Responding to MPs’ Queries: DWP Performance

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Tuesday 6th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Employment (Guy Opperman)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) on securing this debate on a very important issue. I assure him that the Government take this issue extremely seriously, and that does not just apply to the Department for Work and Pensions; all parts of Government take the issue of Members’ correspondence on behalf of their constituents very seriously, and in the DWP we certainly do.

I want to start with two preliminary comments before I get to the nuts and bolts of the hon. Member’s important speech. First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Stephen Flynn) on his recent election and pass on the Government’s congratulations to him; I look forward to seeing him at Prime Minister’s Question Time tomorrow. Although this is a Scottish debate, it is only right, when we have an opportunity at the Dispatch Box, to congratulate the England football team and the England cricket team on their triumphs in Qatar and Pakistan respectively. We should not forget the beating that we hope to hand out to Monsieur Macron and his fellow Frenchmen on Saturday.

The hon. Member for Glenrothes is right to have high expectations of responses to communications that are submitted to the Department for Work and Pensions. As I will set out, in the vast majority of cases the DWP sends out timely replies. However, I accept and understand the frustration that all Members of Parliament, whether Government or Opposition, feel when the Department has not responded in the right way. We have worked constructively with Members on many occasions, and I am proud to serve in a Department with tens of thousands of people who are doing a fantastic job to deliver an awful lot of public services across this great country. In total for 2022-23, Department for Work and Pensions support and services represent £224 billion of public money, which is 9% of all GDP. That reflects the enormous force for good that the Department for Work and Pensions is and, as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) set out, the energy and efforts of thousands of DWP colleagues every single day to support people up and down the country, to change and improve lives. We should put on record our thanks for their sterling efforts.

I want to turn to covid, because many of the problems that the hon. Member for Glenrothes rightly identifies date back to the pandemic. We saw the degree of support that the Department gave during the pandemic, with enhanced universal credit to literally millions of extra people and masses of extra work coaches coming in, and there is unquestionably a context for why some of the hotlines were subject to cessation or have taken a while to come back. If he gives me a minute or two, I will explain why.

We rightly focused during the pandemic on ensuring that we got the right support to those who needed it quickly. That included, for example, responding effectively to the doubling of universal credit claims across the country and helping people to move back into work following the pandemic. We also had to make operational decisions, which ultimately are made by Ministers but fundamentally are made by the operational teams that run big Departments such as the DWP. A significant number of colleagues who would ordinarily be handling complaints and MP correspondence were redeployed to essential frontline services.

As part of that, the Department took the decision to temporarily suspend the retirement services hotline, while the disability services hotline was redirected to an answer machine, which was checked, and there was no change to the child maintenance hotline. To ensure that the Department continued to deliver a complaints service during this time, we brought all remaining complaints handlers together into one new centralised DWP complaints team. We also introduced a triage process that allowed us to prioritise complaints from our most vulnerable customers and those relating to payments. The centralisation of the complaints service meant that working-age and universal credit complaints teams were no longer aligned to individual districts. That may potentially have had an impact on any local arrangements between complaints team and MPs. However, the focus at that time was simply on supporting frontline delivery in the middle of a pandemic, with all the complications of running public services with the attendance of staff at that stage.

Following the pandemic, we have slowly but surely returned the handling of complaints and correspondence to service delivery areas, which has seen greater accountability and ownership and allows complaints and correspondence to be investigated by specialist complaints teams. The Department has also improved signposting on the w4mp website, which enables parliamentary staff to find the right contacts for general and case specific inquiries, and to direct complaints to a dedicated mailbox.

I will try to deal with the assertions made about MP hotlines. We now operate a number of dedicated MP hotlines in relation to child maintenance services, which continues; disability services, such as personal independence payment and disability living allowance queries; and retirement services, enabling people to raise issues on the state pension, pension credit or winter fuel payments.

Last month, we started a three-month trial of an MP hotline for queries relating to working-age benefits. This is available from 9 am to 4 pm, Monday to Friday, with a voicemail facility available outside those hours. As part of the trial, we will assess the demand for the service and ensure that it meets the needs of hon. Members and is sustainable for the Department. I assure the hon. Gentleman that his representations—most robustly made—have been taken on board about the degree to which he believes there is a demand.

We are also developing a dedicated universal credit hotline for MPs. System testing is under way and we hope to have the line up and running shortly. All MP hotlines are regularly checked during operating hours and calls from Members are answered directly or a voicemail message can be left that will be picked up and responded to as soon as possible.

The hon. Gentleman raised MP hotlines in particular, but I will briefly address other forms of communication, because this debate is about all correspondence and responses. In terms of written correspondence, as he probably knows, the Cabinet Office publishes guidance that sets out the principles that Departments must follow when handling correspondence from Members of this House, as well as peers, Members of the devolved Parliaments or Assemblies and members of the public. That includes performance response times for responding to correspondence—specifically, a timeframe of up to 20 working days.

In 2021, the Department received a total of 7,116 pieces of correspondence from Members, about 70% of which were responded to within 20 working days. The latest data from quarter 2 of this year shows that about two thirds of the correspondence received was responded to within that timeframe.

[Peter Grant]

Can the Minister clarify exactly what “responded to” means? All MPs—certainly everyone who has been an Opposition MP—will have had responses from Ministers that do not tell them anything. Does he mean a response that actually provides information or does an email that simply says, “Thank you for your email” count as a response within 20 working days?

--- Later in debate ---

[Guy Opperman]

I wanted to come to that point, which I will deal with in several ways. The hon. Gentleman will be aware and will understand that much of the correspondence to the Department is complex; it is not simple stuff that can be assessed. I was the Minister with responsibility for pensions for five years where the entitlement to, say, pension credit had to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Those things take time.

The hon. Gentleman raised the letter that he wrote on 29 June. It is my strong assurance from the Department that at 10:42 on 31 August—I have the email printout here—his standard parliamentary email inbox received a specific correspondence in relation to that letter. That may have got lost in the ether, but the assertion is strongly made by the Department that it replied on 31 August at 10:42.

On the hon. Gentleman’s campaign, I applaud and endorse his work, but he will understand that, post covid, all Departments are resurrecting and reincarnating various hotlines and capabilities. I take on board one key point—obviously, I will try to answer his other point too—that it is not always possible to reply within 20 working days, and in such instances, the Department must ensure that correspondence is responded to as quickly as possible and that the correspondent is kept informed, particularly where there is likely to be a significant delay in sending a full reply. I accept that it is important to highlight that many cases that the DWP receives are complex, so it is particularly important that individual situations and circumstances are looked into carefully and properly, and that a full and considered response is given. I genuinely take his criticisms on board, however, because they are honestly made and well thought through.

I will touch briefly on other ways to communicate with the Department. On parliamentary questions, we have a 90.8% response time for named day parliamentary questions, which is 277 out of 305 over the last period, and for ordinary written questions, there is a 93.5% response time, which is 389 out of 416.

The hon. Gentleman raised a number of other specific matters. I totally accept that, on the one key point about his ongoing treatment and how it is handled, the individual Minister who deals with correspondence at the Department for Work and Pensions, as he knows because we discussed this earlier, is Baroness Stedman-Scott in the other place. If there are any matters arising out of this, she will go through them and write to the hon. Gentleman—in good time, I hasten to add—to ensure that a proper response is given.

I want to contextualise two other quick points, and I have a little time. The first is that all efforts by the Department need to be judged against the background of covid and the background of the cost of living support. This is the Department that has had to deal with the £37 billion package set out by the Chancellor in May. That includes, as we all know, the £650 cost of living support, the £300 extra winter fuel payment and the £150 disability cost of living payment. We have had to find people and use them to deliver all those things, which is a massive enterprise. While the hon. Gentleman is right to have legitimate criticism of individual cases, they have to be seen in that context.

On top of that, the hon. Gentleman will be aware that, in the September sitting of Parliament and then subsequently in the 17 November autumn statement, again a vast amount of things were brought forward, ranging from the further energy support package to the extra cost of living support and the energy price guarantee. Those are all things that have had to be brought forward and actioned by the Department for Work and Pensions.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith (Chingford and Woodford Green) (Con)]

rose—

[Guy Opperman]

Of course I give way to my right hon. Friend, who was the Secretary of State for six years.

[Sir Iain Duncan Smith]

I apologise to the hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) for not being here earlier, but I did let him know that I was delayed.

May I say with the deepest respect, because nobody respects the Department more than me, that I just do not think this correspondence is working? We got a call in my office the other day to say that it would not now be writing to us, because people were too hard-pressed in the Department to write to anybody and they would make a quick call. We did not want a call; we want correspondence. When I was in the Department, the Secretary of State and Ministers all signed off their own correspondence, and nothing went out of the door that they had not read and checked. That had added value in that we knew what was going on in the Department. Each Minister should sign off every single bit of correspondence to MPs, and anything else is simply substandard, if the Minister does not mind my saying so.

[Guy Opperman]

I take my right hon. Friend’s point very seriously, and we will look into that specific point. I am not aware of the individual example of course, but we will definitely reach out to his office tomorrow to ensure that we get chapter and verse on that specific case. He will know and understand—and I am not disputing that we need a verification of his particular case—that responses in certain cases are handled by officials and responses in other cases are handled by Ministers and the Secretary of State. I cannot possibly comment on the nature of this case, but it is very traditional and usual for anything from a Member of Parliament to be responded to by the Member of Parliament who happens to be a Minister or the Secretary of State. That is clearly the normal way, but I will look into this and make sure that Baroness Stedman-Scott writes to him promptly and investigates the matter forthwith.

I want briefly to touch on two final points. On FOI handling, there was a 97% response time for quarter 1 and a 96% response time for quarter 2. On the correspondence guidance, clearly the hon. Member for Glenrothes can hold the DWP to account, but a whole bunch of guidance is set out for all Departments—it is published quarterly, and it is available both in the House of Commons Library and on gov.uk—from which he can see a comparison of this Department with other Departments.

While the statistics show that most Members do receive timely replies from the DWP, there is clearly room for improvement, and I take that on board. We closely monitor that performance, we take on board the points raised by those on both sides of the House, and we will ensure that things are done better in the future.

Question put and agreed to.