Welfare Reform Bill

Debate between Lord German and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Monday 24th October 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Certainly, it is important that individuals such as the noble Lord can apply successfully for their state pension online. We have seen some great successes across government in being able to use digital as the default route—in particular, the student loan application process, and vehicle licensing and road tax services are excellent. The Department for Transport should be a model on how this is being done. But still a significant proportion of the population is not online, despite the best efforts of Martha Lane Fox and the rest, who I wholeheartedly support. The Government need to set out what they are going to do. In education, I introduced a home access programme that got 167,000 families online but it cost quite a lot of money. It was a fantastic, fraud-free scheme using prepaid credit cards. It was great but, I repeat, it cost a lot of money. I would ask the Minister whether he has got the money in his back pocket.

There are big questions around the delivery of IT. I am looking forward to the briefing. The Minister is evangelistic in his enthusiasm for how it will work, which is impressive, and I want to know more. But, at its basic level, what concerns me is that in essence it seems that we will have three IT systems being developed. There is the IT system within DWP to integrate the benefits side of things. As I understand it, it is not much more complicated—it might even be less complicated—than the IT project that the department successfully delivered in respect of ESA, which gives the department considerable confidence. As I think I said at Second Reading, the chief information officer at the DWP, who is one of the better-rewarded civil servants across Whitehall, is an excellent official and deserves every penny of what he gets because he delivers for the taxpayer in this regard.

That complicated database is quite possibly within the capacity of DWP to deliver successfully. However, it has to integrate with another database which is being developed by Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for real time information around employers who will have to report in real time how much they are paying their staff. The two databases will have to integrate in order for universal credit to work. That is not just the complication of an integration of two databases.

I know, for example, from the SATs crisis—I was the Minister who oversaw it—that that crisis was as a result of three databases interlocking, corruptions occurring and the data letting us down. In developing this real time information system, HMRC is also developing something based on a tax system, which looks at our personal tax, that has to integrate with a benefits system database, which looks at household tax. You have to make sure that all the data have enough alignment around the identifiers to make sure that the right individuals and households all fit together properly. That seems quite a tall order.

Now I also understand that there is a contingency plan; at last the Government have a plan B. This is good. That is the contingency plan around whether or not the real-time information database at HMRC will work. It can then fall back on the third database, which has to be developed, for self-employed people, who will be self-reporting into a database at HMRC their changes in income and circumstances so that they can be eligible for universal credit. That might be fine in terms of database integration, but it raises a consequent question. If plan B is to work, it needs us to believe that all the employers up and down the land will happily self-report in real time without error or fraud to the HMRC in order for universal credit to be paid accurately. Of course, we all know what happens when either the database falls down or the information going into the database is inaccurate from our experience of tax credits, which in part we are looking to replace through universal credit. As a Member of Parliament, I found that quite a significant proportion of my case work and the work that my staff did for me and my constituents was chasing up problems with tax credits—over payments, when individual families were weighed down with debt to HMRC, which was then at times quite aggressive in chasing it and needed a phone call or a letter from an MP’s office to get it to calm down and be reasonable. We do not want universal credit to suffer reputational damage and cause real problems for families in that way.

If noble Lords are interested in any of this, they may be interested in the Public Accounts Committee report from the other place. Its third recommendation says:

“The Department admits that there are substantial risks attached to implementing major welfare reforms while at the same time reducing its costs. The successful transition to Universal Credit, for example, will depend heavily on the development of a new IT system with HM Revenue and Customs to a very tight timetable. We have often seen problems with delivering new IT to time, budget and specification. The Department should allocate clear responsibility for scrutinising progress of the welfare reforms alongside cost reductions, develop a clear understanding of the risks to each and how they will be managed and encourage staff to report any emerging problems early”.

That is at the root of this amendment. The Public Accounts Committee is saying that there should be clear responsibility for scrutinising progress of the reforms, and that is what I want for Parliament. I want parliamentary scrutiny of the progress of these reforms.

I have mentioned the efficacy of the self-employed database and the plan B for real time information in the HMRC system. I have, in a previous debate in this Committee, mentioned my worries about documentation and housing benefit local delivery, which will be answered in the famous meeting that we are going to have on 3 November. I am sure that there are many more delivery risks that others can think of, but I shall not take up the Committee’s time in going into them. I repeat that I want this to work, but I want it to work in a way that is fair. The Minister, understandably, has to spend time with his head under a towel working out the details, but he also needs to get out and have a look around at the environment into which he is going to introduce this. It is the worst possible economic environment in which to carry out this massive welfare reform; it adds huge risk, as the DWP has to lead the response to a worsening situation in the employment market with limited, effectively capped, resources. I believe that it is a perfect storm, and it is therefore right for this House to demand absolute transparency on the risk assessment and risk management and the delivery of the various milestones in the programme. Indeed, it may be prudent for the Minister to reflect and say, “Let’s get the legislation through, but let’s adjust the delivery timetable until the employment situation has stabilised and we can be confident that the work programme will be able to be delivered successfully, because jobs will then be created by the private sector in order to make that programme a success”. All my worries will then dissipate.

Finally, I want noble Lords to imagine the consequences of this programme going wrong, with people already moving from fortnightly to monthly budgeting having to manage without getting into rent arrears, and so on, then getting no money and facing recovery action. They are already the poorest and most disadvantaged, in part because of policies from other departments having no money; they will have to beg at the door of impoverished local councils for social fund money. That does not bear thinking about in human terms. We know that local authorities will run out of that social fund money and then where will they go? All of that is a scandal, a year or so out from a general election. I am giving political advice to the Minister: that it is in his best interests and in the coalition Government’s interest to take this seriously and to think about the delivery timeline, which may have made sense when it was first written, but I do not believe it makes sense now, given what is going on in the economy.

[Lord German]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for his self-declaration. He is an enthusiast for IT and the changes that it can produce, but he also recognises the difficulties which could overtake anyone who is trying to undertake such a major change as this. It is very difficult. I shall not repeat much of what he said, but his last point is: what happens if we fail with an IT structure that does not deliver the welfare reform that we are looking for? I think that, more than anyone else getting the blame, the political class as a whole will get the blame for a structure under which individuals would suffer. So it is very important to get it right.

Unfortunately, we tend to roll a number of words together. I suppose you might say that the universal credit depends on a substantial, reliable, appropriate and functioning IT system. I have used the phrase “IT system”, which is probably not the correct phrase because we tend to throw these words around. I use a series of analogies, and I hope that noble Lords will bear with me. I used the phrase “daisy chain” because it is the easiest way to describe linking between one system and the next. In essence, there is a number of inputs into the IT structure, some of them from employers and some from potential claimants, and all those pieces of data have to be linked together—hence the phrase “daisy chain”. If you break the daisy change, clearly you do not complete the circle and the person does not get paid at the end.

None of those changes will be possible without substantial shifts, in recent years, in the IT platforms that we have available to us in order to deliver such as programme. If we are going to make this work, we have to ensure that all those parts are working. Of course, there are—most noble Lords would recognise this—two substantial departments of government, both of which have a hand in ensuring that this works. I do not know, but there are plenty of people who will tell me, whether the relationship between the two big departments, Her Majesty’s Treasury and DWP, works as one might hope. If that were the case, you would be looking for the sort of regime where one department was trying to exercise responsibility over another. I hope that that has not happened. I hope that there is genuine cross-departmental working. My first question for my noble friend is: who is taking responsibility? Is DWP sitting in the driving seat, as that is the hub from which all this will happen, and is HMRC material coming across to it in the way that DWP prescribes in order to achieve the result?

My second question relates to the passing on of data. One of the lessons that we and the world have learnt about the passing on of individual items of data connected together is that there is now an international standard for data passing. I would like reassurance from the Minister that we are using the correct ISO standard for the passing on of data. If we are, we can be reassured that not only are we able to pass it on from one department to another, but that it can be passed on to any other part of the system in the public or private sectors, or whoever else wants that piece of data, and that it has the same level of acceptability from one to the other. I would like a reassurance—particularly on what happens at the end, the starting point of which is this data from employers—that we are going to be using and transferring the employer’s data at that ISO level, and that there will be no “Well, we’ll do it this way to start with and move on to a better way later”. I want to be reassured that that happens, because without it we would have some difficulty in achieving the result we want to see.