Tax Credits: Concentrix

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Wednesday 14th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for what he has just said. As for mandatory reconsiderations which are the appeals against the decision, the noble Lord is right that 67.97% end up in the customer’s favour and 32.03% in favour of HMRC. At the moment, the number of mandatory reconsiderations awaiting decision is 2,197. That is when benefit has been stopped and the claimant has asked for that decision to be reviewed. I understand the point the noble Lord makes about outsourcing. I am not sure that I would go quite as far as saying that it was totally inappropriate ab initio to outsource this to the private sector. I hope that what I said in response to the noble Lord, Lord Davies, that this contract is not being renewed gives him some assurance.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I take this opportunity to congratulate my noble friend the Minister on his appointment. Does this whole sorry saga not point to the fact that working family tax credits were simply too complicated in the first place and why they are in need of such fundamental reform?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I am grateful to my noble friend for her welcome and I miss sitting next to her in this House. The WFTC is a complex system and in the Statement and response that my honourable friend gave in the other place, she referred to the complexity. As I said in response to an earlier question, all these cases will over a period of time—some six or seven years—be migrating to universal credits. We hope to learn from the complexity to which my noble friend referred in devising a better system than the one we have.