MR LEIGH LEWIS CB AND MR TERRY MORAN

15 MARCH 2007

  Q200  Chairman: We all go to our own Jobcentre Pluses regularly and the Committee itself went on a series of visits recently and some of us went to the Jobcentre Plus in Clapham and they brought people in from the whole district to talk to us informally. What the staff were saying, who were very committed to the service they were giving, the common refrain from them all was that in some sense they felt they were being deskilled, that they were precisely not any longer being able to do the thing that you are describing. They said that they are used to the old days, to having to know the whole territory in order to be able to deal with issues in the round and they had now become so segmented that they could not do that anymore, so in a sense what we were hearing on the ground is quite at odds with what you are telling us is your philosophy.

  Mr Lewis: I think there is always a little bit of looking back. I spend an awful lot of my time out with our staff in our offices, and I am going to the Jobcentre Plus office in Worthing tomorrow and I was up in one of our big contact centres in Newcastle last Friday, and there is always a little bit of looking back to a golden age, a golden age which actually was never quite as golden as it is sometimes perceived. We certainly still do have many of our staff, our New Deal personal advisers, our visiting officers in the Pension Service, who have a very broad role, but inevitably, like any other organisation which is subject to resource pressures, and we are reducing our manpower, as you know, by some 30,000 over a three-year period, we are having to look at not just how we deliver good, and improving, customer service, but how to deliver it cost-effectively. That does mean inevitably having some processes which are carried out in a more systemised way because it is more cost-effective, but actually I think that the debate really with our people, and it is a very good debate with our people, is how do we get the best of both worlds because I profoundly believe that we can have a more cost-effective delivery, but also a better delivery to our customers as a result.

  Q201  Chairman: I think we are not asking you specifically about the DWP, but dealing with the DWP as an example of an organisation. Again, when we were talking to these people, their complaint was about their inability, as DWP workers, to access this telephone line into, is it, the processing centre in Makerfield?

  Mr Lewis: Yes.

  Q202  Chairman: We know that our constituents cannot get through on these helplines, but here were DWP staff with their own dedicated line, complaining to us that they could not get through. There is something wrong with this system, is there not?

  Mr Lewis: There was certainly something wrong with that bit of the system when you were there, and I have seen the letter which you wrote to Jobcentre Plus and the reply that you have had. Just to put it in context, not to sound unduly defensive, actually the performance right across our contact centres in all of our businesses is very strong and improving. The vast, overwhelming majority of people who ring our contact centres and our call centres get through and get through easily and we have made some huge strides, but there are still some problems. Within Jobcentre Plus, we are moving from a system in which benefits were processed effectively in every single local office, so every single one of hundreds and hundreds of offices did its own benefit processing, and we are moving to a point where we are centralising that to around 70 big benefit delivery centres. That is a vastly more cost-effective way of doing business. Inevitably, some of the staff who are having to make that transition feel that they are losing something in the process, that ability to see that individual customer face to face across the desk to understand precisely where he or she is coming from and to actually operate with that individual face to face, but there are two things I would say about that. Quite often, we did not give a great service in that environment actually because it was very, very hard to maintain standards of quality and consistency. Secondly, it is inevitably vastly more cost-effective to concentrate expertise in a smaller number of locations.

  Q203  Chairman: We have raised this with other people too, but the sense is that, because you are being driven by the need to make efficiency gains and because technology is seen as the means by which you can do this, the very thing you say that you cherish and want to put at the heart of your philosophy, which is the individual customer focus, but what they want is the ability to talk to a human being in the round about their problems in an accessible place and precisely that is what is being removed from them, is it not?

  Mr Lewis: No, I do not think it is. Of course we are asking some of our customers to deal with us in particular ways and we are no different actually from any major customer-facing organisation in that way whatsoever, and any of those big customer-facing organisations which we deal with, particularly in the financial sector, have some of that. Let me give you one example where I think we have transformed our customer service for the better. Only ten years ago, perhaps even less, if you wanted actually to find a job from the then Employment Service before the advent of Jobcentre Plus, there was only one single route to do that. You had to go into your local Jobcentre, you had to look at those little cards on those little boards and that was the one thing. If you rang your Jobcentre, even if you could find its telephone number, and said, "Can you tell me whether you have any jobs? I have just lost my job. I am a plumber, so have you any jobs?", they would have said to you, "Well, I'm awfully sorry, but you will have to come in to find those jobs". Now, we still have the accessibility for you to go into your local Jobcentre Plus office and, incidentally, when you do, you do not find those cards on the boards, but you now find really effective job point terminals, you probably saw them in Clapham, which have access to a quarter of a million jobs literally there in front of you. Secondly, you can ring Jobseeker Direct, which is our telephone find-a-job service, and about 170,000 people a week do that and they speak to a human being, they talk and they get referred to a job there and then over the phone, or you can go on to the Net and you can do your own job search for those same vacancies and self-refer. I think that is a startlingly better service. It has not taken the human being out of it and it has given our customers vastly more choice and access.

  Q204  Paul Flynn: I am bowled over, I really am, just by the suggestion and the picture you paint of the service because you say here that the stereotype which is described of benches bolted to linoleum floors and embattled staff behind floor-to-ceiling screens has gone. I can recall those screens being introduced and the reason they were introduced was because of customers who were violent and who would lash out at the staff and, if they were not happy, would urinate in the lift. It was a pretty bleak picture painted of the relationship between staff and customers at that time. Where have all these violent customers gone?

  Mr Lewis: I have my own personal history because I am now the Permanent Secretary, but I was the first ever Chief Executive of Jobcentre Plus, so I was there and I took the organisation through that transformation personally. Those people have not gone away and we still, in our Jobcentre Plus offices, have a tiny minority of people who behave badly and, because we take the health and safety of our staff exceptionally seriously, we do, therefore, have a whole set of measures in place to protect our staff and indeed other members of the public, so we will have customer care officers, security guards, if you will, we have closed-circuit TV, we have panic buttons and all of the staff have had training in dealing with difficult customers. Overwhelmingly, what has happened is a very, very simple and basic law of human behaviour, that, if you treat people decently, they respond decently. Even if you are giving them news which is not the news they want to hear, if they are sat across a desk from you being dealt with as a human being in a human environment, they react as a human being, and that is overwhelmingly what we have seen. In those old offices, we surrendered the customer-facing part of the office to the worst-behaved individual who happened to be there at any one time, but not anymore, as I hope you will have seen at Clapham. We have an environment that actually, I think, we can be proud of as part of public service.

  Q205  Paul Flynn: A visit to one of those offices in the remote past, 20 or 30 years ago, was a demeaning and generally insulting experience that people loathed. With the changes, if the levels of violence to staff have not increased, I am assuming that is what you are saying because the other argument is that it has improved and the rest of the customer experience has also improved.

  Mr Lewis: Yes. First of all, we know from extensive surveying of our customers, and we are here talking about our Jobcentre Plus network because our other businesses do not operate in that same face-to-face environment, but in our Jobcentre Plus business we absolutely know that the overwhelming majority of our customers hugely prefer the environment to the one that went before, and indeed it is now difficult for some of them of course to remember what it was like before. We still do have incidents in our offices, and I do not want to pretend to the Committee for one moment that we do not ever have difficult incidents in our offices, but their number has not increased overall and overwhelmingly our staff, including many of our staff who at that time, and I was leading the organisation at that time, had real fears and anxieties about what would happen if those screens came down, the overwhelming majority of our staff would not now go back to that previous environment.

  Q206  Paul Flynn: You are about to expand the role of the Independent Case Examiner to all of your businesses. Why is this and what improvements do you foresee will come from this?

  Mr Lewis: We think that actually it can help make us a better Department and provide a better and more effective further tier in our complaint-handling process for our customers, and I can actually say to the Committee that we are announcing today the appointment of the new Independent Case Examiner, Mr John Hanlon, for that role. What it will mean is that any customer of the Department, who receives a letter from one of our chief executives, such as Terry Moran, in response to a complaint and who is still unhappy with the position that he or she is in or the reply that they have had, will be able to refer their case to the Independent Case Examiner. This will be Mr Hanlon who will be, as previously has been the case with respect to the Child Support Agency, independent of the Department in the sense that he will reach utterly independent judgments on whether he thinks the customer has been treated well or badly and can recommend, if he thinks the customer has been treated badly, what redress we should provide. That does not mean that the individual does not have a right still to go via their Member of Parliament to the Ombudsman, but all the evidence from the prototype that we ran suggests that it becomes an effective mechanism for trying to resolve complaints quickly. I hope it will do one other thing too because, as we said in the note, complaints in a curious way can become a positive. If you can turn a very angry customer into a satisfied customer because you have handled their complaint well, you have someone who may actually become an advocate of the organisation. We hope that the Independent Case Examiner, the ICE, will be able to help us understand generic things that he may be able to see from putting a kind of set of complaints together which we may be missing, areas where we can clearly improve our service, but we may just be failing to spot them.

  Q207  Paul Flynn: Mr Moran, if I can pull you in on this, how will this affect your area, bringing in the Independent Case Examiner?

  Mr Moran: Well, as it happens, we are extending it across the Department. When we introduced the prototype a year ago, we in the DCS were able to use it actually for every case which came to my attention. We took the opportunity with prototyping to introduce a very simple, three-tier complaints system: where in the first tier where the issue may have arisen we would expect local staff to deal with it and if within six months they were not happy with that and they expressed dissatisfaction with any grievance six months after that, it would be the unit manager and if within that experience they were still unhappy, they would have the right to come to me. In that period we had, I think, 140 cases, which is not that many relative to the caseload that we deal with. Those 140 cases came to me for personal oversight and I would write personally to the customer. That did not generally happen before and only the most extraordinary and extreme cases would ever get to me because in organisations like the public service it often can mean that someone thinks they are doing the right thing by protecting the head of the organisation away from all of these issues, but actually it was a real breakthrough for us in terms of having clear transparency that I was as interested and concerned about complaints even at the local level that I would write to customers directly. If a customer was then unhappy with my response, having reviewed it, they would then have the right to go to the Independent Case Examiner.

  Q208  Paul Flynn: The cases that are examined at local level, it is quicker, the customer gets an answer and it would probably be unsatisfactory to them to get a long delay, but if you expand the role of the Independent Case Examiner, is this a sensible use of your money? Are you not bringing unnecessary complexity and delays into the system rather than improving the system so that more complaints are handled at the local level?

  Mr Moran: It has not been our experience that we would see it as an expansion of the time to the customer because the whole emphasis of having a three-tier system which is very clear and very transparent is that it puts the emphasis at the local level to ensure that this is clear because, until we had this system, the transparency did not really exist for me, as Chief Executive of the organisation, to see what complaints were arising and indeed what we were doing with them, so there was a greater accountability being exercised in this last year through this new system. It is very powerful in terms of focusing minds in that if it gets all the way to me, what am I going to think about it. Actually I have seen some of the complaints in terms of our handling of it and a number of learnings have come through just in this last year of our use of the Independent Case Examiner. In one particular example, we saw that we were not taking the appropriate action consistent with when someone alleged they had made a claim to us and that form had not appeared in our offices, we believed, and we found inconsistent handling of that. As a result of the experience of those sorts of cases coming directly to our attention, we were able to revise the procedures and ensure that everybody was brought up to speed with what the correct procedures were. Sometimes that only ever happened in the most extreme cases, particularly through Ombudsman cases, so, because the Ombudsman cases take an awful lot longer than these sorts of complaints take, this is about ensuring that we do things meaningfully earlier and well, and I think it has been a very good year of experience.

  Q209  Paul Flynn: Could you explain to the Committee the role of the Independent Case Examiner and why it is essential to have one in addition to the Parliamentary Health Service Ombudsman? Why have two?

  Mr Lewis: Of course we did not have to have two and, until literally the beginning of April for all of our businesses, we would not have had two, but we will now, and I think we have learnt actually. We have learnt that having that extra tier which is independent, but which does not carry all the formality perhaps and all of the kind of sense of huge rigour of analysis that goes with the PCA[2], does give another opportunity for someone to say more quickly, "Look, I just think you have got this wrong", even to a chief executive, even to Terry Moran, "Look, I've seen the letter you've written. I may be able to understand why you've said that to the customer, but I just think you've got this wrong and I think you should look at it again", and I think that will be powerful. I also very much hope that we will see the Independent Case Examiner as someone who can help us to see those generic instances, which we may not otherwise spot, where our services fall in between the cracks because he will see a variety of cases from different businesses and he may well say, "Look, this is similar to this and similar to this. Terry, are you really looking at that set of circumstances?".

  Q210 Paul Flynn: If we were interviewing you in the year 2004 to 2005, I doubt whether you would have drawn attention to the number of calls to the Disability and Carers Service helpline which resulted in the engaged tone. In total, there were 18 million, 80 % of the calls, and you have reported that this figure has disappeared down to 1 %, a tiny figure, but it is hard to know how you could possibly deteriorate from 18 million. If we were seeing you or your successors in about two years' time, what would they be pointing to as an area in which there is most room for improvement?

  Mr Lewis: Let me say something and then, perhaps with the Committee's forbearance, I would like Terry Moran, who actually led the transformation of that helpline, to say something about it. I am on public record as having said that the performance of that helpline, and we are now talking about three years ago, was dreadful. The fact that millions of people rang that number and could not get through and rang again and again and again was dreadful. There were reasons for it, but there is no excuse for it whatsoever. Having been as frank with the Committee as I possibly can about that, what makes me and Terry Moran very proud is that we have seen a total and absolute transformation of that helpline to the point where it has not only been accredited by an independent contact centre verification organisation, and Terry will give you the details, but we were immensely proud that, as you may know, the Cabinet Secretary, the Head of the Civil Service, has instituted for the very first time a set of Civil Service awards and the helpline team won the first ever Civil Service Team of the Year Award in those awards this year for the absolutely remarkable transformation of that helpline, but it does not excuse for one moment the state that it was in three years ago which was unacceptable, it was dreadful. Incidentally, it will, I hope, be me still in two years' time and, if it has gone back down again, then I will carry absolute personal accountability for that and I will have to come and explain to this Committee why it has, but I very, very much intend that it should not do so.

  Q211  Paul Flynn: When you wake up at three o'clock in the morning, what keeps you awake, which area of work do you hope to improve in three years' time when we see you?

  Mr Lewis: I do not often wake up at three in the morning, I am pleased to say, and things do not in that sense keep me awake at night. I think the challenge, let me put it that way, for all of us, and Terry Moran is one of my colleagues on our top executive team in the Department, we are going to have to go on delivering more in our Department with less. We are no different from any other government department or agency, we are no different from any other major organisation, but it is hugely challenging and we have to go on rising to that challenge.

  Mr Moran: I would just say one thing. It was the year the Agency was created, it was the year I took up the appointment and the staff were absolutely on their knees wanting to do better and what I think is really important is that, whatever record is made of this hearing, the one thing I do not want to be allowed to be recorded is that in any way, shape or form there is the suggestion that the staff did not want to do better because they did. For all sorts of circumstances, which I will not bore the Committee with, that did not happen, but, as a result of a focus of attention on this, that 18 million calls compared to this last year was 26,000 engaged tones and, just to help people realise, there was a 36 % satisfaction in 2004/05 and it is 98.5% currently as a result of what can happen. Interestingly, as the Chairman was mentioning earlier about people wanting to talk to somebody, that is our experience too. They like to get through and, when they do, they get a good service and we have got pretty powerful feedback that not everybody wants to go into somewhere to speak to someone face to face, but in fact three-quarters of our people prefer to do it over the phone, and actually for people with disabilities that is not an unusual thing to learn, but the focus was all about saying, "Is this a service that we can really make a difference in offering?" because too many people think that contact centres are sweatshops, unpleasant, that you can only ever get through to automated voices and all the rest of it and people sometimes lose, shall we say, motivation when they work on telephones. When you read the headlines that keep really upsetting staff, as indeed we have three years on from that experience, yet they have absolutely transformed themselves, it is really demotivating because people who are not used to it still regard that as the current-day service and that worries me greatly, but I am absolutely very proud of what people did there. They have responded to it and they have kept that momentum and they have kept that service up and it is improving month by month.

  Q212  Chairman: This is a good story. Can you just assure us that now that people can get through, when they get through, the person that they get to speak to can take on the query in the round and deliver a full service back?

  Mr Moran: Increasingly. At the moment in my own helpline for disabled people and carers, we are only transferring 7 % of all calls that come because the person on the end of the phone is able to deal with the vast majority of the issues that they raise. It is not yet in a place I want it to be in terms of ensuring that a person will get absolutely everything that they need at the end of that phone call and sometimes it will involve a call back or a need for a form to be filled in or whatever because we do not yet have some of the technology and support that we need, but, generally speaking, that service is progressively improving each year.

  Q213  Mr Walker: Mr Lewis, you certainly did turn around Jobcentre Plus. The one in Waltham Cross, one of the towns in my constituency, is an extremely nice place to be and I know a little bit about Jobcentres, having been on the board of a company called Blue Arrow in the late 1990s. I think you can call people who use Jobcentre Plus "customers" because they do have choice and you are directly competing with the Blue Arrows and Manpowers of this world and sometimes you are collaborating with them, but in other parts of the DWP service are they really customers because "customer" does imply that you can shop around, you have a choice, and you can take your custom elsewhere? In many, many of the services that you provide, I suppose in the strict sense of the term they are not customers and I would just be interested to have your thoughts around that conundrum.

  Mr Lewis: This has been the debate inside the Department and inside government almost ever since I have been here actually which perhaps suggests that that is too long in any event, but actually I think there is a huge reason why the term "customer" is right, notwithstanding the very valid point that you make that not all our customers have choice. In a sense, you almost have to look at the counterfactual, what we used to call people in the Department I joined. On a polite day, we used to call them "claimants", and on many other days the staff would call them terms which were much less kind of user-friendly even than that, but it was about culture. It was about conveying a sense that actually every single person who comes through our door has a legitimate right and expectation to receive the best service which we are able to give and to meet their needs. Of course you can debate whether we can really use the term "customer" because there are not a choice of 15 supermarkets, et cetera, but nevertheless would I go back from using that term? No, not for one second because I think it has been one part of transforming the culture of the organisation. To thank you for what you said to me, on my very first day as the Employment Service Chief Executive, and this was before the creation of Jobcentre Plus, this was the beginning of 1997, I remember I thought on my first morning as the Chief Executive that I would go and visit one of our offices as it seemed to be a good place to start. It only had two signs on the door, on the outside of the office. One said, "Jobcentre", and that was okay because at least it told you what it was, and the other said, "No dogs, no food, no children", and those were the only two signs. This was meant to be an organisation which was serving people and now, as I hope you saw, outside it will say, "Jobcentre Plus", and it looks more attractive, but there is a sign which says, "You are welcome to come in with your family, your partner and your children", et cetera. This is part of changing the culture in the way we regard the people we are here to serve.

  Mr Moran: I agree. I remember when we introduced "customer" because I have grown up in this Department since being a lad and it was a huge shock to people to actually move away from this idea of a claimant to something on the basis of, "Why do we not expect this person to get the service as if we were using it ourselves or our grandparent, our child, our brother or our sister was using it? What would we expect to get?". It was that sort of desire to get people to rethink that it is not just somebody coming here because they are an inconvenience to us, but that actually people are coming to see us at some quite devastating point in their life often and getting that into the heads of many of our folk. It is very easy for us all to get into a fixed way of thinking and forget, for us to see the wallpaper, but actually not recognise what the pattern of the wallpaper is even in the devastating circumstances that people present themselves, so using the term "customer" is quite important. It was not the only thing that would ever change people's reactions or views of things, but it set a tone about what we expect really of ourselves in support of the people who come to us, and I think it is still quite important to continue to use it. An example, interestingly, is that I went to an NAO senior managers event where they asked me to speak and they insisted on calling me a "client". I actually do not see myself as a client of the NAO, but they do see me as a client and it is quite interesting what terminology can mean. They can inspect me, watch that I am doing all the right things and occasionally offer some advice, but I do not see myself as a client, but it helps them liberate some of their thinking about their relationship with public service providers so that we spend money wisely, and it is a similar analogy.

  Q214  Mr Walker: On service standards, I have an extract from the Disability and Carers Service leaflet. Are you familiar with it?

  Mr Moran: Yes.

  Q215  Mr Walker: It states that they aim "to provide you with an accurate service. This means we will get things right first time".

  Mr Moran: Yes.

  Q216  Mr Walker: How often do you get things right first time? It seems to me that you can have a mission statement, but there is a danger that a mission statement can start to sound superficial. "This means we will get things right first time", that says everything, but it probably means absolutely nothing, to be honest.

  Mr Moran: Well, I understand entirely where you are coming from. For me, it is quite important that we set a standard which is important to ourselves, which is: why would we not seek to get it right first time? Some of the measures that we agreed with Ministers are not 100 %, so, for example, accuracy of decision-making at the moment is 92 % for Attendance Allowance, it is 90 % for Disability Living Allowance and for Carers Allowance it is 98 % because of some of the vagaries and complexities, but the doing it right first time is not just about the accuracy of the decision in this context; it is about whether I am doing everything that I should be doing at the time that we are having an engagement and whether, when you call our helpline, we make sure that you get what you need in that call accurately, fairly and fully. Those are the sorts of things where doing it right first time is important. It is worth saying that the customer information leaflet is a leaflet which is one of the first that was designed with customers and the lobby in mind, which actually we consulted people about to say, "What matters to you? We will do our best to respond to them", so that is what led to our customer promise and the six commitments, of which that is a part.

  Q217  Mr Walker: I am not meaning to be pedantic, so do not get me wrong because I think you are doing wonderful things at the DWP, but as to "This means we will get things right first time", you do not always get things right first time, of course you do not, so in a sense would it not be better to say, "We will always endeavour or try to get things right first time"? It is about managing the expectation of the customer reading the leaflet.

  Mr Moran: I understand that, but part of me is actually saying that I should not want to manage the expectation of the customer down, but I should be ensuring that the customer's expectations of the public service are as high as they need to be. Part of me says that I am quite pleased that this organisation has customer service satisfaction at the moment of 86 %, which is great in one sense, but 14 % are saying not. It is actually 3 % better than last year. Part of me has this sneaking suspicion as to whether that is higher than it really is because people have got such a low expectation of the service that, when they get something that actually is rather nice and better than perhaps they thought, their expectations are very highly met. I do not want to get in a place that sets an expectation with the customers which should be below anything which we ourselves would expect. When I deal with my bank or I deal with my insurance company, I want them to deal with me right first time all the time and I do not see why I should require any less for the customer that I am intending to serve.

  Q218  David Heyes: Can we try and unpick this dramatic improvement in the 80 % down to 1 % figure that you have quoted in the Disability and Carers Service for people getting access to you. It is fantastic, but amongst that 1 % how many get, "Sorry, we're busy, we can't deal with you at the moment. Please ring back later" message or a message which says, "You are in a queue"?

  Mr Moran: Last year that was 26,000 where they would have got a message to say, "Don't stay on the line". This will arise sometimes where, for example, there has been something on TV and, all of a sudden, our forecast of staffing requirements to meet expected demand shoots through the roof. It is very rarely a practice which arises as a result of everyday running of the business now. We have introduced quite sophisticated workforce planning around forecast workloads in terms of inbound calls. It is a pretty standard system that most other organisations were using and we were not until three years ago and we upgraded the telephony so that we could do this specifically. It will happen, but it is happening less and less.

  Q219  David Heyes: Do you have stats though that you could maybe make available to the Committee?

  Mr Moran: Yes, of course.[3]

3   Ev 145 Back