Mortgage Interest
Debate between Kit Malthouse and Ged Killen(6 years, 4 months ago)
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Kit Malthouse
Thank you, Mr Hollobone. I was going through a number of the issues that the hon. Member for Lanark and Hamilton East raised about support for mortgage interest, and I had reached the involvement of Serco, about which she raised concerns. Let me be clear: Serco does not administer the loan scheme. Serco was contracted merely to provide some of the initial information about the scheme—the initial correspondence, the follow-up phone calls to give people information about it, and the booklet to inform people how it works.
Ged Killen (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (Lab/Co-op)
Does the Minister not accept that the issue is with the timescales and the lack of notice? Have the Government learned no lessons from the changes to the state pension age? What assessment has been made of the number of women affected by those changes who are also affected by this change?
Kit Malthouse
I do not accept that there has been a lack of communication. If anything, we have over-communicated about the scheme. We went out of our way as a Department to ensure that literally hundreds of thousands of letters were sent and hundreds of thousands of telephone calls were made. We are still trying to contact some people, given the lack of clarity about the data we need to make those contacts. We are taking this in a very steady and sensible way.
Everyone is given plenty of time to make a decision—everyone is given up to six weeks from the loan offer to decide whether they want the loan. Once the loan documents are issued and sent off and a loan offer is made, people get six weeks to make a decision. We signpost people to the Money Advice Service or Citizens Advice if they need any kind of financial advice, because neither Serco nor the Department for Work and Pensions can offer such advice. As I said, there is a communication phase, which Serco handles, and the execution and administration of the loan is done entirely by DWP operations.