Speeches by Cane.

“Good morning. I am going to be looking at resources. Starting with what level of staffing and funding do you need in order to carry out the full scope of your remit?”

“I agree; we must not set things up in competition. I would like to ask the Minister three questions. First, what is she going to do to make sure that every school in every area has the specialist resources it needs to deliver for its children? How is she going to make sure that rural areas such as mine in Ely and East …”

“One of the things that shocked me most when I was elected was how much we are failing children with special educational needs. We all get those emails in our inbox, and they are heartrending. When we meet those parents, we can see the stress and the strain etched in their faces, and we can only imagine what it is like …”

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

“Once somebody is answered, are any of those calls dropped partway through—do you measure that?”

“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…”

“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?”

“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”—”

“How many complaints have you had regarding inappropriate service from call centre staff?”

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

“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?”

“What are your current customer satisfaction scores, and how are they measured?”

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

““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?”

“So it is 100 seconds until they speak to a person, and for the higher priority lines it is less than 20 seconds before they speak to a person.”

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

“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.”

“That is good to hear, but I would like to see the figures. As you know, at PACAC there was discussion of insensitive call handling. I understand from the media that you consider the particular case that was raised to have been during MyCSP rather than Capita. Could you talk us through the sort of training you are givin…”

“Do you ask for this at the end of every call? How do you do that?”

“Are you sure that is working correctly and consistently?”