ESA Underpayments
Debate between Meg Hillier and Sarah Newton(6 years, 5 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
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Sarah Newton
Yes, I can make that commitment. We have already started to contact people and we are already making payments. Once we have contacted someone, we will make the freephone telephone number available to them, and we will pay them as soon as possible, but certainly within 12 weeks.
Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)
I welcome the fact that the Minister took action to make sure that the wrong was righted for those people who would otherwise not have had this payment from 2011 to 2014. I congratulate her on that. However, the real concern is that there were warnings from 2013 onwards, both from her staff in the Department and from agencies dealing with these people. She says that the Department found this out, but it took a long time to act. Many people have still lost out on passported benefits, some easy to calculate, like free school meals. Will she, in the light of the recommendations in our report, look closely at the impact of the passported benefits that were lost and consider a compensation scheme?
Sarah Newton
I thank the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Of course, the whole Department will take her report very seriously. The Secretary of State herself wanted to be here today, but she is making a very important speech elsewhere. That is the only reason she is not here herself to really underline the importance of what we are doing in the Department.
The hon. Lady raises a very good point about what more we can do to support frontline staff in the DWP who spot something wrong or feel uncomfortable with something that is happening—perhaps an unintended consequence—and to escalate their concerns so that they are heard by managers and those right at the top of the organisation. As a result of the work that the Secretary of State has been doing since she has been at the Department, with our new permanent secretary, new structures have been put in place to ensure that that escalation of concerns is appropriately considered across operations, policy and legal, and that appropriate action is taken. I believe that that action will prevent this from happening again.