens Advice in Scotland suggested that Jobcentre staff do require some training. We are talking about an infinitely complex benefit system. Is there one particular area that you find they are repeatedly getting wrong, where training would at least solve a lot more of the problems that you are seeing?
Clare Jephcott: The area I see is when people are in crisis; when there is benefit in payment so they need the short-term advance payment. Even though the DWP are claiming they have reminded staff about that, I think that is an essential area that needs to be focused on again, because people are falling through that gap and that is why the foodbanks are overloaded.
The other issue is the mandatory considerations, when they have a mistaken assessment and they are appealing an ESA decision. That issue, people having to claim Jobseeker’s: there again the advice you get on the phone is also sometimes misleading. They do not realise that they can appeal. They are just told to claim Jobseeker’s. The majority of my clients have severe mental health and physical difficulties. They are failing the work capability assessments. Even though they have degenerative diseases they are time and again doing the same assessment. They are not claiming Jobseeker’s or they are not appealing because of misinformation. That area is also key, and also the actual fact that the law is such that you can no longer claim ESA during the reconsideration stage of mandatory consideration, you can only claim Jobseeker’s. My clients find that incongruous, because they know they know they cannot work. They can barely get to the toilet sometimes, some cases are so severe. So that area of law is really detrimental. Obviously I think it is discriminatory, because it is having a significant impact on disabled clients, so I think when you have your WCA claim, you need to get back to the ESA assessment rate, because making them claim Jobseeker’s is just bizarre.
Q17 Craig Mackinlay: I think the Carer’s Allowance as well was something that there did not seem to be enough knowledge about among staff. That is being missed as well.
Clare Jephcott: Yes, that is being missed, absolutely. Yes.
Q18 Chair: We understand that staff have a script that guides them on how to conduct a conversation with potential claimants. Do you know if part of the script talks about short-term advance payments or whether that is something that might just happen to be thrown in or not?
Clare Jephcott: It is only thrown in if you ask for it. I have never had it recommended to me or suggested.
Rhiannon Sims: I asked welfare rights advisers in Citizens Advice in Scotland that question, and they seemed to think that it is never offered without a third party requesting it. I do not know if that is the experience of everyone else.
Sarah Seeger: The feedback I have had on that point is mixed so I believe it is possibly variable maybe from Jobcentre to Jobcentre or adviser to adviser. My colleagues tell me they have seen our customers with a small piece of paper with a number on that they can ring to get an advance, but I am not sensing that that happens every single time without fail.
Chair: So one of our recommendations could be to request the script and then to see what is in the script and if this is adequately covered.
Q19 Craig Mackinlay: Just following on from that, the Short-Term Benefit Advance, most claimants I think will have heard, just through discussions I suppose, of crisis loans. Are they more easily available than the Short-Term Benefit Advances, because most people seem to have heard of those?
Clare Jephcott: Did you say crisis loans?
Craig Mackinlay: Yes.
Clare Jephcott: They were abolished in favour of local welfare schemes, so it is very dependent on where you live, that scheme.
Q20 Craig Mackinlay: Are people calling them the same thing? I think people call things crisis loans; is this what they mean?
Clare Jephcott: Crisis loans have been abolished. They are usually grants, but again, they are very minimal. I can only talk about Islington. There, before, you could just phone up and get a crisis loan. Now you have to go through an agent, so you have to get to the council or to our office or other advice agencies in the area to make a claim. Even when you do, you have to prove so much, that there is no other area of support, and if you are lucky enough to get one, it is £20 and then they help you with your energy supply. You can only get one. If you want another one, it is at the discretion of the manager. You really have to push for it and then it is only £40. I have clients who are not claiming JSA, who have fallen through the net; they are trying to appeal the ESA; no income. Well, £40 gets them nowhere. They are weeks on end without money, so they are going to foodbanks. That is the reality, I am afraid.
Q21 Craig Mackinlay: The worry is they are then going to high-percentage loan agencies.
Clare Jephcott: Yes, exactly, the pay lenders are having a field day.
Chair: We have three people wanting to come in as well, Richard briefly and then Karen and then Emma.
Q22 Richard Graham: Thank you very much. Very briefly, a question for the CAB and Law Centre. When many of us had problems in our constituencies over the whole business of Atos and the physical assessments and the slowness of payments and so on, what I found was that our CAB had clients there who had been waiting for over six months in some cases for this to be resolved, without referring it back to the office of the relevant MP. We set up some fairly rigorous guidelines about the speed of referring serious problems with constituents to their MPs. What sort of systems do you both have in place with your MPs so that you are referring issues on benefit delivery once they have gone beyond a certain point to your MPs; to use their MP’s hotlines and get the problems sorted?
Rhiannon Sims: I do not think we have any formal system in place, but sometimes it does get to that point. We have seen cases where people have waited over a year—they have still been on the assessment phase of Employment Support Allowance—and it is particularly a problem in rural Scotland, in the Highlands and Islands, where assessment centres are few and far between and there are not enough assessors to do home visits perhaps.
Q23 Richard Graham: Do you not think it is time to have a system to refer things to MPs much, much earlier?
Rhiannon Sims: Possibly, but I think it would be better if—
Chair: The system worked.
Rhiannon Sims: —the system worked, to be honest.
Q24 Richard Graham: Sure, but if you have a fall-back system that can help you, where people are responsible to their constituents, should they not get involved earlier?
Clare Jephcott: They get involved when we ask them to. In Islington, we are very lucky, we have two very dedicated MPs and staff around them. We do call them in when we need to, but we do try first to get the claimants the benefits in payment.
Richard Graham: My recommendation, Chairman, would be that we set up a system where things are referred after a certain period of time automatically.
Q25 Heidi Allen: Very quickly just on that, I think it is so valuable to do that, because we then can pick up trends. If it is one office or one geographical area that is always failing, then we can adjust that and maybe then get the problem fixed so that the system does work properly.
Rhiannon Sims: I would be concerned about how many cases you are able to—
Heidi Allen: Fine, that is what we are paid for.
Richard Graham: That might be helpful in itself.
Clare Jephcott: Every single case would need an MP.
Chair: No, indeed.
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck: It could be introducing another layer of complexity to the situation.
Chair: All right, we will leave that with you, but we may come back to Richard’s point in our report. Karen and then Emma.
Q26 Ms Karen Buck: Specifically about the status of decisions: if somebody goes for a Mandatory Reconsideration where ESA is stopped, or indeed other benefits are stopped, other consequential benefits like council tax and Housing Benefit can also be stopped, but I believe there was a ruling recently that said that should not happen. Could you clarify what the situation is?
Clare Jephcott: My understanding of that rule is if there are sanctions, the Housing Benefit should not stop, but if the ESA stops, yes, absolutely.
Q27 Ms Karen Buck: All the other benefits stop?
Clare Jephcott: Yes, the Housing Benefit will stop and you have to prove that you have nil income before they will restart it again.
Q28 Chair: That need not be so, need it, though?
Clare Jephcott: No, it need not be so, officially.
Q29 Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck: Moving on to a different topic for the panel, I have had constituents who have been left without any support at all because the DWP consistently lose their documents or cannot find the forms. Does anyone on the panel have any idea about how that system can be changed to eradicate this ongoing problem? It seems to be the same people as well. I get the same constituents coming back saying they have lost them for a third time and a fourth time, and all the while these people are left with nothing.
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: Our experience has been that where the system is automated, it works a lot better. There have been changes recently for the APA letters to be automated. They tend to be working a lot better than they previously did. The DWP mail handling centre, they use a lot of template forms, a lot of copying and pasting happening and errors can occur that way.
Another thing that our housing association members tell us is that quite often they see their letters going to the wrong office, the wrong place. One of the things that we have raised with the DWP is could they have a standard list with one address for each housing association to make sure the housing associations know exactly where all that mail is going, or even better, when we get to a digital system, could there be a landlord portal where landlords could self-update that kind of information so that we design out some of those errors.
Sarah Seeger: We have had experience of APA requests being lost three times in a row. All the while the claimant is being paid those housing costs and then not paying them in as their rent and losing their home over it. I am pleased to say that is much better now that we have an e-mail system. We notice with our claimants frequently their sick notes disappear, so they provide them to the DWP, think they are fine. If they are on Jobseeker’s, quite often the first they know that something has gone wrong is when their money is not paid, because they have been sanctioned. Now, I do not know the internal workings of the DWP well enough to make a recommendation on how you fix that, but that does seem to be a consistent issue that comes up over and over again.
Chair: Craig, you will pick up on that, will you?
Q30 Craig Williams: Thanks very much, Frank. Can I take us back? We have talked a lot about Mandatory Reconsideration and I think that is a big issue this morning, the impact. Citizens Advice, you have some great case studies in your written evidence, and thanks very much for that, but I want to draw the panel out more on the impact on claimants during that period. I know Clare touched on it, but I do not whether any of you have stuff you want to add.
Sarah Seeger: The difficulty for us is there is not a set timescale, so we do not know when to expect this to be resolved, so it is very difficult for us to make a decision about the best way to manage a tenancy when there is this big unanswered question. There do not appear to be any service standards or timelines set out and no measures in place to make sure that these things get managed quickly. I think that would be enormously helpful, both for us as support agencies and claimants.
Q31 Craig Williams: What specific measure would you like to see in terms of improving that period?
Rhiannon Sims: I think there needs to be a time limit in place. They say their aspiration is to deal with Mandatory Reconsideration decisions within 14 days. I feel there are many cases where that is not happening and I think that time limit needs to be enforced properly. We have to remember that it is often income replacement benefits that people are having reconsidered, so they do not have anything else to live on, except if they are also claiming a disability benefit, but that ought to be for something different. It is a massive problem and we need a time limit, and ideally we would need to see those claimants having some kind of income during that period.
Q32 Chair: Is it not a conversation for the Department, in that they already have the basic information in registering the claim? The difficulties might arise if claimants want to add information, given they have been refused. I am always puzzled about the amount of time my constituents have to wait for the reconsideration, because the Department has the information in most cases. They just want to say, “Why have you not given me a benefit?” They then add a whole pile of other stuff. Is that your experience or not? Clare.
Clare Jephcott: Yes, a time limit is perhaps welcome, but you have to think with ECAs you do need medical evidence from a local medical professional who knows the claimant a lot better than the snapshot that the health assessor has, and that does take time to get. We spend a lot of time chasing those. Perhaps a time limit would work then with a GP, “There is this time limit and we need it now” because they do work to deadlines.
Q33 John Glen: Given that the DWP data shows that 31% of their Mandatory Reconsiderations result in reversing an adverse decision, it begs the question, is it about speeding up the MR process or getting the original decision right more frequently?
Clare Jephcott: Absolutely, yes, of course, it is the first assessment.
Q34 John Glen: Because that would solve it. That is a massive percentage to have to change.
Clare Jephcott: Yes, and I do not see why they do not ask more the people who know what their condition is.
Q35 John Glen: What is driving that high rate? What is the flaw in the original decision that is causing such a high number to be turned round, to be changed?
Rhiannon Sims: I think it goes back to the medical assessments of Employment Support Allowance in particular. Obviously a Mandatory Reconsideration can apply to any kind of benefit, but I think particularly when it is medical assessments for ESA, DLA or PIP we are still seeing inaccuracies in which group that claimant is being placed in or the level of award they are getting. I think the majority of Mandatory Reconsiderations we are seeing are in relation to that. So getting the assessment right by that assessment provider is key.
Q36 Craig Williams: I wanted to come back on the mental health aspect, because I have some particular cases at the moment where it is former police officers with all that PIP information to hand, when they go into the Jobcentre and have that snapshot and it has contradicted. It is going into the judge on the ESA with all that information from a professional body and why is that not trusted? Is that more than my slight anecdote. Are you seeing that a lot, that despite the fact people have a mountain of consultants and other respected advice, that is sometimes ignored?
Clare Jephcott: Yes, I think it is. It is only when you get to the tribunal and they listen to the claim.
Rhiannon Sims: There is a problem with how the DWP gathers the medical evidence. It is not always clear which healthcare professionals are responsible for providing that. GPs often are reluctant, because they feel they do not have a good enough understanding of the benefit system or would not necessarily know how that person’s condition was affecting their everyday lives, so it is difficult to get medical evidence for the claimant and for the DWP.
Chair: Pretty chilling that, is it not, that doctors do not know enough about you to provide that evidence? Anyway, Heidi.
Q37 Heidi Allen: A slight change of tack now, looking specifically at the relationship with Universal Credit and paying for housing, so rent. I do not know who has an opinion—you probably all have an opinion on this, I suspect. A person can apply to have an interim payment if a claimant cannot make ends meet and cannot handle that single payment coming in of Universal Credit. Talk me through this: they call it the Alternative Payment Arrangement. Does it work? What are the flaws in it? Your views generally as a system.
Sarah Seeger: We welcome the opportunity to have rent paid direct to us for claimants that are struggling, but it is not quite working as it should yet and has added a significant layer of complexity to what we do. The process has improved now that it is done by e-mail and we get a faster response. However, quite often, once the APA is agreed, that is when our problems start.
Where we have a problematic Housing Benefit claim, we have a longstanding relationship with the local authority and they will engage with us in conversations about claims so that we can understand what may have gone awry and work with the claimant to get that sorted out. With Universal Credit now, that is very different, in that when we are expecting an APA payment, if it does not appear or comes but does not cover the rent in its entirety, the first thing we need to do is phone the service centre and find out why. More often than not, I would say 95% of the time, the service centre cannot or will not tell us that because of client confidentiality. Even though it has worked very well in practice with the Housing Benefit for the last 20 years, it seems to be an issue for the service centre.
Q38 Heidi Allen: How does it have anything to do with client confidentiality? Is the whole point not that the client is being taken out of the process?
Sarah Seeger: Usually all we want to know is why is the payment short and is there anything we can do to help with that. We are then pushed into a lengthy escalation process. If the call centre agent cannot help us, it is escalated to a call-back, which we may or may not get. If we do not get the call-back, then we have to e-mail. If we do not get a response to the e-mail, then we can ring the housing team. Would it not be better to just cut all of that out and let us ring the housing team and then we have saved all that wasted demand on your service and of our time? That is time that we could spend supporting clients to sort themselves out.
I think even better than that would be if we had access to a landlord portal, so for those simple kinds of enquiries we would not need to bother you at all. Again, that would save us a lot of time that we can then put towards working with the vulnerable claimants to keep them on track.
Another issue we have noticed with APAs is they are available for vulnerable claimants from day one—they do not need to have accrued eight weeks’ worth of rent arrears in order to get one—but I am not detecting presently that the Jobcentre are picking up on any those vulnerabilities. When I have gone and talked to work coaches and said, “These tier 1 factors are very important” they are like, “What are they?” and then I say, “I feel that I know more about this than you guys” which is rather disconcerting. We have examples of quite vulnerable customers who have had a big lump sum of housing cost paid and it is frequently swallowed up by their associates, by their chaotic lifestyle or on other debts and they have no capacity to pay those arrears back. They might have £2 a week left once they have paid all their essential bills, so we are leaving them with a debt that they cannot afford to pay back. I think there is possibly a job to be done to empower work coaches a bit to say, “I think that person is vulnerable and we need to work with them a little bit differently”. I do not sense that they feel they can do that at the moment.
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: I have one point. I completely endorse Sarah’s point about would it not be easier if we could just phone the housing specialist team. The housing specialist team has been a welcome development from the DWP. The information is generally accurate, timely.
Q39 Heidi Allen: That is a new addition to the process then, it looks like?
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: Yes, that is a new resource that has been made available, but clearly there is an escalation process before you get access to them.
The point I wanted to make was about the trusted status/proof of concept work that the DWP is currently exploring. We think that does hold real potential to try to solve some of the issues that Sarah has outlined by trusting key partners such as housing associations to be able to take some of those decisions based on their relationship with their tenant and their knowledge of what would work best for their tenant, in dialogue with them. We would be keen to see DWP progress with that quite quickly.
Q40 Heidi Allen: When you finally get resolution then, normally by talking directly, by the sounds of things, is it the same kind of mistakes? Are there themes? Are there things in the process that are not working?
Sarah Seeger: Sometimes it is error and you can have an APA for two months, then one month it does not appear, we do not know why it reappears the next month. Sometimes it gets paid to the claimant by mistake. Other times it is just that the claimant has done a couple of days’ work and the payment is reduced, but both us and the claimant get the notification a little bit late to facilitate them budgeting for their housing costs then. It is a perennial problem. It happens in the legacy benefit system as well. Universal Credit, I am glad to say, makes it much easier to do a few days’ work, because the admin burden is reduced on claimants, but then it is hard for them to plan forward. Where their income is very low, they just do not have the wiggle room to be able to deal with that and smooth it over. They are immediately then pushed into being behind on several things at once and wondering what they are going to do to resolve that.
Q41 Craig Mackinlay: Thinking a bit sideways on this, in my former life I was a chartered accountant, and as agents we are allowed a fair bit of access via the HMRC interface into what our clients’ records are and that is going to be expanded over time. Do you think there might be a case for particularly housing associations, trusted agents, to be allowed greater access to your claimants’ records on a read-only basis and perhaps making adjustments?
Sarah Seeger: We would absolutely welcome that.
Q42 Craig Mackinlay: It is working in HMRC—in HMRC’s own merry way—to an extent. I am thinking something could be similarly rolled out.
Sarah Seeger: We do have it to a degree with some local authorities and Housing Benefit; we can see some basic information, like when they last had a letter and things like that. It is very helpful and it cuts down our demand then on the phone service, because we do not need to ring up. It means we can text or call the client or nip around. There are lots of things we can do that other agencies cannot, because we own their home and we are more present in the neighbourhood. Yes, we would absolutely welcome the opportunity to be able to do that and work in that way.
Craig Mackinlay: That might be an idea.
Chair: Very good. Jeremy.
Q43 Jeremy Quin: Another topic, if I may. The personal budgeting support: in the pilot areas, what sort of uptake has there been and has it been a useful, successful tool for recipients? Any one of you?
Sarah Seeger: Not yet, no. We have tried to understand the reasons why it is not working very well at the moment. Back about a year ago, we did a short survey of our Universal Credit claimants and only about a quarter of them recognised that they had been offered budgeting support. I think the script at the time when this possibly changed was along the lines of, “Are you comfortable talking with me about money?” and most of them just either said, “No” or, “I am fine”. I think they get a bit further into their claim and then the problems rack up and then they have rent arrears and then we end up doing that. I am aware that in some areas it is a bit of a palaver in terms of getting your personal budgeting support appointment and claimants drop out of the process that way, but what I see frequently is housing officers, housing associations, are picking this up as part of the work that they do around managing rent arrears.
What we would very much welcome is maybe the opportunity to be considered a partner that is delivering PBS, because we are in someone’s home, they are talking to us about money and we would quite like to strike while the iron is hot. We are able to sustain that at the moment while we have a small cohort of Universal Credit claimants, but we will not be able to continue to do that further down the line.
A big demand for us as well is a lot of people just need help navigating their claim. We have one customer that has been on UC for a year. He gets ill a lot. If it could have gone wrong with his claim, it has gone wrong and he has probably had about 50 hours of support to keep his claim where it should be. He has some rent arrears as a result, but I am certain they would be an awful lot worse and he may be homeless if we had not done that work. What keeps me awake at night is we will not be able to sustain that degree of support moving forward and I do find myself wondering what will happen to these customers if we do not go back and look at PBS and support for claimants and think, “We need to do this differently”.
Q44 Jeremy Quin: I would love to hear from both of you. I will just throw this in as well: from what Sarah is saying, there is a failure at the outset, that people do not realise they are being offered that degree of personal support, so by the time they are picking up the support from people like you, it is too far down the road.
Sarah Seeger: I should say as well, the ones we asked said, “Oh, I think I might like some help with that now I know about” but 80% of our Universal Credit caseload have rent arrears and probably therefore do need some budgeting support.
Jeremy Quin: Thank you. Rhiannon and Clare, I know you both want to come in.
Rhiannon Sims: I am a bit concerned about how personal budgeting support has been piloted, because I did a bit of detective work, seeing this question, and it turns out only two areas in Scotland have been piloting the Universal Support Delivered Locally and only one of those has been doing the personal budgeting support, but that is in an area, Argyll and Bute, where they do not have Universal Credit yet, so it seems—
Sarah Seeger: Yes, it has not been trialled in live area, to my knowledge.
Rhiannon Sims: I spoke to someone at Argyll and Bute Council who said they had referred 31 people for PBS and that they are a bit concerned about the number of links in the chain. It seems that the DWP has to refer to the council and then the council has to refer to another party to carry out the budgeting support, at which point there might have been a number of changes in circumstances for that claimant, so I think there needs to be—
Q45 Jeremy Quin: It sounds to me that there are two concerns. The first is that people are not being offered it properly in the first place, and if they do ask for it, the delivery is tortuous.
Rhiannon Sims: Impossibly slow, yes.
Clare Jephcott: In Islington, we are a pilot area without Universal Credit, so we are a pilot area of the Universal Support Delivered Locally. I believe 500 residents have been assessed about the need for support and there is a 50% take-up. The main concern by the providers there is that for it to be effective, you need to build up trust with the resident and a positive interest in engaging with the process, but if you move to a system where it becomes mandatory or subject to sanctions, that trust is put at risk and then it does not have the effect you want, so it needs to be permanent.
Generally I think there is a danger of being a bit condescending to clients, because they are generally skilled and very careful money managers. It is the fact that there have been such huge cuts—£36 billion since 2010—that it is hitting working families as well the disabled. It is the lack of money. It is not the lack of budgeting experience; it is balancing the books with very, very little, as I am sure you are aware.
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: One point to add to that, Sarah talked about the work that Curo is doing to provide support to tenants. There is a real opportunity with the rollout of Universal Support Delivered Locally for housing associations to play a greater role and they are keen. We surveyed our members and 75% of them said they would be interested in taking up some of the contracts in Universal Support. Our plea to local authorities and the DWP would be to think of housing associations when they are contracting for partners, think about them as a preferred partner. They are on the ground working with their tenants already. So there is an opportunity here for us moving forward.
Rhiannon Sims: One thing I would like to add is when you think about the models of delivery for this stuff, in my experience so far, when it works best is when you have services co-located because it massively eases the claimants’ efforts. They can go in with an issue and see all the people they need to see. They quite often have limited funds to travel to wherever the office is and so my plea would be do consider that when you look at how you might design this.
Q46 Richard Graham: Can I just come in quickly on a couple of things? First on Housing Benefit and UC and so on, it has been suggested to us that housing associations are supporting an increasing number of tenants with rent arrears. That is certainly not the case in my area. What are the facts that you have in the NHF to suggest that the numbers of people with rent arrears are sharply on the increase, as this suggests?
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: We do some snapshot surveying every month of some of our members that are involved in Universal Credit month and we are happy to share some of the facts and figures behind that with the Committee if that would be helpful.
Q47 Richard Graham: These are across the country?
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: Exactly, yes. Obviously the sample set changes depending on who responds to the survey every month, so it is a snapshot rather than month on month comparison, but it is a useful insight. At the moment September figures showed about £2 million worth of arrears in total, that is £600 to £800 per claimant. The other side of that is the amount of resource that the association then puts in to try to do the kind of work that Sarah talked about so eloquently in terms of support for the claimant.
Q48 Richard Graham: If all the housing associations published their figures it should be perfectly possible to get a really accurate statement of what it was last year, what it is this year, and what the difference is. Is that possible?
Clarissa Corbisiero-Peters: We can certainly send you some figures. That is absolutely fine.
Q49 Richard Graham: That would be really helpful. On co-location and so on, and the service you are going to get, I totally agree with what CAB and Islington Law Centre were saying about this. Again, in my experience that has not always been easy. There has sometimes been reluctance from the non-Government bodies, for example, to co-locate into cheaper accommodation provided by the council to be alongside the housing staff, because they wanted to preserve their independence, and sometimes there have been issues about whether clients should be referring themselves to the Law Centre or the CAB. There have sometimes been those sorts of issues. What is your experience on the ground of how well you have been able to work with other bodies and co-locate?
Rhiannon Sims: In Scotland we recently ran four regional workshops that were aimed at creating better partnerships on a local level between CABs and Jobcentre Plus and we found from that that a lot of them were suggesting co-location as an option, but there is also a bit of hesitancy, perhaps, from the Citizens Advice Bureau because they are concerned about wanting to maintain the independence of the service.
Chair: Have you anything to add to that, Clare?
Clare Jephcott: Just that at Islington we had the Advising Islington Together project, which was received well and was very successful and we did work together and we are still working with the forum. Unfortunately, the Big Lottery Fund money has now ended but we are looking into trying to extend it. But co-locating: CAB do rent rooms in our building, which we rent from the council, so we are working very closely together. I am not director of the centre but I can see we can expand there.
Q50 Richard Graham: Are you in the same building as the housing team from the council?
Clare Jephcott: No, we are not part of the council.
Q51 Richard Graham: So that is not perfect co-location, is it?
Clare Jephcott: Sorry, I thought you were talking about co-locating CABs and Islington Law Centre together. Sorry, I misheard that.
Q52 Richard Graham: That is a start but the obvious thing is to try to have a one-stop place where everyone can go to for all the different elements of their benefits and queries provision in the same place. Is that not the ideal?
Rhiannon Sims: I think a start would be to have better referral processes between Jobcentres and CABs. One thing that we keep seeing is that Jobcentres send people who need to use a phone to their local CABs because there has been the removal of the warm phone service in the Jobcentres with the change to digital Jobcentres. It is not really appropriate to just send people down the road to use the Citizens Advice Bureau’s phone, because that is not the kind of service we provide. I think we need clearer guidance on when referrals and signposting is appropriate.
Q53 Chair: I have one last question. We are over time. One of the savings from Universal Credit will be that it will be online for the use of the claimants. Do you think that is going to work easily or do you see problems with that. Clare, can we start with you?
Clare Jephcott: For the clients I deal with, I see problems with it. They are not digitally skilled enough. Also, when you have no funds or you have no credit on your phone, you need a device, you need electricity and you need the skill to do that. That is what my clients lack, so I think you still need a good contingency plan for the ones falling through the cracks. Digitally I can see wide-scale is going to improve things—economically it will work—but there are people, vulnerable clients, who really need to be protected from falling through the net.
Chair: Does anyone else have a different view to that? Rhiannon?
Rhiannon Sims: There is the problem with skills, but there is also a big problem in Scotland with access to broadband and fast enough broadband in rural areas. We conducted some research recently and found that one in four of all broadband issues presented in bureau came from people in remote areas where they had physical barriers and additional costs as well. Particularly for benefit claimants that is potentially going to be a large percentage of their income.
Q54 Chair: As I am the least talented in this, I think what we will do is we will invite the Committee to apply for Universal Credit and see whether they can manage the IT side of it. That will give us a good judge about where our constituents might be.
Clare Jephcott: With all due respect, my clients have physical and mental health difficulties.
Chair: I am making a different point, so I am saying I think some of us would have difficulty if we were trying to apply for Universal. I am in no way reflecting on the clients. Thank you very much. It was a great session.
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Peter Hughes, Group Manager, Wigan and Leigh Homes, Clare Hughes-Cross, Advice Services Manager, St Mungo’s Broadway, and Carmel Keddy, Team Manager of Access and Information, Derbyshire County Council, gave evidence.
Q55 Chair: Is Clare here? Great. While you are settling down, Peter, might you begin by identifying yourself for the record? To all of you, welcome.
Peter Hughes: Yes. My name is Peter Hughes. I am a group manager, responsible for income, at Wigan and Leigh Homes. At Wigan and Leigh we were a pilot and pathfinder for Universal Credit. We went live in July 2013 so we have quite a lot of experience over the last two years of the whole UC journey, if you like, and I am here to give you an update on our experience to date.
Clare Hughes-Cross: My name is Clare Hughes-Cross. I am the Advice Services Manager for St Mungo’s Broadway, a homeless charity largely working with single people and largely working with people not on Universal Credit yet. We have one.
Carmel Keddy: Good morning. My name is Carmel Keddy. I am the Access and Information Team Manager from Derbyshire County Council.
Q56 Mhairi Black: We touched on it in the first session, but one of the main criticisms of Mandatory Reconsideration is the delays in it and the time factors, so in your experience what are the direct impacts on claimants due to these delays in their payments?
Carmel Keddy: Due to delays in processing the Mandatory Reconsiderations?
Mhairi Black: Yes.
Carmel Keddy: One of the key aspects of that is all around Employment and Support Allowance claims. If an Employment and Support Allowance claim is refused and the claimant wants to do a Mandatory Reconsideration they can no longer receive the assessment rate of ESA during that process. They have to make an alternative claim and the only alternative claim generally is Job Seeker’s Allowance. For a lot of those claimants it is not possible for them to fulfil the Job Seeker’s Allowance criteria and they fall through the cracks, they get sanctioned. Some claimants just simply cannot do that process. They cannot just go through that process and make that claim. They just say, “I would rather sit at home and starve than have to go through that process. I’m not well enough to negotiate that”. So that is one aspect of it.
Then another aspect of it is the anxiety and the problems people face waiting for that outcome. So for example if you think about the changeover from Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payment some claimants are finding that they are getting a very different decision on the PIP claim than they had previously on DLA, and then they are having to wait for extended periods of time to get that decision back before they can mount their appeal. That can be really upsetting and confusing and worrying for that person during that process and one of the things that we would like to put to the Committee this morning is that consideration is given to taking the Mandatory Reconsideration back into the appeals process. So it is not a separate process, before people get to the appeal stage, it is just part of that process because pre-Mandatory Reconsideration there still existed opportunity for a decision to be reviewed and changed before it ever got in front of a tribunal. We would like to see the move back to that again. An appeal was lodged, a decision was reviewed at some point by a decision-maker somewhere, it was changed or not changed and then it automatically went through to the tribunal stage. At the moment we have this several tier process. Lots of people get lost in the process—they do not ever make it to the appeal tribunal because they give up along the way—but it also just extends the amount of time that it is taking before people can get decisions.
Q57 Chair: Would you be against the re-establishment of the status quo on that?
Clare Hughes-Cross: I agree with what Carmel has just said. I see a number of clients who—again people with Mandatory Reconsideration for ESA—when faced with claiming JSA are completely terrified. They are appealing saying that they have limited capacity for work and then are being asked to claim a benefit saying they have capacity to work. I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that it is okay, because otherwise they have nothing left to live on.
We have also noticed that there are problems with Housing Benefit because there is a change. Someone is on ESA, they then have to claim JSA and then if they appeal they can choose to claim ESA again. Claims can get extremely complicated.
Q58 Chair: Do you have the problem that some of my constituents have, and I guess other people’s constituents as well, where ESA tells them, “You’re fit for work” and JSA tells them, “You’re not” and they are in this void? As much as they are prepared to register for JSA despite all their doubts, they can get some money, they are refused?
Clare Hughes-Cross: Yes.
Peter Hughes: It is not really my area of work to be honest, but we would not have anything against what my colleagues have said.
Q59 Richard Graham: Clare, in a sense what you are saying is an argument for absolutely no change whatsoever, that once somebody is on a particular type of benefit really they should be left there for the rest of their life, that no change is possible, all change is far too upsetting and complicated and nobody who has been out of work for a long time should ever consider that they might be able to do some work. Surely there is a much more positive approach here, which is that people’s conditions change, that most people are happier when they are working and that the role of the various agencies is to help people get through these bureaucratic problems and make sure that if possible they do have the chance to work?
Clare Hughes-Cross: I am not saying that people should not have the chance to work, but most of the clients that I work with are quite a long way from being able to work. At some point they may well be able to.
Q60 Richard Graham: To try to get to a place where they might be able to?
Clare Hughes-Cross: We provide support at St Mungo’s Broadway for people around employment, skills and training but I tend to work with the ones that are furthest away, that have quite serious mental health problems, and have been street homeless for a long time. There are additional barriers that we can overcome, but maybe they need a little bit more time.
Q61 Chair: Following our report today we decided before we opened the meeting, Clare, that given our first report on benefit delivery— the Government’s record was as good as the previous one but at roughly half the cost—we were going to invite other members of the House of Commons to tell them what their ideas are as to how might we improve the prospects of the 70% who are not helped by the work programme now. Talking to members briefly before this meeting it seems that there is a category of claimants, which you in a real sense represent, who are the furthest from the labour market. We ought to have a different way of looking after them and helping them into work than people who are much nearer that, whereas at the moment they are all classified in that big 70%, are they not?
Clare Hughes-Cross: Yes.
Chair: Richard, did you want to come back on that?
Richard Graham: No, I think all ideas are welcome and Clare is absolutely right, but I think the thing is to approach it with a positive, “What can we do to help?” rather than, “The system is hopeless. My people aren’t up for this, don’t change anything”. I think that is very depressing.
Q62 Craig Mackinlay: What is the procedure for Mandatory Reconsideration? So for instance you have had your claim for ESA refused. Is it a form? Is it online? Where does it go and who is it? Is it a panel or a person? How does it work?
Carmel Keddy: If a decision is refused then you ask for a Mandatory Reconsideration and that can be done via the telephone or in writing. One of the first problems that we come across is that very often people ring up and ask for a Mandatory Reconsideration and they are incorrectly told, “You have to do it in writing” which is not correct.
They are also told, often, “You can’t lodge that now. A decision-maker will ring you back and explain the decision and then you can lodge a Mandatory Reconsideration”. That is also incorrect. That can happen as part of the process but it should not prevent somebody lodging a Mandatory Reconsideration in the beginning.
So they can do it over the phone or they can do it in writing. If they come to us obviously we assist them with that process. It is then passed to a decision-maker who reviews the case. There is an option to present further evidence, if that will help, but the difficulty that we have with that over and over again is generally speaking in most cases the person with the further evidence is the GP. The GP will not provide that further evidence because they want to charge a fee. Our claimants cannot afford to pay the fee, so the reconsideration is done on the basis of the original information that the decision-maker had. Generally speaking, unless there is something startlingly wrong, it is rubber-stamped, “The HCP said XYZ therefore we agree” and the decision is rubber-stamped. So it is just basically a long delay before we get to a point where a tribunal might take place and extra oral evidence from the claimant can make a difference.
Q63 Craig Mackinlay: Is there a statutory timeframe—
Carmel Keddy: No
Craig Mackinlay: —or a code of practice that is meant to be done?
Carmel Keddy: It could be several weeks. I think the original idea was that there would be an aim to get decisions turned around in 14 days but that is never, ever, our experience. It can be months and months. We have a case, for example, an Income Support claimant, who is currently receiving no benefits under threat—it is all to do with an immigration-type issue—and is at the process of just about being evicted from her property and awaiting an outcome of a Mandatory Reconsideration decision. That decision would change everything but clearly the housing association are saying, “We cannot guarantee what the outcome of that is going to be. If we don’t get the Housing Benefit back we are out of pocket, therefore we are still considering making this person homeless”.
Q64 Craig Mackinlay: For a private landlord that could be very serious.
Carmel Keddy: Absolutely, yes.
Q65 Chair: So the suggestion, Carmel: one is we must pick up with the business about claimants being charged by their doctors for key information, but you are asking for the position to be that the system is simplified. You ask for an appeal, as in the old days. I would find constituents, because they had appealed, were then told that the decision was being overturned before it went to appeal. So it would be part of that process?
Carmel Keddy: Yes.
Q66 Chair: So we would save a whole stage?
Carmel Keddy: Yes.
Chair: Really good.
Carmel Keddy: There are other things, such as if a Mandatory Reconsideration is lodged, if the full HCP report could be provided to the claimant or the representative at that stage, because we often find glaring errors in HCP reports. An example was an HCP report that said they saw a claimant and they could walk 20 yards, when that report was done over the telephone. So to me, if we got that report at that stage the claimant could immediately say, “Hang on a minute. I didn’t say that. That’s wrong, that’s not me”. Do you know what I mean? So if we had that information it would make the process a lot quicker.
Chair: That is tremendously helpful. Mhairi?
Q67 Mhairi Black: The reality is when you were saying earlier that some people are given misinformation, for instance they are told that you have to deliver something in writing, who is it that is giving out that misinformation?
Carmel Keddy: The person that is answering the call at DWP.
Q68 Mhairi Black: So is that just back to the problem that there needs to be more training? Or is it that there is another body that would be better equipped to deal with it?
Carmel Keddy: I am sure that training is always an issue, as it is in most organisations, but what we found is that there was new decision-makers’ guidance issued around this very issue—particularly we were having problems with the Attendance Allowance claims— -and the decision-makers’ guidance was very clear that you had to accept a telephone request and that all the claimant had to say was, “I’m not happy with the decision” or, “Can you look at it?” They didn’t have to use the words “Mandatory Reconsideration”. So when we saw that new guidance we felt reassured that the matter would be dealt with. Subsequent to that new guidance being issued we are still time and time again coming across this issue. We made a complaint to the DWP. We had a response back from that that said, again, “We are going to act on this. We are going to push further, we are going to look at it again, we are going to provide more training” and yet still just in the last matter of weeks we are still getting claimants being told that they cannot lodge a Mandatory Reconsideration over the phone.
Another case was a claimant wrote a letter that clearly says, “Can you look at my claim again? I disagree with these points”. She did not use the phrase “Mandatory Reconsideration” and when we followed this up we have been told that no Mandatory Reconsideration has taken place because the client did not ask for it. So there are mixed messages that are going on and we are not sure what is happening, but it is still a problem.
Q69 Ms Karen Buck: Presumably this could all happen to the same person several times. Is that an experience that sometimes you encounter?
Carmel Keddy: That the same thing happens?
Ms Karen Buck: Yes, that somebody will lose their ESA, go through this process, go through the Mandatory Reconsideration or appeal, get their benefit reinstated and then have exactly the same thing happen to them?
Carmel Keddy: Yes.
Q70 Ms Karen Buck: Is there a sense in which this process itself impacts negatively on people’s wellbeing? Setting aside the money, obviously.
Carmel Keddy: Yes. We have regular conversations with people on our helpline where people say that, and I think this goes back to the point you were making earlier about the effects on people. The point we would make is that this process is making people more ill than they need to be. Talking about people having opportunities to look to get back into work, where you are constantly reassessing their position, whether they are ESA one week and then a few months later it is the PIP, and then it is back to the ESA again and they are in the middle of an appeal, it detracts from the opportunity to be able to look at ways they can get back into work again, because their entire life is taken up with worry about the next assessment and the next review of their benefit. They are just coming in so thick and fast it is just too much for people to cope with.
Q71 Ms Karen Buck: We have touched on sometimes what can happen when this spirals down into Housing Benefit and into eviction, particularly as Craig mentioned private landlords are less likely to give people a bit of slack. Is there evidence that this whole process ends up with more cases going into eviction proceedings than would otherwise have been the case?
Carmel Keddy: We would not have any direct evidence on that. I do not know whether you have? I would imagine though that would certainly be the case.
Peter Hughes: I can speak from a housing perspective. Obviously if Housing Benefit claims are suspended because of sanctions or because of breaks in claim then arrears do tend to accrue during that period of time. As a landlord we have to protect our income. If those arrears are in excess of £1,000 or higher then unfortunately at some point we have to draw a line in the sand. Even though we do have social responsibilities we provide—
Q72 Ms Karen Buck: What was the figure again?
Peter Hughes: As a ballpark figure £1,000. If it is at that kind of level, then we would have to then consider taking—
Q73 Ms Karen Buck: So that could be three weeks under the Affordable Rent regime?
Peter Hughes: I am speaking from Wigan and Leigh. Our average rent is only £78 per week, so it is obviously a much larger number of weeks than that, but as a social landlord—
Q74 Ms Karen Buck: So with you, at very low rent, a northern England association, that would be approximately 14 weeks or so?
Peter Hughes: Yes.
Q75 Ms Karen Buck: How long can it take to get a Mandatory Reconsideration in practice?
Carmel Keddy: There are no time limits.
Ms Karen Buck: In practice.
Carmel Keddy: It could be three months, six months; it could be longer. We have had cases that are even longer. We have had cases where it has been a year and we are still writing letters saying, “Where is the outcome of this Mandatory Reconsideration?” There are no time limits. We cannot guarantee anybody, so from a housing association perspective you cannot say to them, “There will be a decision by this date. Don’t take any further action until this date” because we do not know.
Q76 Richard Graham: Can I just come in on that as I did with the earlier panel? It seems to me absolutely absurd that there are situations where people are waiting for a year for a decision on something like Mandatory Reconsideration. What do you have in practice at the Derbyshire County Council to go to the MPs or the people involved at a certain point? I would have thought three months is more than long enough, and say to them, “We have a roadblock on this. Please can you help unblock it?”
Carmel Keddy: Within Derbyshire County Council first of all we do work closely with our local Jobcentres and DWP partnership team. One thing we are lacking right now is any form of escalation process within the DWP itself, so we do not have telephone numbers. We used to have lists of people that we could ring to escalate a problem.
Q77 Richard Graham: Escalate it to the MPs. You do have the MPs’ hotlines.
Carmel Keddy: It varies across the county, because obviously we are not working with just one MP. We are working with a county-wide group of MPs. Some are very supportive. The issue with that sometimes is that the client itself will say, “I don’t want the MP involved” in which case there is nothing further we can do. We do not have any formal arrangements in place to do that and I was really interested by the point you made earlier, because I was sitting in, and I definitely think that is something that we would be more than happy to progress with our MPs within Derbyshire. Again, it does go back to the point that if we solve the problems we do not need to do that. The only proviso to that is I would put a warning in there—
Q78 Richard Graham: Would you agree, though, that if you did set up a system like that it would have three positive effects potentially? First, the MP knows that there is a problem because MPs do not know there is a problem unless they are told. Secondly, if they do know and they are not getting quick resolution they will highlight it to Ministers in DWP, who also will not know there are problems unless they are flagged up to them. Thirdly, from your point of view, you should be able to get much faster resolution of some of these issues, which means that you can focus on looking after more clients and getting these difficult ones’ backlogs sorted out.
Carmel Keddy: Definitely. My only proviso to that would be that in the evidence that we have presented to the Committee that was a one-week piece of work and there were 116 benefit delay cases in the county in that one week. I am not sure what casework resources MPs have to deal with that.
Q79 Richard Graham: So how do you categorise “delay”? I have been through this and CABs and the Law Centre have said to me, “You will not be able to cope with the volume and so on” and the answer is we can and should be able to cope with the volume where there are problems. The real issue is about this definition of delay. What do you categorise as a delay?
Carmel Keddy: We would look at it on a case-by-case basis. So with a very vulnerable client or a very complex case—we tackle every case as soon as it is brought to us, we do not wait— in terms of whether the delay itself then becomes a major issue is the effect it is having on the claimant. So we are used to PIP delays. We knew that PIPs were taking a year. There was nothing we could do at that point.
Q80 Richard Graham: No, that is not acceptable. I do think, Chairman—
Carmel Keddy: Not now, but it was.
Richard Graham: —as a suggestion, this business about delay: we need to quantify what categorises delay. I do not think it is any good saying, “Well, it varies from client to client”. I think you have to have some service delivery agreements in place. Where there is a delay beyond what DWP service standard is, bang: it goes to the MP, the MP gets involved and hopefully it gets sorted and if it doesn’t then they should be raising it with the Minister.
Carmel Keddy: That goes back to the DWP to give us those timescales.
Chair: Given what Clare has said in the first session, it might be educational for us to know how many cases we would get. I just have to plead I would not welcome it, in that my office is already almost at breaking point looking after cases. The idea that I am going to be swamped with all this terrifies me, quite honestly, but maybe for a week it would be quite a good experience, to drown us.
John Glen: You all obviously have deep experience in different parts of the country, but this different distribution—I am sure in London and poorer parts of the country, or Gloucester or Salisbury there are significant variations. The problem I feel is the lack of reliable data on the range of delays and waiting periods across different regions or centres. As far as I know the data is not collated on that basis, is it? So it is very difficult to interrogate where there are problems at different centres.
Richard Graham: Yes, but Carmel will have the figures for the delays that she is experiencing for her county and she can divide it up by constituency and you can have a look at it.
Q81 John Glen The point I am making is a national one. Am I right in thinking, as I understand it, there is no data cut by county or unitary authority?
Carmel Keddy: Not as far as I am aware, no.
Q82 Chair: You are also one advice service, aren’t you Carmel? There will be other services in Derbyshire helping claimants who may well be—
Carmel Keddy: Yes, so we provide the overarching welfare rights services and work hand in glove with all the Citizens Advice Bureaus in the county, who also provide welfare rights advice as well.
Chair: We have also decided to invite the DWP to a seminar with the Office for National Statistics, to see what data they have that no one ever uses, and what data we could all do with, so they can concentrate those resources in collecting it. This is Richard’s point: this is one of the areas that we should do.
Craig Mackinlay: Even if we were to get the data from when an MR is being lodged to when it is solved, you then have a precursor to that, because people are not getting into the MR system because they are facing a bit of stonewalling in getting that in, in the first place, so we have a double problem.
Chair: It is clearly quite complicated to get the data, but I think we have had a real challenge from both sessions and we ought to pursue that. Craig, do you want to pick up?
Q83 Craig Williams: Can I ask a very basic question about correspondence with the DWP? In the written evidence and other evidence we have had, you have had mail go missing, you have had ESA statements go missing. What is your broader experience about the correspondence with DWP and is this is a very basic problem that we have to look at?
Peter Hughes: From our perspective as a northern housing association, we have been aligned with Universal Credit for a number of months, getting on for just over two years. Initially it was really poor, I have to say. Letters were going astray. When we applied for direct payments, which is payments directly to the landlord, those were also going amiss and we had to resend the application. To be fair to the DWP that has been addressed.
We now have an electronic form and we can send it electronically but via e-mail, which is a great step in the right direction. But correspondence going back to us, since the data sharing protocol was introduced, we are supposed to get notification that a tenant has claimed UC, and we only get that in about 10% to 20% of all claims. When we do receive it we are talking six, seven, and up to eight weeks from the time the tenant has made a claim, which is useless, because by that time we have already spoken to the claimants anyway and are fully aware that they are making a claim. So we still have quite major issues in terms of correspondence coming back to us. However the DWP has taken steps to improve with the electronic APA.
Q84 Craig Williams: So it is much easier to follow up and see what you do not have?
Peter Hughes: It is. Hopefully the deal will be we are going more and more digital and we will be able to get e-mails back and forth, but I think the data sharing issue is a major sticking point on that.
Craig Williams: Is there anything you would like to add to that, or disagree?
Clare Hughes-Cross: We find lots of times fit notes are getting lost. It is a continuing problem with our clients. When they first claim a benefit and give it in at the Jobcentre it is scanned and sent, but after that there is a stamped addressed envelope sent out for the next one and again we do not have records but it is reported back to me that quite often these get lost and then need to be replaced.
We have also had issues where we phone and say, “Did you get the letter of whatever date?” and we are told, “Yes, we have that letter” and then later on, when we ring again, “No, we don’t have that letter”. I really do not understand what is happening in those situations.
Craig Williams: So it is very basic admin?
Clare Hughes-Cross: Yes.
Carmel Keddy: I would agree entirely that that mirrors our experiences. Since the internal reorganisations and the new mail handling system we have had periods of time where we have almost exclusively communicated with the complaints resolution team, because that is the only way that we get acknowledgements that a letter or complaint has been received, and we get a response that is meaningful.
We would make a suggestion that we reinvigorate the old system that people can just go into Jobcentres and have documents received, scanned and e-mailed or faxed over. At the moment they can do that but they have to ring up and make an appointment, then they have to go in with the document and then it gets done, whereas if people could just take fit notes and things like that in—not maybe as a matter of course but where there is a problem—and get that document scanned at their own Jobcentre and sent across they would then know the document had been sent then. We could follow that up.
Q85 Richard Graham: Just a very quick one. You have 530 people, tenants, who are UC claimants?
Peter Hughes: Yes, it has increased since I wrote the submission. It is just over 600 now.
Q86 Richard Graham: Okay, great. Just tell us very briefly what has this experience been like? Has it worked?
Peter Hughes: In a word, no. We have been live for two years, and it has been a very gradual process. It has taken us two years to get to just over 600 cases.
You mentioned rent arrears earlier, in the previous session. Our average rent arrears for a UC case is £534. Our average normal rent arrears case is about £97 and that is even less when you compare that to the whole tenant base.
Q87 Chair: So it is a five-fold increase?
Peter Hughes: Yes. I regularly speak to colleagues in the north-west, as well. I sit on a group with the National Housing Federation and—
Q88 Richard Graham: Do you use that system? There is a system if people are behind after a certain period of time.
Peter Hughes: Yes, we apply for the Alternative Payment Arrangement: the APA, There are two tiers. There is Tier 1 where there are mental health issues; there is a history of rent arrears and multiple debts and you can apply for an APA at that stage. There is Tier 2 where it is guaranteed and that is two months’ worth of arrears.
In our experience we have found that it is only ever approved at two months’ worth of rent arrears. There is the odd case that may get through if there are severe mental health problems and it is fully documented, but generally speaking we have to wait until the tenant owes two months’ worth of arrears before we can apply for the direct payments.
Q89 Richard Graham: Once you have that is the system then working?
Peter Hughes: Bearing in mind that it has to go through the process at the DWP, by the time that is in place it can be up to £1,300 worth of rent arrears. Then we get a third-party deduction, which is 20% off the standard allowance towards the arrears, and then we will see arrears coming down. However, if there is a break in the claim the direct payment ceases and if there is a change in circumstances it stops also. Reviews can be taking place without us being informed, or sometimes the claimant being informed. Again in that circumstance the direct payment ceases also.
Richard Graham: Chairman, I think it would be very useful if Peter could bear to do so to have a written bit of evidence about his experience that we could look at and also share with Ministers.
Chair: Yes, and also from our previous set of witnesses as well, who want to contribute. Heidi?
Q90 Heidi Allen: I am quite depressed, I have to say. So much of this just sounds like weak process; the admin behind the scenes not backing up the intentions. Go electronic.
A slight change of tack again from me. Short-Term Benefit Advance, that little bit of extra help, or is it? What are your experiences of when people take that because of a new claim, or there is a gap, or whatever it might be, and their ability to then pay it back afterwards? Does the process work?
Clare Hughes-Cross: I think the issue is more getting one in the first place. On the last panel they were mentioning that people are not routinely offered them. We have had a number of clients who have asked for them and been told, “No, you can’t apply for one”. Of course anyone can apply for one. Paying it back is not as much the issue as getting one in the first place.
Peter Hughes: I will just add to that. We are a landlord obviously so we do not process benefits or anything like that, but from our experience of speaking to tenants unless they ask for it they are not offered it, and the vast majority do not have the awareness that they can apply for it in the first place, so they are not asking for it. You may get the odd one or two that have and that is welcomed, and they pay that back over six months generally. I would go back to the point that unless they ask for it they are not routinely offered it by the Jobcentre staff.
Q91 Heidi Allen: That is interesting because I think our thoughts were that perhaps getting it was relatively easy but the paying it back then became so difficult, people getting into arrears and so on. But you are not saying that by the sounds of things.
Peter Hughes: From my experience and that is only from the tenants we have spoken to.
Q92 Heidi Allen: Okay. Carmel, I am thinking you might have a different view?
Carmel Keddy: No. Absolutely the two issues are getting them in the first place. Within Derbyshire County Council we also have our local welfare assistance scheme, the Derbyshire Discretionary Fund, so we see a lot of claimants directed to the local welfare assistance scheme, when they should have had the discussion about having a Short-Term Benefit Advance. There is a bit of that ping-pong thing going on there. Claimants routinely are not told about Short-Term Benefit Advances and often when asking for them are told, “No, you can’t have one. You’re not in the right circumstances” and so on.
Certainly the issue again is about repaying them; it instantly creates a hardship situation. If we are saying that that is the level of benefit somebody needs to live on and we give them a Short-Term Benefit Advance and then they are going to have to live on less, then that it is going to cause hardship in the long-term.
There is a huge separate issue with Universal Credit because we have created this new benefit where there is an automatic five to six week wait before a payment. Almost without exception every client that we have dealt with that is claiming Universal Credit has had to access the Short-Term Benefit Advance, which I do have to say does seem to work a bit better in Universal Credit, but which immediately puts them in hardship because then they have to start repaying that back out of future benefit payments. So clients are getting a Short-Term Benefit Advance. They are also accessing local welfare assistance, so they are getting two or three payments from that if they are eligible to try to fill that five or six week gap, but they have to pay the Short-Term Benefit Advance back. So the hardship is created immediately they go on to that benefit within that first six-week period.
Q93 Heidi Allen: So what would any of you recommend about changing the system in the way that it operates?
Peter Hughes: They have to pay it back within six months—I think I am right in saying that—which is generally about £50 a month in my experience, which is quite a substantial amount when they are only receiving £280 if they are on a very basic allowance, so possibly allowing them to spread that over a year possibly, or even more.
What we are finding, when they are applying for UC, is it is taking that long to get the first payment that they are turning to inappropriate lenders, your doorstep lenders or your High Street lenders like Wonga and all the rest of it, that are charging extortionate rates of interest. Then they are paying them back at such high rates that they are struggling to then pay their rent and their council tax and then they face eviction and potentially homelessness. I think we should be allowing them to spread the costs of that over a greater period of time.
Q94 Craig Mackinlay: Just talking about these in-advance payments. So there would be a five or six week delay. I felt that this was just a cashflow help, and then once your claim is registered you would be back registered to the date that your claim was valid so I am wondering why—
Carmel Keddy: You are paid in arrears. So you start your claim today, you will get a payment, depending on your circumstances, either be five to six weeks from today.
Q95 Craig Mackinlay: Yes, but it would be backdated to the date your claim was valid?
Carmel Keddy: No, it is a one-month payment that has then got to last you for the following month, so it cannot cover the six weeks previous and the four weeks going forward. It can only do one or the other, so either you have borrowed money to get you through the six weeks—there are very few clients who can manage for six weeks without an income. So if you imagine you start work and you get an advance on your wages, then your next wages are short of your advance, basically. So you are in a lose-lose scenario. We have created that hardship situation from day one. These can be clients who were managing perfectly fine until that point, but then the changeover to UC puts them into this terrible hardship situation and they will have lost out on a certain amount of Housing Benefit and so on. They cannot afford to pay it back.
Q96 Craig Mackinlay: I am still struggling with that. So they have had a change of circumstances, may have left work or whatever. You would think their final payment at work would have got them through the next month under normal circumstances.
Carmel Keddy: There will be clients in those circumstances, but we have clients coming out of prison, clients coming off an ESA claim, clients having a change in family circumstances, fleeing domestic violence and so on. They are starting with zero so six weeks down the line they have got a hell of a lot less than zero. If we have given them an advance that is great, that might have just stretched and got them through that six weeks, but then their money for the next X number of months is short.
Q97 Craig Mackinlay: I have done a bit of work with credit unions. Do you not think a bit of discipline of getting people involved with credit unions in better times might help them through some of this? They are infinitely better than some of the appalling lenders around.
Peter Hughes: We heavily promote our local credit unions for savings; for cheaper loans than your doorstep lenders. They offer jam jar accounts and this kind of thing. However you are relying on the tenant to take ownership and take responsibility and build up a nest egg, if you like. But with UC we kind of set them up to fail, because six or seven weeks down the line they are owing people money left, right, and centre—they owe rent and they owe council tax—and they never really in our experience get back in line with that. We are talking about people that as my colleague says have zero to start in the first place. I agree it is an education process about getting people to use unions more and try to save.
Craig Mackinlay: I am just saying if there was a time of some stability in these people’s lives and they were saving just £2 a week for a couple of years they would then have probably access to a credit union fund and borrowing ability.
Q98 Richard Graham: You do not have to deposit now in order to get a loan from a credit union. So the issue for ALMOs and housing associations and so on is what are you doing proactively to help the credit union get that information through the door of people at this time of year ahead of when they are spending money on Christmas presents and so on saying, “This is the best way to do it, rather than running to loan sharks and so on”? Are you going out and proactively doing that?
Peter Hughes: We have what we call money advice days, located across the borough. We have events where the credit union come in and give training to tenants through forums.
Q99 Richard Graham: Do you put flyers through doors?
Peter Hughes: We do not put flyers through doors. The credit unions do that. However on our literature to tenants, on rent arrears letters, on other letters, we include detailed information on credit unions, what they offer. All our staff are trained up so that when they are going out door-to-door, face-to-face or over the phone—
Q100 Richard Graham: What is the take-up rate now?
Peter Hughes: I do not have any figures to hand, to be honest.
Q101 Chair: Peter, there is also more pressure on you, isn’t there, to make good a system by doing this?
Peter Hughes: Yes.
Chair: Karen, and then I want to move on quickly.
Q102 Ms Karen Buck: Do you think it is in some ways easier—not easy but easier—as a landlord to relate to your tenants than it would be to get that message about credit unions over to, say, people in the private rental sector where they are not necessarily at a fixed address for more than six months at a time?
Peter Hughes: Yes, I would say so. I would say it is easier to build up a stronger relationship as an ALMO as we are rather than the private rental sector, because as you say there is more longevity within a tenancy generally speaking. We go out on to the estate and we do things like benefit buses, money advice days. So we do have quite a good relationship with our tenants. We have the tenant forums, tenant assemblies, where we deliver the message and get feedback from them. So yes, we are probably better placed than landlords in the private sector to deal with that, to be honest.
Q103 Chair: But you are a shrinking part of the total supply of rented housing, are you not?
Peter Hughes: Yes.
Q104 Chair: I want you to cheer us up, please, by moving to PIP payments. Is it your experience that this is a benefit that is now working better, and what still are the problems that we might suggest there are easy solutions to, or not even easy solutions? Carmel, would you like to start?
Carmel Keddy: Yes, thank you. We would definitely agree that the time it is taking for claims to be processed has reduced quite dramatically and that is very welcome.
In terms of ongoing issues, we are still seeing a lot of delays in the PIP2 forms being issued, so once somebody has made that initial telephone request the time that they are waiting for PIP2 forms. There seems to be a bit of delay with that.
We are seeing cancelled appointments and refusal of home visits as a key issue, so people with very severe health problems being refused a home visit, and we have to follow those up and make complaints and address those.
We wonder whether perhaps, as part of the drive to reduce the waiting times for claims to be processed, claims are waved through with claims awarded for very short periods of time; very often a year. We are seeing a lot of claims being reassessed within a year of their initial award, which is sometimes very unsatisfactory and very unfair on the claimant. Claimants have got their letter saying, “You have been awarded” and then within a matter of weeks they have another letter saying, “And now it is time for your review”.
Q105 Chair: Yes. So that might be one of the problems with targets, mightn’t it?
Carmel Keddy: Yes. An unintended consequence. Yes.
Q106 Chair: One way of meeting the target is to quickly get them through and then check them later on.
Carmel Keddy: Yes.
Q107 Chair: Do either of you have any—no, Richard, you have asked quite a lot of questions. I have some other questions to do.
Richard Graham: That is what we are here to do.
Chair: I know, but we want to share them out fairly.
Clare and Peter, do you anything to add to that?
Clare Hughes-Cross: We have also found that it is much quicker now for people claiming PIP. One of the problems that the people I work with have had is they have been called for medical assessments in different parts of the country at fairly short notice, and often at weekends, which is something that is quite difficult. It seems someone in London is being asked to go to Essex at 9.00 am on a Sunday morning for a medical assessment. Our clients do not drive, and usually do not have access to a car or transport; it is quite challenging. It seems quite bizarre, some of those medical assessments, where they are being asked to go. Usually when we ring up they are then offered somewhere local quite soon, so I do not really understand why that is not happening in the first place. For our clients, they have support, so they are ringing up and sorting it out, but obviously there is concern as to why that is happening.
Q108 Chair: That is really helpful. Peter?
Peter Hughes: I would just add that from speaking to staff that deal with PIP claimants that it does seem to be a bit of a slicker process than DLA. I have nothing more to add, really, than that.
Q109 Chair: I have had real problems with two constituents who are mortally ill and either their mother was asked or they were asked when they expected they should die. Does that part of the service work well, in the sense that my two constituents were exceptions?
Clare Hughes-Cross: I have not had any terminally ill cases under PIP, but that is an experience I had with DLA.
Q110 Chair: Have you as well?
Carmel Keddy: We have had that incident in the syndicate. Yes, we do. Part of our organisation has a palliative care team, so we have come across that. But we are working with Macmillan, so it does not tend to happen that often, but it has occurred.
Q111 Chair: How could we best shield claimants who are dying, and more immediately, as Craig reminded me earlier on, we are all in this state—
Carmel Keddy: The system is in place for that to work. I think it just needs to work
.Chair: Work properly, yes. Yes, all right.
Carmel Keddy: There are procedures in place.
Chair: It is the working of it. That is good. Right, John?
John Glen: On the digital service when it is delivered: do you expect that to, enhance the delivery of benefits?
Carmel Keddy: Which bit of it?
Q112 John Glen: The proposed digital service for the rollout of Universal Credit. The Department have said they are going to deliver it. Do you expect that to be a helpful innovation?
Carmel Keddy: We always talk about 80/20; so when we talk about our client base, you look across the population and say 80% of people can generally navigate their way through most things, some with a little bit of support. We tend to be dealing with the 20% that are not able to do that, and we fear for them with the digital process. We are trying to do lots of work in Derbyshire to make that easier, through working with libraries and adult education. We have had a conference, trying to get the message across to people and put support in place for that 20%. But in terms of actual access, digital access itself, that is a major problem for clients on low incomes and clients with disabilities and health problems. Derbyshire is a rural county, so there are still some issues around people getting access to broadband and people being able to travel to their local library, for example.
The form is quite a torturous process and takes quite a long time, and even within a library setting access tends to be for a specified period of time, so you can get 45 minutes before your computer shuts off. A lot of claimants will not complete it within 45 minutes, and there is still no current save facility on the form, as we understand it, so they would lose what they have done.
Then the ongoing communication is intended to be a digital one, and we are just not sure, for that group of claimants, how that would work in reality, that they have to consistently log into their account and keep logging in to get messages, and appointment data, and things like that. They will not get telephone calls; they will not get paper written letters; it will all be done through this account. We are concerned that for those vulnerable clients, how they will be able to cope with that process?
Q113 John Glen: If sufficient access support and simplification of process within the new digital process was overcome would you be more optimistic? Or are you completely—
Carmel Keddy: You would move that 80% up into that other 20%. There is still going to be a core group that are going to struggle, whatever.
Q114 John Glen: I dare say 15 to 20 years ago those proportions were different as well. So is there some room for positivity around digital?
Carmel Keddy: Yes.
Q115 John Glen: Okay. Do either of you have anything else to say?
Peter Hughes: I was just saying a move to digital is a positive move forward. I mentioned earlier about post going astray, which is at odds with the whole ethos of UC, which is supposed to be online, and it is ridiculous that we are having letters sent to us that are getting lost in the post; so in that respect, definitely.
However, as we are social housing landlords, as has been mentioned we have very vulnerable tenants that do not have access to digital services and do not have the education to access that. We do have a digital inclusion officer and employment and skills officers that try to train tenants up. We offer workshops to try to get them online. That is the only sticking point; if we can get those people the skills and the access to digital services, then absolutely fantastic. But it is getting that in place and trying to reduce that 20%. Yes.
Q116 John Glen: Clare, what you said about your client group, it would seem that they would be quite a long way from being able to access the digital. Is that right?
Clare Hughes-Cross: We are expecting that we will have to offer a lot of support for each client in that situation, and we have been training staff and talking to clients about how best to achieve that. Of course they will move out of the accommodation we provide at some stage, and we need to make sure that they are ready, and we accept that challenge.
Q117 John Glen: So we need to not underestimate the degree of support and the sophistication of that support if they are going to make it effective.
Clare Hughes-Cross: Yes. We do not have anyone on Universal Credit yet because of the nature of the client group, but when we look at what is needed; people need to have an email account. A lot of our clients do not have email. So it is starting at the beginning, and working through, and training people on how they are going to. I am very concerned. I read something about the amount of passwords in being able to log on to your own account, and that is really worrying, about people remembering them, people giving them to other people to look after for them, so that is a big concern.
Q118 Craig Mackinlay: On that point of connectivity and people knowing when they have a message due—they might not have an email address—would a text-based system help as well?
Clare Hughes-Cross: Perhaps that is something you could add to that.
Q119 Craig Mackinlay: Yes. Because I think more people perhaps have a mobile phone than—
Clare Hughes-Cross: Yes.
Peter Hughes: They would say technically what the main issue is for them, whether they want it through a mobile phone rather than a user name and log in feature.
Q120 Craig Mackinlay: Whereas if a text comes through, “You have a message”.
Peter Hughes: Yes. Yes, as long as it is not—
Q121 Chair: Clare, you look after some of the most vulnerable members of the community. Would all your customers have mobile phones?
Clare Hughes-Cross: I do not know the number, but certainly more would have mobile phones than would be able to use computers, I would say, but not all of them.
Chair: No, not all.
Q122 John Glen: You have answered quite easily that question with respect to the claimants. But from what you were saying earlier, Carmel—all of you have touched on this, the loss of paperwork through the process of DWP—there is presumably the possibility that an enhanced digital service could remove some of those errors and make the flow of information more reliable and improve the accuracy of the service.
Carmel Keddy: We would certainly hope so. We are obviously not privy yet to how the process is going to work in Derbyshire, but some of my understanding is that the process of clients submitting documentation via the digital system is quite longwinded and complex. I think there are still a lot of areas that need to be looked at again, and what we would be asking for is access to all the feedback from the pilot so we can look at what has taken place and give further feedback to the DWP to say, “This is where improvements are needed”.
Chair: On that optimistic note, we will close. I am sorry we have run overtime.
I am really grateful to you, as we were to our first session today. We now need to think about how we follow up some of the points that we have already learned this morning from you. It has been really good. Thank you very much.
Oral evidence: Benefit delivery, HC 372-i 21