Speeches by Cane.

“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…”

“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—”

“It was not working for him, and your staff knew he had an asterisk in his name. If there was an issue with how he had to enter his name, he should have been told. That should be clearly in the instructions.”

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

“So they still cannot access it?”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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?”

“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”—”

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

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

“I understand that.”

“I am told by a constituent that they wanted to make a lump-sum payment. On the previous portal, they were able to do that online. On the new one, they had to download a form, print it out, fill it in and either scan it back in again or post it. Was that a temporary workaround, or is that now how it’s going to work goin…”

“So they would get feedback that they had influenced a positive change to the system?”

“When you talked about the scoring, I noticed that you started with two things that are very much about the complainant—the impact it has on them, and whether it is influenced by any protected characteristics—and yet you call it a public value model. Do you think that is a good name, or do you think it might imply that …”

“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.”

“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?”

“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?”