Social Security (Civil Penalties) Regulations 2012

Lord German Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2012 Grand Committee

[Lord German]

My Lords, may I explore one item and ask a cheeky question at the end, related to the universal credit demonstration that some noble Lords were able to hear earlier on? Very welcome it was, too.

Paragraphs 9.1 and 9.2, which the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, has already referred to, are about the guidance that is to be issued. In response to my questions to my noble friend about the way in which decision-makers behave, the answer has invariably been that we must encourage the empowerment of decision-makers. Of course, written guidance does not necessarily help people to use their discretion.

The other problem that is painfully obvious to many observers of the situation is that, when discretion is used, it may not necessarily be uniform throughout Jobcentre Plus offices. There have been a number of occasions, and some of these have reached the media, when decisions have been made on the basis of what may appear to be fairly flexible guidance but has been interpreted in a very literal way. If these penalties are to be most effective, then they are a weapon that has to be used with great discretion. Is my noble friend prepared to outline a little more about the nature of the work that will go on with Jobcentre Plus decision-makers to advise and empower them but also to train them in a method that does not simply consist of reading written materials from the department, and whether he has put in place a reviewing or monitoring mechanism—some way of judging whether that discretion is being used in a fairly uniform way? Nothing could be worse than if people were to rigidly apply rules in one office while next door someone was being treated with discretion and therefore differently. Noble Lords will know that it is difficult to strike a balance between discretion and uniform application. I wonder how that circle is being squared by the department, particularly in relation to paragraphs 9.1 and 9.2.

One of the problems found in the employment support allowance process is that claimants often fail to provide full evidence of their condition until perhaps after the decision has been taken and their appeal is on its way or reaches the tribunal stage. Does my noble friend see any use in the threat of these penalties that might assist people to come back earlier and give their full position and provide all the details in evidence that may be relevant to their claim up front in order that decision-makers might help to get the claim right at the first attempt?

This is a minor and very cheeky question. Under the universal credit, where real-time information is to be provided, is there a double banking system—does the claimant of universal credit also have to report these matters to the department? Is there a double check or, if there is a failure at one end of the system, will the claimant be blamed for what may have gone wrong in, say, information being inputted wrongly by his or her employer? Will any form of double-checking take place? Does the claimant stand any liability for what might happen in that respect?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I shall try to deal with as many questions and to avoid writing as many letters as possible. The noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, asked about the latest figure on official error. The latest figure is £0.8 billion. As regards making sure that one civil penalty will apply, we have put in place processes for decision-makers to check whether a penalty has already been applied for the same failure or error resulting in the overpayment. Only the JCP and the decision-makers, PDCS, are dealing with the non-housing matters. The way in which we ensure that we do not get a double whammy with local authorities and DWP is for local authorities to apply their penalties only when the standard housing benefit or council tax benefit is the only benefit in payment. In that way, there is no possibility of an overlap.

We are drafting the guidance and we hope to share the final draft guidance with SSAC by the end of this month. We will look to share it with other relevant stakeholders at that time to take on board their comments. The guidance will cover the obvious examples of negligence, reasonable steps and reasonable excuses. As one would expect, there will be intensive training, which will explore definitions of the penalty criteria. I do not think that the figures have changed from the impact assessment that we discussed when we were looking at the Bill. The cost is £19 million over 2014-15. The appeals estimate, which we discussed, remains purely an estimate.

In response to my noble friend Lord German’s question on the difficult mix of discretion and consistency, it is important that we have clear guidance about what constitutes the penalty criteria. Each case will be individually considered by a decision-maker. They will have general duties, such as to look at only what is relevant and to explain their decisions to claimants. My noble friend’s idea had not occurred to me. He is more devious than me about using this process to make sure that we do not have different information going to decision-makers and later to tribunals. I think that I shall take that away and think about it, as it is rather clever. That is a design issue that we shall explore.

I say in answer to the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, that we will monitor the new penalty to ensure that it is effective—and to what extent—and that there is equality of treatment. We will use evidence from a range of sources such as administrative data and wider data sets. In practice, one of the main success criteria will be that we impose fewer penalties as time goes by.

We talked in the past about the fact that we now have a framework for conducting trials much more coherently right through the system. Clearly, we will pick out the key behavioural impacts of different aspects of the policy. How sanctions will work in that area is something that we will look at with randomised control trials. It is a very obvious test and there will be mechanisms for conducting it. We will look at the results very closely, and rather earlier than at the results of other tests, once UC has come in. I hope that I have dealt with all the issues.