MR JOHN WHEATLEY

22 MARCH 2004

  Q440 Rob Marris: My understanding from going to the Wolverhampton CAB is that you have got two computer things going on, and I think Wolverhampton is a pilot for one of them. You have got something—I do not know what you call it—which is akin to the job point that Jobcentre Plus has with touch screens for people to get information out of, which I tried. I have to say it is better than the job point because it is wheelchair accessible for a start. It seemed to be pretty good, and then you have also got your own internal caseworker type of system which Wolverhampton was starting to put in about six months ago, from memory. IT projects are notoriously difficult. In terms of your in-house staff on both counts, whatever your equivalent of job points is called, and I know it is not just jobs, and your caseworker-type system, how confident are you that they are going to work? You talked about optimism before.

  Mr Wheatley: The project you mentioned, the touch screens, is about kiosks. It is very small scale at the moment. I think there are only about six or eight[2] of these things in existence at the moment. It is a very small scale pilot. We have built in as much evaluation as possible and would want to build in more if we rolled that out, but the results are interesting. Something like 20% of people coming in are able to resolve their query entirely just by using a touch screen which gives them access to local sites, to the DWP sites, to Inland Revenue sites. The main sites that we thought people would want to access are proving useful for providing information. If we rolled that out more widely there would first be issues of how do we fund that roll-out and, secondly, how do we make sure that people are going away with the right answer to their question. A lot of what bureau advisers do is fairly detailed diagnostic interviewing to find out whether the presenting problem is the whole picture or does the client need to have a full benefits check to maximise their income because they are in debt, for example. It is quite a detailed process which is not amenable to a touch screen system.

  Q441 Rob Marris: So you have not yet decided whether you are going to roll out touch screen, even if you could afford it?

  Mr Wheatley: We have not decided finally. It looks encouraging and we would like to experiment further but no decision has been made.

  Q442 Rob Marris: The technology of that touch screen works all right for you? I realise there are other factors in your decision on it.

  Mr Wheatley: Yes, it works fine. It is simply a terminal which gives limited access to certain Internet sites rather than being a terminal which gives access to the Internet. It is pretty simple.

  Q443 Rob Marris: What about your caseworker system?

  Mr Wheatley: The case system is rather more ambitious. It is quite a detailed system which records all the information that you need to record about the case, plus all sorts of information about which ward the client is in, which health authority district the client is in, whether there are any policy implications from the case as presenting. There is quite a lot of information there. We have been rolling that out in different phases, very much like a traditional IT project. It has been managed by a programme board chaired by someone from the private sector, and the project structure has been separated out from management organisations and Citizens Advice, so there is a degree of separation there.

  Q444 Rob Marris: How is it working?

  Mr Wheatley: It is working now in a quarter of bureaux. A quarter of bureaux nationally are using it and we are confident that all will be using it by the end of the year.

  Q445 Rob Marris: And it is working?

  Mr Wheatley: It is working, yes, for most of the time. We have had the odd system crash but that is normal.

  Q446 Rob Marris: Is it based on off-the-shelf stuff?

  Mr Wheatley: It is based on an existing product. I think it is called Continuity but it has been adapted for our purposes rather than designed afresh.

  Q447 Rob Marris: It is a kind of souped-up off-the-shelf system, in lay terms?

  Mr Wheatley: Yes, and there are advantages and disadvantages to that. You have to be sure that the product you are adapting is the right one.

  Q448 Rob Marris: To begin with, yes.

  Mr Wheatley: Yes, and sufficiently adaptable.

  Q449 Rob Marris: And in that process, on the caseworker side, how and when did you involve the staff and volunteers in that?

  Mr Wheatley: From the outset. The project managers' first task was to conduct a large number of meetings with bureau advisers and staff, volunteers and paid workers, to establish what information they needed to keep, what were the external requirements, for example, from legal services, contracts advice, what information was needed to go into it. Part of the result of that is that it is a detailed system because we have tried to accommodate all those wishes, but it does mean that it is a system that is at least nominally owned by the people who use it.

  Q450 Rob Marris: Did you do that consultation before or after you fixed on Continuity as your platform?

  Mr Wheatley: That might be a question I would need to take away and answer by way of a letter. I am not entirely sure. I could not tell you off hand.

  Q451 Rob Marris: So it might have been that you did it before Continuity was decided upon or it might have been after, when you were, to use my words, deciding what souping up to do on it?

  Mr Wheatley: Yes. I will let the committee know. [3]

  Q452 Rob Marris: But, based on your 25% roll-out so far, it is looking good for the other 75%?

  Mr Wheatley: We are confident that it is a system that will work.

  Q453 Rob Marris: How come you are managing it and the DWP is not?

  Mr Wheatley: That is a difficult question for me to answer.

  Q454 Rob Marris: I realise that you are not in the DWP.

  Mr Wheatley: I do not know the answer to that. I could waffle on for ten minutes but I do not know.

  Rob Marris: I was just hoping you might but I quite appreciate why you do not. Thank you.

  Q455 Chairman: John, why do you not think a bit more blue sky about some of this as an organisation? It seems to me that you have got a huge corporate knowledge about the nature of the system and how it works, the ins and outs and ups and downs of it. Why do you not get alongside some of these IBMs and—dare I say it—EDSs and say to them, "We might be able to help you get off-the-shelf systems that might benefit from what we know about the benefits system"? I know you have got enough to do. I used to be an honorary adviser to CAB and I know how busy you all are. I understand the Internet access and your e-system seems to be an entirely sensible and overdue thing, and I am sure you can get the technical support to get the security issue sorted out and I hope you will, but can I encourage you? If we are all thinking about Sir Peter Gershon, after we get access to his report in July, which we will all study, you are a pretty dominant organisation in the advice business and there might be others who have done a lot of work in understanding and interpreting the complicated system that we have. Is there not a role for you knocking on some of these big computer suppliers' doors and saying, "Actually, we can help you get where you want to be"? Has nobody ever thought of that?

  Mr Wheatley: It is a good idea, I am sure, but do not forget we are involved with strategic partners from the private sector, so there might be issues there about private sector talking to private sector and all sorts of commercial confidential issues, but I do not see any reason why, if something works, that knowledge should not be shared more widely. Particularly if we do something well, if there is something in the way we have done it that would help government to do things better, I am sure we would be more than happy to share that information.

  Q456 Chairman: You could take a lot of money off IBM, but of course you are right to say that your independence is a valuable asset which you cannot trade lightly. I understand that. I have a couple of other quick questions which are not core activity for you, and please duck them if you feel more comfortable doing that. Do you have a view about simplification in terms of the system as it is and whether, with a degree of rough justice which you might have to accept, you might get a system that is more easily and more cheaply administered in a way that releases money for increased benefit?

  Mr Wheatley: When the Budget announced 40,000 in equivalent job cuts in the Department for Work and Pensions we did say that that pointed to a need for simplification in the system because the experience of our advisers is that the system is often not administered particularly well and there are, as recently published figures from the department show, enormous amounts still out there in benefits going unclaimed. There is a broader need for efficiency and we do think there is scope for simplification, but I would caution that it is always possible to simplify. Your previous witnesses made some points about fairness in this regard and I think also Parliament is constantly having to adjust the benefits system to clarify what is intended. If you take a benefit like disability living allowance, for example,—

  Q457 Chairman: I wonder why you choose that one.

  Mr Wheatley: It is a very good example of a non-straightforward benefit which is not an allowance paid in respect of disability but an allowance paid in respect of the care or mobility needs that arise from an illness or disability, all of which takes a bit of assessing, so you do end up now with a 38 or 40 page claim form, a raft of case law clarifying what is meant by using a slotted spoon in the cooking test, for example, a whole host of Commissioners' decisions which clarify further the regulations, and further regulations on the basis of Commissioners' decisions which in the department's view go against the original policy intention. If you try and cut through all of that by saying, "Okay: let us simplify it all", I think you run the risk of just creating lots more losers and perhaps some winners and then you will have further test cases to clarify the policy intention and be back at square one. It is a nice process. I remember being at our stand at one of the party conferences and a newly elected Member, who obviously had been to her first constituency session, said, "The benefits system is terribly complicated. Why can we not just have one benefit?", and I was lost for an answer. At the moment we are talking to the department about the disability living allowance on-line service and that will be a transactional service where you will be able to submit a claim via the Internet rather than at the moment just complete a form and download it and print it off. To be a workable on-line service it will have to be simplified. There are pilot schemes going on now (and have been for some time) within the department to test whether a shorter form completed over the phone in part perhaps will work. We are looking at this with interest because it will be interesting to see what the outcome for the individual claimant is: does this process of simplification detract from the accuracy of the benefit decision? Does it make it more likely or less likely that someone is going to get the right benefit (if there is such a thing)?

  Q458 Chairman: You are of course defending the sophisticated system that we have because it tries to deal as best it can with individual circumstances and that is fine. Again, from my side of the table, I do worry now that, since all of these big systems involve off-the-shelf software packages, Parliament takes decisions about introducing new benefits blind to any of the implications that that may or may not have for the off-the-shelf system that will be used to administer them. I just feel, and I hope I can take you with me, that we all need to spend a bit more time understanding the delivery mechanisms that we might be pushing these new legal entitlements into. I think organisations like your own have got very good and timeous advice to give about the ups and downs of analysis on government proposals for change, but nobody ever seems to tell Parliament about how it could be done better and if it was tweaked a little you could get an off-the-shelf system to do this as opposed to that. I think that is something that we are all going to have to get better at in future if we are going to save money in order to get better levels of benefits paid because you can spend less on the administration.

  Mr Wheatley: I think you make a very strong set of points there, Mr Chairman. One of the key reasons why any project, whether it is an IT project or not, can go wrong is that the people who commission the projects are not accurate enough in saying what it is they want. They order something, sit there and wait for it to arrive. When it arrives they say, "Oh no, that is not what we had in mind at all. You have got that completely wrong", by which time it is costly and difficult to rectify. We have found that in a number of the projects that the Office for the Deputy Prime Minister is running now, it is failure at the outset to specify very exactly what your requirements are, what you want the system to do, that leads to confusion from the IT people who are designing this system. As we move into a post-Gershon world, as it were, there is a case for saying that as well as the regulatory impact statement for running any measure you might have to have an IT impact statement to say, "Is this change compatible with IT?".

  Q459 Chairman: You read my mind exactly. I do think that Gershon is a watershed. That is a personal view. I have not talked to my colleagues about it. I think that when the report is available in its entirety in July we should all spend a little time reflecting on the very point that you have made there. Is there anything that you think we have left out that you would like us to consider in the course of this sub-committee inquiry?

  Mr Wheatley: Only to say that things are happening and are happening a lot more easily at the local level between local authorities and Citizens Advice bureaux.

3   Note by witness: Citizens Advice did the consultation before fixing on Continuity as a platform. The consultation resulted in us producing a detailed requirements document, which we used as a basis for undertaking a formal procurement process. A number of different suppliers bid competing solutions, and after an exhaustive selection process we selected the bid involving Continuity. The reasons for this were that the Continuity solution most closely met our requirements, used an established product, and represented best value for money. Back