Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what monitoring and reporting mechanisms are in place for identifying operational issues at the Child Support Agency, including faults with the automated telephone system; and when the problem with the operation of that automated telephone system was first identified.

The Child Support Agency has a number of steps in place to help identify any telephony system issues. Including:

(1) Technical Monitoring - There is extensive monitoring and assessment of the overall Child Support Agency with a full incident and problem management process in place.

(2) Business call monitoring – we have real time management information to helps us identify:

• Numbers of our Caseworkers available to take calls from clients
• If queues are starting to build up on any of our lines
• Average waiting time for client calls
• Call abandonment rates from clients hanging up

This information helps our telephony performance and Network Management Teams to monitor the service being provided to clients and urgently respond to any issues

(3) CSA Operational colleagues will raise incidents when they become aware of issues they are experiencing, or if clients report any difficulties when their call is answered.

During the 2016/2017 operating year 97.4% of calls were answered within 60 seconds. During this period, there have been two issues with the Child Support Agency telephone system which impacted client calls. These were (1) Monday 07 November 2016 from 16:30 to 20:00 with some client calls cut off; and (2) Monday 20 February 2017 from around 11:00 to 19:30 an issue with the IT system meant we needed to deploy a telephone call plan requesting clients call back the following day.

These faults were resolved quickly minimising impacts on our clients