Concentrix

Christian Matheson Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)]

We are extremely hopeful that this sorry state of affairs marks the beginning of the end of payment by results in our welfare system. It has no place there, it creates perverse outcomes, and it has ruined the lives of thousands of people. Our social security system should be there to support people in their time of need, not to allow unaccountable conglomerates to make easy money chasing the voiceless and the vulnerable. Now is the time to draw a line under the grotesque profit model in our welfare system, because that model has failed: it has failed the individuals it was set up to help; it has failed employees; and it has failed the taxpayer.

All of us have horrific stories of individuals who have fallen foul of Concentrix. In my constituent’s case, her tax credits were cancelled while she was in a coma. Rather than answering for these failures, which lie squarely at the Government’s door, Ministers have preferred to throw this hapless contractor under the bus. However, as one senior Concentrix employee wrote to me:

“Every single action we took was directly informed by HMRC and was compliant in full with their guidance… there will be no investigation because there are paper trails after paper trails showing that we have only ever followed client instructions on amending claims.”

I was pleased to hear today that that is no longer the case and that there will be an investigation, because from start to finish this has been a mess entirely of the Government’s own making, and one for which they have not yet answered.

The company that conducted the trial that preceded Concentrix, Transactis, incorrectly removed entire awards regardless of evidence provided to the contrary. Despite the alarm bells that should have been ringing loud and clear in their ears, Ministers decided to push on. It was the beginning of a pattern that is now all too familiar.

Ministers have still not answered for structuring a contract that put maximising revenue at its heart in attempting to assess error and fraud—not accuracy, not meeting quality service standards, and certainly not customer service, but making as much money as possible off the backs of the vulnerable. Ministers have not answered for the measures they included in the contract to maximise revenue. HMRC “profiled”—that is the Government’s own word—1.4 million vulnerable individuals and then unleashed Concentrix to carry out its dirty work.

We do not know—they will not tell me, despite repeated requests—what indicators the Government used to establish which groups to target. Given what we have heard today, it is clear who was in that demographic: single mothers with children. It is some measure of justice that it was women like that—thousands of them across the country—who brought this contract crashing down with their articulate, brilliant campaign.

That is not the only issue with the contract, because the process also turned the burden of proof on its head. HMRC was asking tax credit claimants to prove that their claim had not been made in error. They were asking people to prove a negative, as my hon. Friend the Member for Garston and Halewood (Maria Eagle) explained so eloquently. The Tax Credits Act 2002 clearly states that HMRC can amend or terminate tax credit awards only if it has significant grounds for believing that they are erroneous. It does not allow them to shift the burden of proof on to the claimant to disprove that a tax credit award has been made erroneously. That led one young mother to say to me, in tears, that she felt that she was being “treated like a criminal” and that Concentrix was treating her as “guilty until proven innocent.” One mistake like that would have been unacceptable, but 11,000 people had to apply for mandatory reconsideration in the past year alone. That cannot simply be passed off as a mistake; it was the deliberate design of the contract itself.

HMRC employed a contractor with just 500 staff to target over 2 million people. That meant the company’s pressured, poorly trained and low-paid staff were being instructed to open dozens of highly sensitive cases every day, leaving the phone lines permanently engaged, as we have heard. Concentrix staff have told me that the call volumes were such that the company would have needed to triple its staff in order to answer the phones.

Astonishingly, despite the failure of the trial, despite the highly sensitive nature of the contract, and despite the sheer volume of individuals a completely untested private sector provider had been designated to pursue, we now know that the Government did not actually monitor the performance for the first year of the contract. HMRC had no idea how many performance failures the contractor was incurring. Once it started monitoring that, it soon found out: over 120 breaches in the space of just nine months; and 13 black performance failures. Ironically, HMRC is up for an award this year for analysis and use of evidence. I very much hope that this is not viewed as best practice across Whitehall.

[Christian Matheson (City of Chester) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend share my concern that the chaos she is outlining will end up costing the taxpayer a whole lot more than any money that was saved in the first place?