Employment and Support Allowance Payments

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

Monday 25th February 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Buscombe]

My Lords, let me make it very clear that those with complex needs will not suffer from a hard stop during the managed migration process. As I have said to your Lordships in previous debates, we are working hard to ensure that we work with stakeholders to pilot the whole scheme of managed migration. On the noble Baroness’s very good question about lessons learned, the key point is that through these errors in migrating people from incapacity benefit to ESA, we have learned that the big mistake made was that we did not make contact with individual claimants. We thought it was great to have an automatic transfer, but the issue was that we did not have all the right, real-time, up-to-date information on claimants. Therefore, some of those who were eligible did not receive these payments.

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab)]

My Lords, the Minister explained that the number of staff included in this exercise has increased from 400 to 1,200. Can she tell us from where those staff have been deployed and what training they have had?