Child Maintenance Service

Debate between Charles Walker and Stephen Timms

Tuesday 27th February 2024 Westminster Hall

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member makes a very important point, and I think he is right. I very much welcome his work and that of his colleagues on the Public Accounts Committee in drawing attention to a number of these problems.

I ask the Minister whether the idea of a single caseworker has now been abandoned. Is a domestic abuse team still in place or has that whole initiative, which the CMS talked to the Public Accounts Committee about last year, I think, now been given up? Why is it that someone such as Rachel Parkin has gone back to the arrangements that she was promised she would not?

In our report, we also raised concerns about paying parents who fraudulently attempt to reduce their maintenance assessment and about the fact that the Department does not estimate levels of fraud and error. The Public Accounts Committee, in its 2022 report— two years ago—said that the Department had

“not taken responsibility for detecting child maintenance fraud”

and had shifted the burden to receiving parents, who were expected to challenge false assessments. The Committee pointed out that a paying parent who was notified of being investigated for understating their income would no doubt guess that their ex-partner had reported them, and as a result, the Committee warned, many receiving parents would not report. I think that the Committee was right to make that point. In response, the Department said that it used risk profiling and threat scanning to target fraud in the child maintenance system and that it already had proportionate and cost-effective controls. Can the Minister tell us what exactly risk profiling and threat scanning are in practice?

We recommended that there should be specialist caseworkers for cases in which the paying parent’s income is from self-employment. In correspondence, the Minister in the other place who has responsibility for this part of the Department’s work, Lord Younger, pushed back on that, on the grounds of “funding implications”. However, the Department has said that it will legislate to ensure that unearned income, such as savings, investments, dividends and property income, is taken into account automatically when maintenance is calculated, to make it more difficult for

“the small number of parents who avoid paying the correct amount.”

Can this Minister tell us when that legislation will be introduced?

The Government have just introduced, as I mentioned earlier, secondary legislation to remove the £20 fee for all parents who apply for a statutory maintenance arrangement. I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that that took effect yesterday as planned. The same secondary legislation also introduced new powers for the Secretary of State to write off maintenance arrears under £7 in certain circumstances.

Finally, I want to make this point. There are, as all of us in the House well know, unending complaints about very poor customer service from the CMS. It is very difficult to get through; calls go unanswered. There are incorrect assessments, and people are having to tell their story again from scratch on every call. The service does have a very tough job, against a backdrop of pain and conflict; it is very difficult to provide a good service in that situation, but can the Minister offer us any prospect that the improvements needed will be made?

[Sir Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

Seven colleagues wish to speak. You have six minutes each. If you are on the list to speak and you intervene, that might reduce your time to four or five minutes if you are at the end of the list. I call Dr Thérèse Coffey—six minutes, please.

Work Programme

Debate between Charles Walker and Stephen Timms

Thursday 10th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Timms]

The numbers I have are slightly different, but we can look up the figures. Certainly, 50,000 people spending two years going back to the jobcentre is a disappointing start, but I hope that we will see better figures in future.

I was struck forcefully by something that the Chancellor of the Exchequer said in his spending review statement about the task facing the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. He said:

“That will require a difficult drive for efficiency, and a hard-headed assessment of underperforming programmes.”—[Official Report, 26 June 2013; Vol. 565, c. 314.]

The Select Committee is right to address key issues underpinning the underperformance of the Work programme identified by the Chancellor. The Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion has been commissioned to carry out the official evaluation of the Work programme, and I think that it will produce an interesting piece of work. In its analysis of the 26 September on the most recent performance data, it points out that two years in, the Work programme is not performing as well as the flexible new deal. The percentage of those over 25 entering the programme who secured a job in two years is 35%; it was 38.9% under the flexible new deal. The Minister’s predecessor but two used to castigate the flexible new deal. It turns out, according to CESI observations, that it was better than the current programme.

One thing that would help, and that the Minister could do quickly, would be to lift the ban on providers publishing data about what is going on in their areas. The ban was introduced—let us be frank—to safeguard the career prospects of the then Minister who introduced it, to whom I recall that the present Minister was Parliamentary Private Secretary, and in that it was successful. The right hon. Gentleman was promoted to his current post in September 2012 and a few weeks later we saw the first Work programme performance data, by which time he was safely off the scene. The ban means that information about what works well has been disseminated much too slowly and the underperformance that concerns the Chancellor, and I suspect all of us, would have been less if providers had been free to publish their performance data, as they were in the past.

The Government’s “Open Public Services” White Paper says:

“To make informed choices and hold services to account people need good information, so we will ensure that key data about public services, user satisfaction and the performance of all providers from all sectors is in the public domain”.

Actually, we had a complete ban on any data at all for the first 18 months of the Work programme. There are still no data, as the Select Committee has pointed out, about subcontractor performance. The “Open Public Services” White Paper, published by the Cabinet Office, uses the phrase

“all providers from all sectors”,

but we have still had nothing at all from the subcontractors. From that quote, I want to pick up the point about user satisfaction, which the Select Committee report also mentions. The Select Committee called, quite rightly, for regular surveys of user satisfaction on the Work programme, which would be valuable information. The “Open Public Services” White Paper had an effusive foreword written by the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister, in which they signed up to its goals. We should understand the user experience on the Work programme. The Government’s response to that recommendation is simply to tell us that there will be a couple of surveys of people who have been on the Work programme. That is not what the White Paper stated was going to happen. There should be much more information about what people are experiencing. The fact that there is not is one of the reasons for the underperformance that the Chancellor has pointed out.

The hon. Member for Eastbourne was absolutely right to highlight concerns about the performance of the Work programme for people on employment and support allowance. The Work programme invitation to tender stated that if nothing was done, 15% of those people would find a sustained job outcome within two years. The minimum performance standard was set at 10% above that, which is 16.5%. Paragraph 3.18 of the invitation to tender states:

“DWP expects that Providers will significantly exceed these minimum levels.”

They have actually achieved, as the hon. Gentleman stated, 5.8%. The Royal National Institute of Blind People tells me that 690 people with sight impairments were referred to the Work programme in its first 22 months, and 20 of them got sustained job outcomes. St Mungo’s has sent us a briefing for the debate, which tells us that 54% of homeless people surveyed for St Mungo’s, Crisis and Homeless Link reported seeing their Work programme adviser once a month or less frequently. It is not surprising, therefore, that very few of those who face serious hurdles—people with health problems and people who are homeless—have got into work.

I was in Australia last week, where I talked to people about those issues. There are quite a few providers that operate both in Australia and in the UK, and they said that the Work programme model was wrong and that “creaming and parking” was endemic; the hon. Member for Eastbourne has touched on that. I agree with the Select Committee that specialist voluntary sector providers have not been used enough. They have been squeezed out. In Australia, I was told that 50% of provision is from the voluntary sector, and I think in the Work programme it is about 20% and going down. As others have said in this debate, some good resources are not being utilised. St Mungo’s is a very good example. It had a contract with several prime providers in London, which was signed when the Work programme started in June 2011. By April 2012 it had not had a single referral, and it had to pull out and give up.

I agree with the suggestion that we should have a proper jobseeker classification model, which we do not have at the moment. There are many things that should be said, but I will conclude with this. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is right: the programme is underperforming. The Minister, who I welcome once again to her new role, has the opportunity to address that underperformance. Some of it can be addressed quite quickly, and the Select Committee report can be a real help. I wish the Minister well in her new role and I look forward to her reply.

[Mr Charles Walker (in the Chair)]

The Minister may now speak, but I will call Dame Anne Begg at 4.28 pm on the nose.