Speeches by Cane.

“Thank you for letting me guest today. I need to declare an interest; I am also a civil service pensioner, a retired member of the FDA, and indeed, a member of the Civil Service Pensioners Alliance. My first group of questions is about the telephone answering service. We have heard of the problems that people are having…”

“They are speaking to a person and then the call gets cut off.”

“You said that the average wait time for people with a general query, not one of your priorities, is less than 100 seconds.”

“So they still cannot access it?”

““Until we sort this out.” Why are you not just offering it to them and making it, as it were, their right, because they are owed that money?”

“When does the wait time start from? Calls start with the instruction, “If your call is about X, press number 1,” so is the 100 seconds measured from when they get through to that, or from when they are speaking to a person?”

“And multi-stint is people who left the scheme—”

“—partway through service and then came back in again?”

“Yes, I do. We heard at the beginning about the gentleman who is terminally ill and not yet receiving regular payments, and about some widows who are not receiving them. Why are they having to come up with the magic words to ask for a loan? Why don’t you automatically offer them a loan?”

“I hear that, but you are not able to do it in those three cases we heard about, so why don’t you simply say: “We are sorry that it is taking us so long to resolve this properly. We are working as fast as we can. In the meantime, we would like to offer you a loan”—”

“What number were you expecting four months in?”

“It would be interesting to see that, and to see the trend. The suspicious person in me thinks that, when you have a KPI, there is a temptation to drop calls so that you can answer calls within the required time.”

“I am not suggesting there would be a policy, but it is a behaviour that has been found on lots of other KPIs.”

“Are you also measuring how many calls are dropped?”

“So how many people are using it?”

“Have you done any testing to ensure that absolutely everyone can now get on it?”

“I am interested in what testing you have done. I have a constituent who is now on the portal, but I was regularly told that he could get on and to ask him to try again. He could not, and it turned out to be because he had an asterisk in his name. Are you absolutely certain—”

“You have talked about how you communicate with complainants. When a caseworker decides not to take a complaint forward, how much detail do they give the complainants as to how they arrived at the scoring?”

“Going back to an earlier question, are you worried about the risk that people may self-score? For instance, they might say, “Oh, it’s only a two, I won’t send it in.” If that happens, you lose your data collection.”

“Could changing the criteria based on demand lead to a perception of unfairness? Is it right to say that, if I brought you a case now that was a score four you would look at it, but if I brought you the same case in six months’ time and you did not have the extra resource, then you would not?”