Social Security Claimants (Requests for Information) (Hansard, 18 February 1981)

§ Mr. Ted Fletcher (Darlington)

Opposition Members have often complained that many Government Departments deliberately withhold information from Members of Parliament, particularly if that information is likely to become embarrassing. At least there is a motive in this procedure, although it is to be deplored, but we have now reached the stage when Ministers are impeding Members of Parliament from fulfilling their obligations to their constituents and are withholding information which could not by any stretch of the imagination be called private, confidential or even embarrassing.

I shall give an example of the case that has prompted me to raise this matter in an Adjournment debate. A constituent who was divorced has married again. She obtained a court order against her former husband for the maintenance of the children of the marriage. None has been paid, however, as the former husband, who now lives in South Wales, claims that his only income is from social security benefit. However, his former wife claims that while drawing social security benefits he is also working and earning more than £100 per week. She names the firm which she claims employs him.

My constituent wrote a number of times to the local office of the DHSS in South Wales and did not receive a reply. She then asked me to take up the matter. I wrote to the manager of the DHSS in South Wales, asking him whether he had received a letter from my constituent and what steps he proposed to take to deal with that communication. I received a reply from the manager. He said: The department cannot enter into correspondence with a third party"— I presume that I am the third party that he means— "about the affairs of a person with whom it has had dealings. Therefore, I am unable to divulge the outcome of our recent enquiries. I was astonished to receive such a reply. In this case, an accusation has been made that someone is obtaining money under false pretences. As no replies have been received by my constituent, one can only presume that that case was being ignored.

I have never had the slightest difficulty with my local office of the DHSS in Darlington. I approached its staff on numerous occasions. They are always courteous and supply me with the information that I want.

I fondly imagined that possibly the management of the office in South Wales was being a little officious, so I wrote to the then Minister, the right hon. Member for Daventry (Mr. Prentice). Much to my surprise, he confirmed what the management had said. He repeated that social security registers are strictly confidential and are not disclosed, save in the most exceptional circumstances, without the consent of the individual concerned, even to Members of Parliament. No one should have the right of access to confidential registers without a good reason. However, we are not dealing with the privacy of recipients of social security. We are concerned with the attitude of DHSS officers. When advised of an accusation of malpractice, they refused to say whether they intended to act.

428 I then wrote to the Minister who is to reply tonight. He said that he had nothing to add to what his predecessor had indicated. I put down a question, and he stated that he had nothing to add to his letter. He was adding nothing to nothing. I made no further progress, and therefore I applied for an Adjournment debate.

I hope that the Minister will not shelter behind the plea that what his officers might or might not do is confidential. As a Member of Parliament what I say is privileged. I could name my constituent, her former husband, and the firm for which he is alleged to be working, and state the accusations being made against him. The Minister could do nothing to safeguard his officials from public scrutiny. The matter would be reported in the press. However, I shall not do that. I do not know, and the Department will not tell me, whether the accusations are true or false. I might be doing someone a grave injustice by publicising the matter. How am I to discover whether my constituent has a real or imagined grievance unless the Department advises me of the outcome of its inquiries, if it has carried out any inquiries?

The case raises the fundamental question of the relationship between a civil servant and a Member of Parliament. In common with most other hon. Members, I write to many Government offices, local government officers and social services departments on cases arising from interviews with my constituents. Sometimes the information that I receive is sensitive. It may be at variance with the information that I get from constituents. Sometimes the letters are marked "Strictly private and confidential". I cannot think of a single case of privileged correspondence having been abused. It is necessary for hon. Members to hear two sides of an argument before proceeding. If my constituent has what I consider to be a real grievance, I shall fight to get it rectified. If, on the other hand, having considered the view of Ministers or civil servants, I believe that there is no case, I will be frank with my constituent.

A Member of Parliament is often regarded as a buffer between the bureaucracy of the Civil Service and the rights of the individual. A Member of Parliament has the ability to cut through red tape, and collectively Members of Parliament have resolved tens of thousands of cases that would have led to conflict and acrimony. If, however, a Member is denied access to information on a simple query by some high-handed official and such officials are then backed by the Minister, things have come to a pretty pass. All that I want to know from the Minister is whether his office has received letters from my constituent and what it proposes to do about the charges made in those letters.

It seems a great pity that an Adjournment debate has to be used for this purpose. There are many problems in my constituency, such as high unemployment, cuts in public expenditure and a general lowering of the standard of living, that I should have liked to ventilate instead of this topic. Nevertheless, it is an important issue that concerns not only myself but my fellow Members of Parliament.

I hope that I shall get a satisfactory answer from the Minister tonight. If not, I shall continue to pursue the matter through the Parliamentary Commissioner. The Minister should know that my constituent wrote to the Parliamentary Commissioner about her problems, but he says, quite rightly in my view, that he cannot investigate allegations by a third party. But the Parliamentary Commissioner adds: 429 There is no reason, however, why you should not approach your Member of Parliament who may himself be prepared to make the appropriate inquiries on your behalf. That is exactly what I have done, and it is precisely what I am doing at this moment. If I fail to get a satisfactory answer, I shall report the matter back to the Parliamentary Commissioner on the ground of maladministration in the Department of Health and Social Security, because in my view the Department is deliberately withholding information, and that is hindering me in my efforts to help my constituent.

All that I am asking for in this Adjournment debate is a simple "Yes" or "No" answer. Does the Department intend to take action arising from the information that has been forwarded to the South Wales local office? If the answer is "Yes", I presume that I shall be advised of the action that is to be taken. If the answer is "No", I shall conclude that, after investigation, the Department has found that there is no substance in the allegations that have been made.

I hope that I shall get a clear and unambiguous answer to the questions that I have raised.

§ The Minister for Social Security(Mr. Hugh Rossi)

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Darlington (Mr. Fletcher) for raising this matter, but in view of the lateness of the hour he will forgive me if I say that I do so with very mixed feelings. Nevertheless, it is a token of the great diligence with which he has pursued, and rightly pursued, the interests of his constituents in a matter of this kind. I should like to be able to help the hon. Gentleman, but perhaps when I have explained to him the conflicting principles that arise in the issues that he has raised he will understand why that is not possible.

On the one hand, we are all concerned that confidential information given to my Department by claimants in connection with their claims for social security benefits is used only for the purposes of those claims. On the other hand, of course, we are concerned that social security funds should be safeguarded against fraudulent claims and abuse in general.

It has always been accepted that information which my Department necessarily obtains for the purpose of determining benefit claims is used only for that purpose and is made available to third parties only in the most exceptional circumstances. This means, in practice, that we will not disclose such information as addresses, details of the composition of families, causes of incapacity for work or earnings and other details of employment. Those are private. They belong to individuals. They are in our possession for the specific purpose of enabling us to decide whether their true owners are entitled to benefit.

In normal circumstances we do not disclose this information to third parties, however well intentioned they may be. But there are special circumstances in which this concern for the rights of the individual must take second place even to more important rights. It has, for example, always been accepted that it is right that our records should be used to help in the detection of serious crimes.

Another area in which it has always been accepted that we may pass on information in our possession is where another Government Department is involved in the payment of money to the same individual or in some circumstances concerned with the payment of contributions through the PAYE system.

430 In addition, there is a long-standing arrangement, described in a statement in the House by the then Home Secretary on 6 June 1957, by which my Department supplies certain addresses to the courts in connection with proceedings under the Summary Jurisdiction (Separation and Maintenance) Act, the Guardianship of Infants Act or the Bastardy Laws Amendment Act. These arrangements also have their counterpart in Scotland.

Of course, these restrictions on the giving of information do not apply in cases where an hon. Member is making inquiries on behalf of a constituent who is himself or herself a claimant. In such cases, the Member is given any information that would be given to the claimant—the Member's constituent—personally.

Here, I repeat the request which my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State addressed to all right hon. and hon. Members in a letter last December in which he asked that such inquiries should ordinarily be addressed to the managers of our local offices. I am grateful to the hon. Member that he did so in this case and in all other cases that he has had occasion to raise with his local office. I am glad to hear that he has received the fullest co-operation from the Darlington office. Such local inquiries will provide the information needed much more quickly and easily than Ministers can hope to do.

I turn to the second principle. The suppression of fraud against the social security system is a subject which rightly attracts the attention and concern of many right hon. and hon. Members. It is obviously in everyone's interest that fraud is detected and stopped. We are doing all that we reasonably can to achieve that purpose, and we therefore certainly act upon any information which reasonably tends to show that fraud has taken place. If anything, the criticism raised against us recently is that we are doing this too effectively. That was raised at great length during the recent debate on poverty.

The hon. Member first raised this case in November last with the Department's local office. The manager declined to give any information as to the result of the Department's action. He was perfectly correct in doing so, because, as I have explained, that is the long-standing policy within which all Administrations have acted.

My predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Daventry (Mr. Prentice), assured the hon. Member in reply to a letter he wrote later in November that appropriate inquiries into the allegations were made, but the information as to their outcome could not be passed on. I myself repeated that information in a letter I wrote to the hon. Member on 19 January in reply to his letter of 18 December. I must now repeat that that is still the position, as I did in a written answer to the hon. Member on 2 February.

All that I can do is to assure the hon. Member that the fullest inquiries have been made into the allegations by his constituent about her former husband. However, for the reasons that I have given, I cannot infringe our duty to respect the privacy of those who claim social security benefits by disclosing the results of those inquiries.

I can well understand that this reply will be disappointing to the hon. Member, but I am sure that he will realise that our rightful concern that fraud should not take place must also recognise the rights of individuals to privacy. We cannot disclose to third parties, even to right hon. and hon. Members, the results of our investigations in to allegations of fraud against persons. This applies to 431 the giving of information in cases in which the allegations have been found to be justified and in those in which they have not.

It is easy to see why we cannot disclose information where inquiries show allegations against claimants to be justified. To do so would clearly involve the giving of private information, albeit information which may sometimes be of public interest, too.

It is, perhaps, less easy to see why we cannot say that inquiries have shown allegations to be unjustified. But if that information were given it would be obvious in cases where we declined to disclose that allegations had been found to be justified. So it is in everyone's interest that we do not disclose the results of our inquiries.

Unless those who claim benefit can feel that their confidences will be respected by the Department, it is our conviction that many deserving people would be deterred 432 from claiming. That should be the most important consideration in our minds. But let no one doubt that appropriate inquiries will be made into allegations of fraud.

Perhaps I may add a final word that may be of help to the hon. Gentleman because he is concerned about what he can best do for his constituent. She is concerned because certain payments are not being received from her husband. She has a remedy in the courts. In the courts, by means of cross-examination or subpoena of those whom she feels may be employing her husband, she can discover the truth of what she believes to be the case. However, for the reasons that I have given, I cannot hand over to that lady, through the hon. Gentleman, the results of the inquiries that we have made as a result of her allegations.