CABINET OFFICE & CENTRAL OFFICE OF INFORMATION

28 NOVEMBER 2007

  Q80 Mr Davidson: And how much that is costing. I want to be clear that money is being spent on the people that need the services most rather than those—

  Ms Cleveland: I understand the issue, yes. Certainly if you looked where they do have evidence in some areas obviously the cost of a home visit is considerably higher—

  Q81  Mr Davidson: Absolutely.

  Ms Cleveland: --- than dealing with someone over the telephone.

  Mr Davidson: Absolutely. Thank you, Chairman.

  Q82  Chairman: If I can put this to you, Alexis Cleveland, this is dealt with in paragraph 1.18 of the Report, page 22, where it says: "79% of people receiving means-tested benefits lack practical ICT skills and 51% of adults earning less than £10,400 a year have never used the Internet. Also that 75% of socially excluded people (suffering from three or more forms of deprivation) are non-users of the Internet." The obvious thing is to help these people through intermediaries, is it not? So we read later in paragraph 1.19, "The government subsidises some 6,000 UK online centres, run by libraries, community groups, colleges ... " That is okay. However, we read later at the end of paragraph 1.19, that some centres are only able to offer minimal support. Then if we read paragraph 1.20 we see that, "Government websites are naturally cautious about providing links to external, non-governmental websites. This presents a lost opportunity to signpost citizens to where they can find useful, relevant information as many non-government organisations offer advice and support that would be useful to visitors ... " I think Mr Davidson has a very powerful point here. A very high proportion of people in receipt of means-tested benefits—79%, we are told in the Report that you have agreed—lack practical ICT skills and there is very little apparently that you are doing to help them use intermediate centres either.

  Ms Cleveland: The issue with people in receipt of means-tested benefits, it is very much being promoted through a telephony channel and face to face. That covers two things: one in terms of education and training—

  Q83  Chairman: You are very much promoting face to face.

  Ms Cleveland: I said it is dealt with—if we are talking about people on means-tested benefits they are dealt with either face to face or over the telephone.

  Q84  Chairman: Did you say that you are very much promoting face to face?

  Ms Cleveland: There is a face to face channel for people on means-tested benefits, like job seeker's allowance, where you would actually be seen.

  Q85  Chairman: I am sure there is a channel but I doubt very much if you are very much promoting it.

  Ms Cleveland: If I said very much promoting then I withdraw that comment.

  Q86  Chairman: I think Mr Davidson has a point here. People in receipt of these benefits want to be assured, following Mr Davidson's questions, that traditional ways of communicating with them, face to face, are promoted as actively as are these websites, which may be very difficult to use for people who may have disability problems or any other problems.

  Ms Cleveland: The work that DWP has done on its customer insight has actually demonstrated that the vast majority of older people, for example, want to use the telephone. We are certainly not promoting the Internet for that group; telephony is their preferred choice of channel, but some of those will need to have a face to face service, and I think this year they will visit 600,000 people in their own home.

  Q87  Mr Davidson: Just on that, my understanding was that the vast majority of elderly people wanted face to face contact; they were prepared to accept the telephone because the government was cutting the number of facilities that offered face to face and concentrating on telephones for cost reasons. But it is not true to say that that is what elderly people wanted.

  Ms Cleveland: The customer insight that was done in the Pension Service in DWP was that the majority of people wanted to use the telephony.

  Q88  Mr Davidson: The majority of people, yes, but not the majority of elderly people.

  Ms Cleveland: This was the elderly population, so the over pension age.

  Q89  Mr Davidson: If you let us have that. But not, as it were, the elderly elderly? I am certainly aware from my constituency that the vast majority of those that you would consider frail and needed assistance and so on did not want to do it over the phone and many of them in fact do not have phones, and therefore they are doubly disqualified or doubly in difficulty in these circumstances when you are taking away their access to face to face contact.

  Ms Cleveland: In that case their face to face service is actually delivered through the pension service local service, which is actually a peripatetic service based in communities, which goes to the place where people want to go. So if it were appropriate for a home visit other people do not want you to go to their home but might meet somewhere else.

  Q90  Mr Davidson: I understand the point as well about where people want to go but quite often many of those in greatest need are not themselves active in community groups and organisations.

  Ms Cleveland: That is why they do visit people in their homes coming through and they have a good system of referrals from local authorities, from Age Concern, people like that who can actually refer them through to the Pension Service for a home visit, and certainly to my knowledge when I was Chief Executive there we never turned down a referral.

  Q91  Chairman: I want to go on to pursue this point with you because again reading it, as I have already said to you, 51% of adults earning less than £10,400 a year have never used the Internet. Then we see in paragraph 1.20, something I have not quoted to you yet: "Those who do not have Internet access themselves will often use intermediaries (such as friends, family, care workers or advice centres) in their contact with government departments. For example, Department for Work and Pensions has found that 45% of contacts with the Disability and Carers Service and 23% of contacts with the Pensions Service come through intermediaries." So I put to you a question I do not think you have yet answered, that there has to be a very much more sophisticated signpost helping people on these intermediaries and it does not seem to be happening at the moment because government, it says here, is cautious about providing links to external non-government websites.

  Ms Cleveland: I think for the disadvantaged groups the referrals through to intermediaries, to alternate offices actually will not be necessarily directed through the web channel—it will not be those people that are accessing through that. So you need to get your information lines to those people through word of mouth in communities, which is often the best way, and through local authorities because they are the people that contact a lot of the most disadvantaged people anyway. So I do not think it would be the web channel that you would use for this group.

  Q92  Chairman: Apparently you are doing research on this, how to develop such links; so that is happening, is it, at the moment?

  Ms Cleveland: Yes.

  Q93  Chairman: When you come back to us again this will be much more developed, will it, to meet the point that Mr Davidson has been putting to you?

  Ms Cleveland: When we come back again I would be very happy to talk about the whole customer insight—

  Q94  Chairman: I am sure you would be happy to talk about it but we would like some action as well. Thank you very much. Mr Mitchell.

  Ms Cleveland: There is nothing between us on that point, Mr Chairman.

  Q95  Mr Mitchell: I have now found a channel called something like TalktoThem.com, or something, which allows people to communicate with their MPs and I am now receiving enormous amounts of abuse every day—every day there is fresh abuse!

  Ms Cleveland: I can assure you it was not from us!

  Q96  Mr Mitchell: Perhaps you have that in government, but I get the impression—and a question for Ms Cleveland—that it is transformation of government. Certainly in my case I rushed round to the Internet too soon because there was all this hoo-hah before the 2001 election about this is the future means of communication and the election will be fought on the Internet. So I set up a site and provided all sorts of rubbish on it and there was a means for people to talk back, which nobody did, and published photographs; and it cost a lot of money and nobody looked at it—I think the number of hits was minute, and I do not know how many of those came from the country. I get the impression from this Report and the earlier Report that that has also happened with government, that it became a subject of fashion—everybody must do this—and they rushed in too quickly. It is only now really, having made all those mistakes and having handled it inexpertly and, for the public, confusingly, that they are able to really get to grips with this issue and provide a decent service, for those middle class people who will use it. Would that be a correct interpretation? The mistakes arose from goodwill and over enthusiasm?

  Ms Cleveland: Do I think we are improving the service? Yes.

  Q97  Mr Mitchell: No. Do you think mistakes arose from following fashion?

  Ms Cleveland: I think where we ended up with multiple websites was because we took it from a supplier viewpoint rather than a citizen viewpoint—every little bit of business had to have its own website with its own brand in there. I actually think that the competence of the production of those websites at the time was actually quite good, but when you come to look at it from a citizen's perspective joining them up was very difficult. So I think we did go into the "everyone had to have a website", yes.

  Q98  Mr Mitchell: So now the future is clear and there will be fewer mistakes?

  Ms Cleveland: The technology has moved on; we are looking to have two portals, two routes into the government through two websites that we can direct people to much more easily.

  Chairman: That concludes our hearing. We are very grateful; thank you very much.