MR JOHN WHEATLEY

22 MARCH 2004

  Q430 Chairman: Can I call the committee to order again and welcome John Wheatley from Citizens Advice, who is the e-Government Policy Strategist. He is a familiar witness who has helped the committee in the past and we thank him for that and also for the written evidence. We are looking at the weaknesses of the present situation generally and you in Citizens Advice have got direct experience of the consequences of failure. I do not know if you have done anything systematic in terms of trying to disaggregate what the generality of problems is in working with DWP and those specifically derived from ICT failures. Can you help us understand your perspective on, when things go wrong, what happens to the people who are making complaints?

  Mr Wheatley: We have made some effort to try and work out which of the problems are due to ICT. The nature of our problem reporting system at the moment is not based on ICT. We get a piece of A4 paper from a bureau when they think there is something notable about a child support case that they want to tell us about. At the moment we are seeing something like 50 reports each month nationally from bureaux. That compares to a peak of rather more than that in the early nineties when there were real problems with the child support system and compares at the moment to something like 250 a month from the tax credit system. It is about equivalent to all of the problems we see on income support so it is not an insubstantial amount but it does not represent by any means the total volume of cases that we are dealing with, which is about 50,000 a year. The sorts of problems that we are seeing at the moment which appear to be attributable to the IT system are with people who are still on the old rules suffering from problems receiving payments, women in particular moving off income support having problems as well, delays in transferring people from the old rules to the new system and a problem that was alluded to by your previous witnesses that when our advisers contact CSA the person at the other end of the phone (if the bureau can get through in the first place) claims not to have access to the necessary information and can only give general advice. That is a broad picture of the problems we are seeing at the moment.

  Q431 Chairman: Do you have a view, even an anecdotal view, about how DWP administer the big IT systems that they run?

  Mr Wheatley: It is difficult for us to comment specifically on that other than the fact that we are not directly involved typically. As I mentioned in our written submission the support we gave to the child support reforms was really based on the fact that it would increase the amount of maintenance going to women with children. That was the big reason why we held back from criticising them, even though it meant a lower volume of money. We expected to see something quicker coming in, something more slick. That was why we accepted the simplification in that case and we were disappointed when it was delayed and then introduced with problems which are still not resolved.

  Q432 Chairman: You say you took a view on the simplification. Does that mean that you as a matter of course are consulted in any kind of meaningful way when big new ICT projects are in gestation?

  Mr Wheatley: I would not say we are consulted because there is an IT project under way. We are consulted when there is a change under way to the system per se and by virtue of the nature of our organisation we are always included on various stakeholder consultative groups of that kind and can pick up the phone and talk to people. We are included in discussions but we are not given membership of the programme board or the project board when projects are started, for example.

  Q433 Chairman: Just leaving your own electronic system to one side, which we want to come on to in a bit more detail in a moment, do you think that, having regard to the information technology systems, if you were consulted deeply at an early stage you could have anything to contribute that would help generate success as opposed to failure?

  Mr Wheatley: I think we could contribute practical experience. At the moment the department is developing its transactional services, on-line forms, for example, that people complete via the website, and we have sought to be involved in those projects. We have commented on the carer's allowance service that is available now and we hope to be involved in the design and user testing of the disability living allowance which is due to come on stream later this year. We would certainly like to be asked whether we would like to be involved.

  Q434 Andrew Selous: Could you tell us a little bit more about your Citizens Connect programme and how you see that improving the delivery of the Department for Work and Pensions programmes?

  Mr Wheatley: The Citizens Connect programme was set up with funds from the Treasury, the Capital Modernisation Fund, a sum of £20 million, which does a number of things. It brings the CAB network up to the modern day by installing a virtual private network, faster broadband access within bureaux, between bureaux and the centre. It provides a detailed electronic case recording system, moving away from the vast quantities of paper that the bureaux have used to record cases in the past, allows access to the Internet and so on. It will, as I mentioned, generate more management information from all of the cases we see, so there will be more feedback to policy makers from the generality of cases that we are dealing with. One of the reason why it was sold to government was that it would allow bureaux to deliver e-services to clients who would otherwise be excluded from those services. Internet access is increasingly widespread. If you look at the figures released periodically by the Office of the e-Envoy Internet access is steadily rising, but if you look at that by income still substantial proportions of households on low income have no access to the Internet. It is on that basis that we would be able to help clients better by accessing those facilities.

  Q435 Andrew Selous: I am interested that you mention households on low incomes. Is there any evidence that some of those households may be going to the local library, for example, and accessing the Internet there whereas they may not have the Internet at home? Is there any encouraging news there?

  Mr Wheatley: Some of them may well be. The point is rather that people on a low income who come to us for advice do not necessarily know that they need to go to a particular website and download a form. They simply know that they have got a bill they cannot pay or that the benefits statement they have received does not include the premium they thought they were getting. It is that sort of problem that we can resolve with access to e-services.

  Q436 Andrew Selous: I understand that you need to gain trusted e-intermediary status. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? You have mentioned a figure of £20 million already but are there further costs involved in that? What is the timescale we are looking at and, furthermore, are there issues in regard to data protection privacy to be resolved in terms of realising that status?

  Mr Wheatley: Yes. At the moment if you are a private individual you can get access to, for example, not DWP but the Inland Revenue tax credit account but you have to go through the secure government gateway which involves first of all logging on to a website and then waiting a fortnight for two separate letters containing codes which you put in. That is a system that is cumbersome for an individual coming in to us for advice. If you look at the non-e world what happens at the moment when a bureau with a client in it wants to contact the DWP, for example, is that a phone call is made and the DWP may ask to speak to the client and they may ask for their national insurance number or other information. It is an ad hoc system that generally works to everyone's satisfaction. When you start to talk about electronic systems everyone gets a lot more nervous, starts thinking about fraud, "How can we guarantee that that person is who they say they are?", "How can we guarantee the computer accessing the on-line service is a CAB computer?". There are issues like that which are to do with trust, which is where the trusted intermediary bit comes in, and some of them are technical matters and we have sought to address those and are continuing to address those in discussions with DWP, the Inland Revenue and other bits of government and we hope that a fairly simple solution can be reached so that we do not have to go through a cumbersome process every time a client comes in. We hope that because we have got a secure network we can link into a secure network, a user system perhaps of user names and passwords. [1]

  Q437 Andrew Selous: Are you optimistic that you will achieve that?

  Mr Wheatley: We are always optimistic; sometimes dashed.

  Q438 Andrew Selous: Realistically?

  Mr Wheatley: I think it is possible, even if you are talking about the Child Support Agency where there are obvious sensitivities about different parties to the same case as it were coming in and seeking access to a case record. As long as you have got reasonable security and the person brings in some user name or code that they have been issued by the agency, it ought to be possible to trust the bureau to access the record for the right purpose.

  Q439 Andrew Selous: Would you say that Citizens Advice's vision to establish itself as an e-intermediary fits in with Sir Peter Gershon's idea for DWP having a one-stop role?

  Mr Wheatley: It fits in perhaps in a slightly perverse way. We had a meeting with the Department for Work and Pensions some weeks ago and they said that with the forthcoming Gershon review, which everyone seems to know about even thought it is not in the public domain, there was a renewed drive behind the policy towards intermediaries. They see us as providing a way of achieving efficiency savings and that is something which we regard with some caution. We do not simply want to become the first port of call for everyone who would normally go and see a member of staff at the DWP. We do not simply want to become the front line. That would jeopardise our independence and probably also lose the trust that we have from the public in the service that we offer. It has got to be done in the right way. If you do offer the right sort of e-service and it works then inevitably there will be efficiency savings but it is too crude to see it as simply shifting the volume of work on to the voluntary sector.