WEDNESDAY 19 JANUARY 2000

MS FAITH BOARDMAN, MR VINCE GASKELL, MR MICHAEL DAVISON AND MR JOHN LUTTON

1  180. I have one more question that is related but is not exactly the same area. I, like a lot of colleagues on this Committee of all parties and elsewhere, write to ministers, as is our responsibility, asking for a minister to offer comments and opinions or perhaps even to intervene or to seek further information from the CSA and that is absolutely proper. I know the minister rightly consults the CSA if it is a case of maladministration or improper assessment and the minister, of whichever government, rightly corresponds with yourselves or liaises with yourselves. The information that you provide goes to the minister and the minister then uses that in response to Members of Parliament as I understand it. Notwithstanding the fact that I am complaining about maladministration or errors in assessment and the information that you have is used to assess incorrectly or improperly, that is then passed to the minister who then responds to me repeating some of the comments the CSA has made in correspondence with myself. In the instances where the CSA is found to have acted wrongly or improperly, is wrong in assessments or where there is maladministration that leads to this compensation, do you then write to the minister and say "Minister, the letter that we gave you for Mr Murphy or Mr Love 18 months ago regarding failure in assessment, we are really sorry but we got it wrong and we are sorry we put you in the position of inadvertently misinforming a Member of Parliament"? Does that happen?
  (Ms Boardman) If we had information that there was a specific case then, yes, it would. In my experience that is extremely rare.

  181. It is not extremely rare that a minister gets written to about the Child Support Agency and it is not extremely rare that a minister would then communicate with yourselves to find out what the detail is. Through your computers, that are doing so well, why do you not simply set up a system where you do write to the minister and say "Minister, we are sorry we misled you"?
  (Ms Boardman) If there is a specific case in which we find that we have made an error in advising the minister then we would certainly notify him.

  182. But in every case that you have wrongly assessed and you informed the minister at the time that you were doing your job properly and had properly assessed it and the minister became involved you have wrongly advised him.
  (Ms Boardman) Are we talking about the generality of the cases? I am sorry, I am having great difficulty in following the question.

  183. I will finish by trying to clarify. If I write a letter that says "Dear Minister, my constituent says he owes nine pounds and not ten, can you investigate", the minister writes back and says "In fact, it is ten. The CSA says it is ten", so I write to my constituent and say "It is ten, sorry about that, the minister agrees" but later on you disagree it is not ten, in fact it is eight, do you write to the minister as a matter of course and say "Dear Minister, when you wrote we told you this, in fact it is not ten, it is not nine, but eight"?
  (Ms Boardman) I am struggling to think of an instance in order to give you an answer.

  184. I have one.
  (Ms Boardman) If you have a particular one then I would honestly suggest that you write to me and we would be very happy to give you a full answer on that.

  185. In the interests of both brevity and clarification I think it would be a good idea if you wrote to the Committee and told us on how many occasions you had written to the minister correcting or apologising for a previous erroneous briefing. That would be helpful. If you can match that up against the number of compensation cases, the point Mr Murphy is making, because those are areas where obviously you have made a mistake at some point and presumably wrongly informed the minister.
  (Ms Boardman) We will do our best to do that.

  186. You should ask all my questions, Chairman.
  (Ms Boardman) My apologies, I did not follow the point. We will certainly provide that.

  187. Following on the same line as Mr Murphy, turning to page 94, figure two, this is the analysis of errors in full maintenance assessments.
  (Ms Boardman) Yes.

  188. We have it in percentage form but if we take the over-statements, taking the first column over £1,000, what does that percentage represent in actual numbers?
  (Ms Boardman) Extrapolated up and applied to last year's caseload that would be in the order of 70,000.

  189. 70,000 where you have made an error of over £1,000?
  (Ms Boardman) Is my maths right?
  (Mr Davison) Yes.
  (Ms Boardman) It is in the order of that.

  190. Will you let us have the precise figure?
  (Ms Boardman) Yes.

  191. To your recollection what would be the highest in ball park figures?
  (Mr Davison) We do not have that data available. This information is based on the statistical sample.

  192. I want the actual figures anyhow. If you let us know the highest error over £1,000 on full assessment and I want the same on the under-statements.
  (Ms Boardman) We will do our best but clearly this will be difficult to produce because this is based on a particular sample of cases.

  193. You must have a record of what your assessments have been and so on and the errors.
  (Mr Davison) We could provide you with the biggest error that was found in that particular sample.
  (Ms Boardman) That will not necessarily be the same as the biggest that is actually in the accounts. Clearly if we recognised where those errors were we would be trying to take steps to amend them.

  194. Do the best you can, will you? I want the same for the interim assessments, the numbers and estimates of the highest involved over £,1000, again over and under. Coming back to this point of compensation, you said that you have to arrive at compensation that is based on the interests of the individual but also the interests of the taxpayer. With respect, why do you have to do it in relation to the interests of the taxpayer? Do you not have to do it in relation to equity, what is just in relation to the individual who has been wronged as a result of your errors and blunders?
  (Ms Boardman) Can I clarify first that we do not have delegated authority to provide such payments except within rules which are set for the Department of Social Security as a whole.

  195. Who sets those?
  (Ms Boardman) The centre of the Department in conjunction with Treasury colleagues.

  196. Can we have a note or information on that as well so we can look at it at our leisure before we prepare our report? We had better have a copy of the formula that is used as well[3]. It does seem to me that there are gross injustices being perpetrated in the name of your organisation for which people are utterly under-compensated and the sums we hear about are quite derisory. Has anyone taken you to court over the amount of compensation?

  (Ms Boardman) Not to my knowledge, no, I am not aware of any such cases.

  197. Perhaps they should. Is there a tribunal?
  (Ms Boardman) There is a tribunal which is appointed to hear appeals on points of law.

  198. But no appeal on compensation?
  (Ms Boardman) That issue is covered by the extra statutory rules which, as I say, are laid down for the Department as a whole.

  199. I find it absolutely grotesque when you think of the number of people who have suffered as a result of your activities. Have you had a note then of the impact on this aspect of your work of the new decisions of the Court on Human Rights and the impact of the Court on Human Rights?
  (Ms Boardman) Certainly the DSS-wide rules will have been looked at in the context of any changes in legislation including European legislation, but I cannot speak personally to that because these are not rules that are set within the Agency.

  200. It is not for the Committee to do this but I personally would urge any organisation that represents claimants to take this to the Court of Human Rights and get this sorted out properly once and for all. It would reduce a lot of cases we face from persons who have been persecuted wrongly by your organisation. I have one further question. You say you see a plateauing out of the level of compensation but I notice it has increased 29-fold and the value has gone up 38-fold on the table we are given in Figure 3. You say it is plateauing out but in the last two years the increase in the number of cases was two and a half fold and the increase in the value was four-fold.
  (Ms Boardman) This is a timing issue, as I was trying to explain earlier, in that increases have certainly resulted from our tackling the backlogs over the last two years and also from changes in the basic rules which were partly meant to address some of the issues that you have just been raising in the DSS approach to rules. The combination of those has increased it over the last two years, as you rightly say, and we expect that to continue until the end of this financial year but we expect that we will see the end of the problems caused by the backlog cases over the following 12 or 18 months and a corresponding decrease during that sort of period.

  201. Would you confirm for the information of the new Members here who are probably puzzled about how it went wrong so early—and this is not the fault of the Agency—that at an earlier hearing we were told that you had as many as four people having to deal with one individual case. When we asked why you were so understaffed we were told that the Department had based the staffing of your Agency on the figures needed to process a similar number of cases in the Benefits Agency and it overlooked the fact that it is much easier to get information when you are going to give people money than it is when you are trying to take it away from them. It might be of interest to my colleagues who have not been here quite so long. That was not your fault, that was the Department's fault and equally what is happening in compensation is the Department's fault. I hope we can do something to get it sorted out.
  (Ms Boardman) I think you are underlining the concern we have to make sure that capacity is looked at properly and the evidence that Mr Gaskell was giving is very much trying to make sure that we do not make the same mistakes.

  Mr Williams: Thank you.

  Chairman: Thank you, Ms Boardman, and thank you Mr Gaskell, Mr Davison and Mr Lutton for coming. I know it is always a trying time for you preparing for these meetings. Thank you for the evidence and we look forward to the documentation of written evidence you will provide.