Stuart C McDonald
Main Page: Stuart C McDonald (Scottish National Party - Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East)Department Debates - View all Stuart C McDonald's debates with the HM Treasury
Concentrix: Tax Credit Claimants
Stuart C McDonald Excerpts(8 years, 2 months ago)
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Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall. Right hon. and hon. Members have already highlighted numerous ways in which our constituents have been badly affected and I want to highlight just one more. Constituents are suffering ongoing problems, even when mistakes by Concentrix are acknowledged and credits are reinstated. Having built up big debts to friends or family members, or even to childcare providers who agreed to keep working on the expectation that debts would be settled on the resolution of the tax credit problems, my constituents are now being told that they will get their back payments over the course of a year. That does not really help, because the major debts are due now. Will the Minister explain why HMRC cannot make the back payments now? It is not fair on our constituents and it is not fair on those who have had to help out when the Government have failed in their duty.
I agree that this was a rotten contract from the outset, with a commercial organisation making decisions about a claimant’s past eligibility and getting payment by results. The contract even specified how many cases— 2 million, I think—were expected to be modified, even before a single piece of evidence was considered.
Back in July 2016, the independent Social Security Advisory Committee said that the payment model would:
“potentially create a conflict of interest”.
The only bit I can quibble with there is “potentially”. It was a clear conflict of interest. It becomes hard to square information from our constituents with what we are told about the performance of the contract. I read somewhere that only 120 cases had breached the contract terms, yet I think we have had almost 120 examples of awful cases in the debate so far, so either the systems for monitoring contract performance are not up to scratch, perhaps because they rely too much on the company the performance of which is being measured, or they are monitoring the wrong things entirely.
I hope that the Government will explain what more they will do to resolve the mess, because they are not doing enough yet. Once cases are brought back in-house, they should stay there. We should not repeat the same mistakes again.