Personal Independence Payments (Wales)

Albert Owen Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mike Penning]

The hon. Gentleman is being misleading.

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Order. No one is misleading anyone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Order. Five Members are indicating that they wish to speak, three of whom have done so in writing. I need to call the Front-Bench Members at 10.40 am, so I ask Members to be disciplined with their time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

Good, but I am just giving the Minister that warning not to go through the history of the benefit but, yes, to deal with his responsibility, who is responsible—

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Order. Mark Tami.

[Mark Tami]

My hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan) makes a powerful point. The situation is a mess. Whatever promises are given, it just seems to get worse, even to the point, as hon. Friends have said, that the Department is now having to send in civil servants to try to stem the tide of chaos that is overwhelming the whole system.

On the day on which the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport has decided to go, I am not calling for this Minister to go, but his Department needs to look at this situation. It is affecting, and destroying, real people’s lives. It is causing great suffering out there. I ask the Minister just to look at the Government Benches. There is not a single Tory or Liberal Democrat MP from Wales here today. Why is that? It is because they also know what a mess it is and they have run for the hills.

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[Mike Penning]

If the hon. Lady will be patient, I have another four minutes to speak and I will certainly address that issue.

With the contracts that were issued, there is not a change to a paper-based system. From day one, the perception was that the split should be 75:25 between face-to-face interviews and paper-based assessments. I have said that to the Work and Pensions Committee before. With the DLA, only 6% of claimants were interviewed face to face and nationally we are around about 97% for face-to-face interviews. So there is not a movement away from face-to-face interviews; actually, where we are trying to get to is where we were supposed to be in the first place, which is around 75% of interviews being conducted face to face and 25% of claimants being dealt with by paper-based assessments.

The contract with Capita allows for penalties and we are imposing financial penalties on it where it is not meeting its targets. That process is taking place now and we will continue with it. However, the best thing to do is for us to work with Capita to get accurate assessments.

The point about accuracy is the one that I will touch on for the remaining few minutes. One type of issue that we have is quality issues. We have been really tough, and previous Ministers were very tough, on both Capita and Atos about PIP regarding quality. Because of that, those companies have been very concerned—I have used the word “frightened” before, but they are certainly concerned—about ensuring they get things right, which is one of the reasons why we have nowhere near the number of appeals that we may have expected or that were made under previous benefit systems.

One reason for that is that we have put our staff into the offices of companies, particularly those of Capita, and we will probably do that elsewhere. It gives staff the confidence to make the decisions on the paper-based assessments. Very often, although staff feel they have the information in front of them, they are not sure about making a decision because they fear they will be hit on quality—“The audit will come down and say we should have done this”—so they have pushed the case through to a face-to-face interview. That is actually increasing the delays. We want to give people confidence; that is why our officials are there.

The question was asked, “Where do these officials come from?” Many of them are actually officials waiting for these decisions to come back, so I have a capacity of people sitting there and waiting for decisions to come back. That is why we are putting people at the right grade into the offices of Capita to ensure that we can get better movement and that we get the split down to a manageable one; I hope it will be a 75:25 split.

We will probably announce the review later on today, if not tomorrow, outlining who will do the review and how we move on from it.

The truth of the matter is that there will be people who benefit from PIP and there will be people who do not benefit from it. However, what they need is decisions and we need to communicate with them much better. We are introducing a text system so that people will be better informed as to where they are within the queue system. That is slightly more complicated in certain parts of the country than others. We can text—

[Albert Owen (in the Chair)]

Order. I am very grateful to the Minister, and to Members, for what was a full debate. The Minister has indicated that he will write to Members.