MR LEIGH LEWIS CB AND MR TERRY MORAN

15 MARCH 2007

  Q220 David Heyes: So the 1% is representing people who just cannot get through at all?

  Mr Moran: Yes.

  Q221  David Heyes: That intuitively seems to be what you might expect as a baseline figure, but between that 37,000 and the 18 million, there is going to be a series of other experiences happening with you.

  Mr Moran: There are.

  Q222  David Heyes: That would include, for example, "Sorry, we're busy. Call back later". It would include, "Sorry, you're in a queue", and then there would be, I guess, stats on how long people might need to wait in queues. Do you have this information available?

  Mr Moran: We do and we are happy to supply it.[4]

  Q223 David Heyes: It might paint a very different picture, I suspect.

  Mr Moran: Well, when you say "a different picture", what we quote in terms of 18 million calls which got the engaged tone, so you had to keep ringing, you did not get anything there, what you get now is genuinely service and some of the prompts that you hear on the phone—

  Q224  David Heyes: What percentage get through first time and get a service from you?

  Mr Moran: Currently it is 92.3 %.

  Q225  David Heyes: So there is still actually quite a void.

  Mr Moran: There is actually a lot we can still do, but, when you think about the benchmark across industry and broader public service, this is a standard where the British Standards Institute, who accredit our call centres for their best practices, came in and for two successive years have reviewed what we do and put it in a league of some of the best service providers in this area.

  Mr Lewis: I have gone up myself and actually sat with an operator, listening to some of the calls being taken, and seen some of this for myself. Some of this is now very sophisticated, which is a huge credit to Terry Moran and his top team for this in two ways. For example, there are patterns. There are some very popular daytime television programmes actually and there is a pattern in that, when some of them end, the phones start ringing. It is absolutely the case and now in Terry's business they know that, so there is more resource at that point. The other thing that you get when you go and meet the people, everyone talks to you about "turrets" which is an odd word to use, but "turrets" means that a whole group of staff whose normal job most of the time is dealing with cases rather than telephone calls, nevertheless, have a set of headsets and, if demand starts to go above the level which the dedicated staff can use, it can now be pushed out very, very quickly to those additional staff. That was never there, so there is vastly more sophistication now in terms of dealing with peaks and troughs.

  Q226  David Heyes: I think it would be helpful to the Committee to get this richer body of information of the experiences of the callers to itemise all the points I have described. The reason I press it to you is that the picture you describe of great strides forward and happy customers really does not match the experience of too many people in my constituency and, most importantly from my point of view, it does not represent the experience of my case workers or me when I try to contact them. Let me give you some examples of a specific area where we have got great problems in the Greater Manchester area in terms of Social Fund applicants, people who need crisis funds. Day after day after day the phone lines are engaged all day long or we get the "Call back later" message or we get, "You're in a queue", and you are obviously going to have to wait an inordinately long time to get through, and my staff spend great amounts of time on behalf of constituents, and these are people who have tried themselves, who have maybe been to other agencies and, in desperation, have finished up coming to their MP about it. My staff cannot get through, there is a huge frustration and our experience does not remotely match this nirvana which you are describing to us.

  Mr Moran: Perhaps I can say just one thing because I understand entirely where you have that experience which clearly would present a very mixed understanding of what we are saying. I am presenting a story on behalf of the Disability and Carers Service which shows a very clear transformation and everybody who uses that service is telling us so. Now, the examples that you are beginning to quote, and I think we will happily take away any experience that you want us to look into, is not something I am able to comment on because I do not know that part of the business, but the point that I want to make, and I think it is really important, is that the progress that is generally being made and what I specifically alluded to is experience that virtually everybody who uses that service is commenting on. The customers themselves, 98.5 % of people, when we ring them back to say, "Have you had an experience that is a good one, bad one or whatever?", they are telling us that it is excellent or very good, so people who are representatives of MPs are usually telling us that this service is good.

  Mr Lewis: Perhaps I can just add something at this stage because in a sense this is not Terry Moran's business, this is part of the Jobcentre Plus business and, therefore, it is right that I should take it as we have not got the Jobcentre Plus Chief Executive here this morning. First of all, that sounds pretty poor experience, so—

  David Heyes: There are other examples I could quote from other areas of your responsibility.

  Mr Lewis: Indeed and, therefore, let us look at that. The second thing to say is that, even in the Department which is doing overwhelmingly better than it did, and I am utterly confident of that, that does not mean, in a department which deals with tens of millions of people a week, that we always get it right. We most certainly do not and we are absolutely not saying that there is no room for further improvement or that there are no parts of our business which are in less than a perfect state. Just to give one figure to the Committee, overall the entirety of our contact centres took some 25 million phone calls in the first seven months of 2006/07 and just 0.2 % of those got the engaged tone. Now, having said that, 0.2 % of 25 million is still a lot of people, if you see what I mean, in absolute terms and each one of those people feels pretty fed up when they get the engaged tone, but it does help to put it in perspective, the sheer size of the business and, I think, the progress we are making overall.

  Q227  David Heyes: The two of you have referred several times to "our people" without actually meaning your staff, but the people who work in the service. To what extent are those people now employed by private contractors where the work has effectively been privatised? For example, Capita and HADEN are a couple of examples in my area where they actually do the day-to-day work of front contact with the public. What proportion of the work is now out to private contractors, what are your aims for the future and how far do you want to take this?

  Mr Lewis: First of all, almost universally the staff in our contact centres are civil servants employed directly by the Department. Where we have contracted work out, it has tended to be in our back-office services like, for example, our estate management, the provision of our ISIT[5], which is now almost entirely provided for us by commercial, private sector providers. I do not come at this, to be absolutely honest, with any particular kind of ideological viewpoint of what is a right answer or a wrong answer. I ought to say that I have been a civil servant for nearly 34 years and I am very proud to be a civil servant and believe in the Civil Service and the public service very strongly, but none of us, as I sometimes say to my own staff, has any right to exist, and I think the only test is: what will help us to deliver the best service to our customers? If, in a particular instance, we will deliver better service to our customers by buying that service in from a private or voluntary sector body, then that should be the case, but I want civil servants in my Department—and I am very proud of the civil servants in my Department—to go on delivering the service because they are doing it just as well as it could possibly be delivered.

  Q228 David Heyes: How far has it gone and how far do you take it?

  Mr Lewis: There is no simple answer to that. There are large areas of our department, as I say, primarily the infrastructure services. For example, we do not maintain or own any of our estate—it is maintained and owned on our behalf by Land Securities Trillium. Very little of our IT, almost none of our IT, is directly provided—it is provided to us by EDS. We maintain very strong customer facing teams to ensure that we are receiving the service we want. In parts of our employment provision, employment zones, et cetera, we have now a very, very mixed economy of provision, but we have over 100,000 civil servants in the department. Overwhelmingly, our direct service to our customers, our face to face service, is provided by our own people.

  Q229  David Heyes: A number that will inevitably reduce in future years. Is that the case?

  Mr Lewis: It is reducing at the moment because Government policy is that we should reduce the number of staff and, for example, our direct staffing has fallen by nearly 22,000 in the last two to two and a half years towards a 30,000 target, which was the target set for us by the Spending Review 2004, and that is hard for people—I do not want to pretend. That is one of the reasons, I think, why some of our staff are less than totally comfortable with where the department is, because it is hard to reduce staff by that volume and still maintain the service.

  Q230  David Heyes: My trade union contacts, the PCS[6], for example, say that this trend is leading to a workforce that is disillusioned and disaffected and has low motivation, but, worse, individual employees of yours, or individual employees of some of the sub-contractors who now do the work for you, say this to me personally on an almost daily basis. I just wonder how you can achieve the quality, how you can get complaints down and how you can hope for a better future when the work is being delivered through a disillusioned, disaffected workforce?

  Mr Lewis: Let us keep this in perspective. The overwhelming majority of our staff in our staff surveys say that actually they have huge enthusiasm for the work they do and believe passionately in the work that they are doing, and this is tough—leading any large organisation today is tough. I would love our staff survey results and some of the levels of disaffection—and we do have some levels of disaffection—to be better than they are, but let us take some good news. The staff survey results that we have only recently published for our 2006 survey, almost on every single measure, have improved compared with our 2005 survey. They are not, in absolute terms, at the levels that I or any of my executive team colleagues would like, but they are on a firmly improving trend; so actually levels of engagement in our department are improving.

  Q231  David Heyes: I want to return briefly to the difficulty to get through on the phone to contact centres and share a discovery with my colleagues on the Committee, and maybe get on the record, that there is a trick that we have discovered. We can get round the inability to call a contract centre. Almost inevitably the contact centre phone number ends in a zero, sometimes a double zero. If you dial through the following numbers, the 01, 02, 03, and you can do that patiently, you have a good chance of getting through because of the way that BT allocate phone numbers in blocks—you might get through to someone. I would recommend that to colleagues as a way of getting through this enormous barrier that you present, particularly to crisis loan applicants where I would have thought it should be easier than any other part of your service to get through, whereas, in fact, it looks like it is the most difficult to get through.

  Mr Lewis: Let us try and end on a point of agreement. I agree that not everything in our department is anything like as good as I want it to be, or my top team want it to be, or our ministers want it to be. It is hugely improving and the vast majority of our customers now get through to us very easily. The recent NAO report on our contact centres said, and they presented some very impressive figures—their surveys, not ours—that the overwhelming majority of our customers who deal with our contact centres are satisfied with the service they get. We have got to make it better still.

  Chairman: David has shown you how to get through it.

  Q232  Kelvin Hopkins: Can I ask what is the balance of different types of complaint? We have seen delays, incorrect advice given, service standards, even perhaps the manner of the way people are treated by staff. What is the proportion of each of those types of complaint?

  Mr Lewis: I will ask Terry to speak for the Disability and Carers' Service; he may be able to help the Committee more. I do not think we simply record, I am afraid, our complaints in neat categories of that kind, so I cannot give you statistically valid figures. I think from my own personal experience, complaints come, in essence, in two big blocks. First of all, there is the complaint where the complainant simply does not like the answer that they have received from the organisation. They may think it is the wrong answer, and we all see some of these cases, they may appreciate it is the right answer but simply think it is a very bad right answer, if you see what I mean, and that they ought to be entitled to something in that circumstance nevertheless. That is one big group of complaints, where people simply do not like the answer. The other big group of complaints is where people simply feel they have been badly treated: they have been kept waiting, they have been dealt with brusquely or rudely, they do not feel that they have been listened to or understood. That is where, in a sense, they believe that the level of the interaction they have had with us simply falls down. Terry may be able to say more about his own business.

  Mr Moran: Yes, with the help of colleagues. Essentially, we track our complaints against our customer promise, which is essentially six-fold, about providing an accurate service, an efficient service, recognising people as an individual and with respect, keeping people informed, being accessible so that you can get through on the phone, or whatever, and listening and learning from the complaints that we hear. The area my own organisation sees the largest number is in the area of efficient service. What that usually involves is where there have been delays from that person's perspective in the handling of a case, or there have been issues where they have felt that they have provided the information, and actually they have and we have just not recognised that they have already provided the information. In proportionate terms, and we can follow up with a more detailed note if you would prefer, that is the area of the most concern for our customers.

  Q233  Kelvin Hopkins: In fact you gave the answer I was hoping to tease out; it is actually people complaining about the rules. I notice, and Terry Moran may be able to answer this, that the DCS has the lowest uphold rate for complaints to the ombudsman out of all the DWP's agencies. That suggests that you are actually doing a good job in applying the rules, but it is the rules that are the problem. People are perhaps complaining about the rules, and when the ombudsman investigates, she says, "I am sorry, the DWP is just doing its job." It is not the administration of the rules, it is the rules themselves.

  Mr Moran: I am not sure I would necessarily reach that conclusion. At the end of the day I think the ombudsman tends to look very carefully. The rules around disability living allowance and attendance allowance actually are very small indeed. What these two benefits rely on is a considerable level of subjective judgment by decision-makers, because the test that we are invited to make is does this person have extra costs associated with the disability that they have, not the nature of the disability itself being the test. There are very few rules in that space that actually the ombudsman can say, "It is the rule you have got a problem with." It could be argued, because we are very discretionary, that the ombudsman could find greater fault with us because the judgment could be just called differently, which can lead to why some of our overturn rates are a little bit higher than some of the other benefits when they go to appeal, for example. I do not think I could pin the overturning rate or upheld rate of the ombudsman just on it being around a rules issue. I think what the ombudsman does see is that we take a very thorough view, where somebody raises a complaint with us, about our response to that. As I was mentioning earlier, ICE in the last year has helped us properly focus on what a complaint is and ensure it is dealt with at the most appropriate level at the earliest opportunity, rather than it escalating without anybody taking any serious view of it until such time as an MP has to be involved and then sees that this has been appalling and refers it. So, I do think that once they end up with the ombudsman, they have ended up there in a better shape than perhaps we see sometimes elsewhere.

  Q234  Kelvin Hopkins: Your department is undoubtedly under pressure constantly from the Treasury, I would think. The philosophy of recent governments is for more means-testing, and that inevitably leads to complexity. The people you are dealing with are often people who are not the most finely educated, sometimes not literate, sometimes who speak foreign languages and who may have difficulty replying. Is not that a source of immense problems for you and particularly for the people who you are supposed to be serving?

  Mr Lewis: Let me take that, because it is a very active question. In fact, I have appeared before a sister committee of the House, the Public Accounts Committee, on precisely that, both the complexity of the benefit system and also the quality of our customer information leaflets. There is no doubt that we operate a complex benefit system. It has grown up to its present complexity for many reasons, but it is complex. It is complex for our customers and it is complex for our staff. I ought to say in passing, not to bore the Committee for long, that we are really trying to tackle that. We have set up a benefit simplification unit inside the department, and I think we are making some serious strides forward in that area. We are also trying to make sure that our communications to our customers, particularly, but not only, our leaflets, are as simple and clear as we can possibly make them. They come in many languages, incidentally, so we can put forward information in a number of languages, and an increasingly large number of our leaflets (and we are pleased with this) carry the Crystal Mark of accreditation which says that we have, in effect, made them as simple to understand as we possibly can. We have that quality validation and we committed ourselves—I committed myself at the Public Accounts Committee—that we would seek to have 100 % of our leaflets carrying that accreditation. So, we have done a great deal, and there is more to do, but, again, just going back, if you had picked up one of our standard leaflets in any of our businesses 15 years ago, you would probably still be puzzling over it an hour later. They are hugely better today in terms of the clarity of the information.

  Q235  Kelvin Hopkins: Nevertheless, the benefit system is complex?

  Mr Lewis: Yes.

  Q236  Kelvin Hopkins: Ministers sometimes press for more means-testing, more complexity. I am very glad to hear that you have a benefit simplification process or effort involved. Do you say to ministers, "Really, Minister, it would be a lot better if you did less of this complex means-testing and simplified it in this way", and might the Minister then say to you, "I would like to do that, but the Treasury would say no"?

  Mr Lewis: It is a big and wide-ranging debate. First of all, within a very, very good framework of relationships within the department of course there are discussions, as you would hope there would be, between senior colleagues and ministers on that, as other issues, and of course there are times when we will say: is this the right way to approach this objective? Is there a way to approach this objective more simply? In fairness, of course, it is not simply that pressure for complexity comes from ministers. Pressure for complexity can come from many interest groups and a wider society, it can, dare I say, come from Parliament itself, in a sense, to cut the grain of the benefit system ever finer to deal with an issue here or a problem there, and there is almost an inevitable weight that adds to the complexity, which is why we have, with absolute ministerial agreement and support—I want to make that clear—put a deliberate counter-weight into the department. So, every submission which goes to a minister now in our department on a benefit policy issue has to have gone through the benefit simplification unit, and there will be in that submission a section which says, as regards benefit simplification, either, "We think this proposal is fine", or, "We are worried about this proposal because we think it could add to the complexity", or, "We are pleased with this proposal because not only will it do something that you would like us to do, but actually it will reduce complexity." So we have very deliberately, but with absolute ministerial support, put a counter-weight into the system.

  Q237  Kelvin Hopkins: Many of us complain a lot about the benefits trap: the fact that poor people, if they get a job and are on low pay, lose more benefits than they are likely to gain by working. Do you advise ministers very strongly on this, because I think the benefits trap is something that a lot of people face, even today? One would hope that, with your much greater expertise than any minister would ever have, you could actually advise on this.

  Mr Lewis: My own experience is that ministers are every bit as concerned about this as their civil servants. Actually, in a way, this is very often a problem about information. There are still a very small number of cases, but very small, where people are not better off in work, but overwhelmingly people are better off in work and substantially better off in work, but that does depend on them taking up the full entitlements, particularly in work credits, that they are entitled to. One of our challenges is to try and ensure that people do understand and take up all of the in-work benefits. One of the things which our New Deal Advisers, Lone Parent Advisers and other advisers within Jobcentre Plus have as an absolutely fundamental part of their role is when they are trying to help someone to look at opportunities, jobs, et cetera, to say, "And, do you know, are you aware, that if you were in this job you would be able to claim this and this and this?", et cetera, and not just, "Are you aware?", but, "Can we help you to do it?" as well.

  Q238  Kelvin Hopkins: I was speaking to a senior local DWP officer, obviously some years ago, who was frustrated that the local authority was dealing separately with housing benefits—and that was before the Revenue took over tax credits. Would it not be much more sensible and rational if all benefits were handled by yourselves, by your department, than to have these three and possibly more separate centres of essentially benefits provision? I may say, I am impressed with both of you this morning. You seem extremely able and committed. It strikes me that, if you did all three in one department, you would do a much better job than we get now.

  Mr Lewis: It is difficult to disagree with that, is it not? Nevertheless, let me disagree slightly with one bit of it and then tell you something I hope you might regard as really positive. I do not think it is so much as to whether it is one organisation or two or three as to how they work together. Actually I think right across the Government we could work together much better. The piece of encouraging news I would like to give you, but, please, do not put too much weight on it at the moment because it is only a pilot, we have got a really interesting pilot going on in the North East actually in Wallsend where we are working together with HMRC and the North Tyneside Council in precisely this area. When someone loses their job at the moment they tend to have to deal sequentially with Jobcentre Plus and then the local authority (Jobcentre Plus in relation to jobseeker's allowance and income support and the local authority in relation to housing benefit) and in the process, hopefully, they remember to notify the Inland Revenue, HMRC as it is now, in relation to their tax credit position. There are two things: (1) that can take a long time to happen sequentially, and (2) those various organisations can at times ask that same individual for the same information that we have already given. In the pilot that we are running in Wallsend we have got one front end process. We have still got three organisations, but one front end process, which is doing this once in a joined up way rather than three times in a rather disjointed way; and it is early days, it is not yet fully evaluated, but from the early results we are cutting at least in half the total time for that individual to get from the beginning to the end of the process. Secondly, customer satisfaction rates, perhaps not surprisingly, are much, much higher and, thirdly, it is actually costing the taxpayer less.

  Chairman: Good. That is what we like to hear.

  Q239  Mr Prentice: Just one or two questions. In the memorandum[7] which you gave us you talked about the Civil Servant of the Year Awards and how well everyone is doing, and that is encouraging. The DWP won the cabinet secretary's individual award for outstanding achievement. What was the outstanding achievement that was celebrated?

  Mr Lewis: It was a member of the Pension Service. I am speaking from memory; so if I get this wrong I will write to you and correct this, because I do not want in any way to mislead the Committee. Speaking, from memory, it was a member of the Pension Service, working in one of our call centres in the north of England, who was commended for absolutely outstanding service, an individual—it almost goes back to one of your colleagues' questions—who never let the customer leave the telephone call until he really believed that every part of that individual's needs had been addressed and was known by his colleagues to have that kind of remarkable tenacity. He won the individual award. So we were remarkably pleased. I do not suppose it will happen to us again as a department, but in the first year of the awards we won both the individual and team awards.

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6   Public and Commercial Services Union. Back

7   Ev 139 Back