HC Deb 06 April 2000 vol 347 cc1254-62

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn.—[Mr. Robert Ainsworth.]

7.14 pm
Mr. Roger Gale (North Thanet)

I am grateful for this opportunity to place on record a matter that I regard as of concern and a national disgrace. There are no niceties or courtesies about this debate. It is born out of a sense of monumental injustice and some anger. Had Ministers been responsive prior to tonight, the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, the hon. Member for Wallasey (Angela Eagle) would not now be sitting on the Front Bench seeking to justify the unjustifiable. The subject before the House is the failure of the Department of Social Security to ensure delivery of widows' payment to those to whom it is justly due.

On 2 June 1999, Alan Keith Smith of Margate was working with highly flammable chemicals that caught fire. At the age of 24, he suffered horrific burns. He was admitted to Margate hospital and transferred by helicopter to a burns unit at Chelmsford in Essex. In order to satisfy car tax authorities and others, his 19-year-old wife Corrina asked for, and was given, a letter, confirming in three lines that Alan Smith was in intensive care and would remain in hospital for the foreseeable future.

On 18 June, he died of the injuries sustained in the industrial accident. On the same day, Corrina was required to identify Alan Smith's body in the Broomfield hospital, Chelmsford. She was required to identify his body for a second time on 23 June after his remains had been transferred to the Buckland hospital, Dover, where a post mortem was carried out.

Alan Smith's corpse was released by the Dover coroner, and he was buried on 8 July. The funeral was arranged by Messrs. Twyman and Holmes of Ramsgate. The Dover coroner provided the burial order necessary for the interment to take place. Corrina Smith borrowed £2,500 to bury her husband and to meet the out-of-pocket expenses generated by that tragic series of events.

The inquest into the death of Alan Smith was held in east Kent on 12 October 1999. The registrar in Chelmsford received a certificate from the Dover coroner, Richard Sturt, indicating that Alan had died of multiple organ failure, septicaemia and burns. The coroner's verdict was accidental death.

Mrs. Elfes, the Chelmsford registrar, issued a death certificate on 14 October 1999; I have a copy before me. She posted it to Corrina Smith with a covering letter. The letter states: "I have today"—14 October 1999— registered the death of Alan Keith Smith. Please find enclosed Certificate of Registration of Death which should be completed on the reverse side and returned to the Department of Social Security, the leaflets enclosed may be of some assistance to you. That was the first official document received by Corrina Smith since her husband's death.

Corrina Smith attends Thanet college. As she is under 45, she does not qualify for a widow's pension, so she claimed a £1,000 widow's payment. That would have been of some modest help to her. In a pro forma note issued by the Benefits Agency at Nutwood house in Canterbury on 4 November 1999, she was told that because more than three months had elapsed since the death of her husband she would receive no money.

Corrina Smith appealed against that decision and appeared before a tribunal. She was told again: Corrina Smith is not entitled to a Widow's Payment. This is because the claim was made on 26th October 1999 in respect of a death which occurred on 18th June 1999 and there is no entitlement to a widow's payment in respect of a death occurring more than 3 months before the date of the claim. Let us be clear about the matter. Corrina Smith received from the Essex registrar a notification of death and a death certificate dated 14 October 1999. Notwithstanding the trauma of the coroner's inquest and the distress that she had suffered, her claim was lodged within a fortnight of the receipt of those documents.

Corrina Smith came to see me, her Member of Parliament, at my constituency advice surgery in Birchington on Friday 26 November 1999. All the facts of the case were made known by me to the chief executive of the Appeals Service in a letter dated 29 November. In that letter, I said: The refusal of Widow's payment is, frankly, adding appalling insult to injury. I am quite astonished that under such circumstances the claim should have been rejected at all and would urge that this be processed as a matter of urgency. While writing I have to say that I find the form sent to her by the Department of Social Security about as insensitive as any Government Document that I have ever seen. Because of my strength of feeling on this subject I am copying this letter to the Secretary of State. That copy was sent to the Secretary of State on the same day.

On 23 February, the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, the hon. Member for City of York (Mr. Bayley), responded to my letters to the Secretary of State, saying: On 4th August 1997 Social Security Regulations were introduced that only allow backdating of claims to a maximum of 3 months. I should here point out that those regulations were laid under the previous Administration, following consultation with the Social Security Advisory Committee and were, as the Under-Secretary acknowledged, designed to reduce the complexity of the system. It is abundantly clear that they have also had unintended consequences.

The Under-Secretary repeated the assertion: As the claim was made outside the three month limit a WP could not be paid. He added that he could appreciate that the time immediately after the death of a spouse will be traumatic and claiming may not be the main priority … However, the Benefits Agency does all that it can through its information providing services to ensure that people are aware of the benefits to which they are entitled. This Minister was sorry that you were unhappy with the standard notification of the decision advising that the Widows Payment is not payable. Unhappy! That is one of the most callous, uncaring and thoughtless documents that it has been my misfortune to witness in 16 years in the House of Commons.

Given that a death certificate and the accompanying letter of advice were not sent to Mrs. Smith until after the inquest, is this young widow supposed to have second sight? Her husband had died a horrific death under the most appalling circumstances and the man who signed that letter dares to say that claiming benefit may not be a main priority. Without the necessary documentation and information, it was not even possible for her to claim.

The Department of Social Security's "Decision Makers Guide"—which is not public reading-refers to a situation in which there has been a delay in the issue of a death certificate, but says only: If there has been a delay in the issue of a statutory certificate, for example if inquest proceedings are adjourned, but there is clear evidence of death such as press notices, police statements etc., and no doubt as to identity, the Secretary of State may accept such evidence. How is a member of the general public supposed to gain access, at a time of distress or trauma, to this arcane information?

In his same letter, the Under-Secretary suggests: Where a post mortem is required and there is a delay in post mortem procedures an individual can be given an interim death certificate immediately by the Coroner's Office. This would omit the cause of death but be sufficient for benefit purposes. An individual can be given an interim death certificate, but there is no requirement to do so. Mrs. Smith assures me that she was handed no such document and I now understand that, in any event, where such a document is provided, no guidance note or letter of the kind offered by the registrar accompanies the document.

On 29 February, I wrote to the Under-Secretary suggesting that he examined the rules and the legislation in the light of this case. That letter was passed to the Appeals Service. I next wrote personally to the Secretary of State, on 10 March this year. In that letter I said: The mere fact that a Coroner's inquest is necessary would suggest that circumstances are less than normal. A Death Certificate or even a notification of death is not issued until a later date … If regulations are to be changed at all then they should, most surely, set the clock running from the point at which notification of death is issued, rather than the actual date of death, as it is only at this point that the bereaved is given the letter of instruction to complete the document and send it to the nearest Social Security Office …

I would urge you both to have this case specifically reconsidered and also to reconsider the manner in which the regulations apply so that others may not find themselves in a similar position … That letter to the Secretary of State did not receive a response of any kind until this week.

I did, however, eventually receive another letter dated 8 March, from another Under-Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Wallasey, who also understands that the time immediately after the death of a spouse will be traumatic and claiming benefit may not be a main priority … which would seem to indicate only that both Ministers are worked by the same civil servants pulling the same strings and using the same word processors.

The Minister pulled out of her red box more jargon about seeking to heighten people's awareness of rights … Iam told: Steps have already been taken to encourage widows to make claims within the time limits … and that the Benefits Agency have recently amended the form which is issued on registration of death to make it clear that it must be sent to them quickly to avoid loss of benefit … That takes us back to precisely where we started because Corrina Smith was not sent the form which is issued on registration of death … until the three-month limit imposed by the Government had expired.

The chief executive of the Appeals Service, Neil Ward, can only write on 20 March: The tribunal has no discretion in matters such as these and the Chairman has no alternative but to apply the law … For the record, this is not law at all; it is regulation imposed by the Secretary of State.

On 28 March, threatened with referral to the European Court of Human Rights and this Adjournment debate, the Under-Secretary finally replied to my letter to the Secretary of State. All she could offer was the observation: An appellant who remains dissatisfied with the tribunal has the right to apply for leave to appeal to a Social Security Commissioner … but only on a point of law … I am left with the inevitable conclusion that those charged with the political administration of the Department that is supposed most to provide for some of the most vulnerable people in this country simply do not care. From the Secretary of State to his junior Ministers, this case has received nothing but platitudes and bureaucratic self-justification.

Let me summarise: we are talking about a young man who died in a fire, a young woman who had to borrow money to bury her husband, a coroner's inquest held months afterwards and a notification issued only after that. No information of any kind appears to have been provided to Corrina Smith which might have enabled her to make her pitiful claim within the time limit, and the system and regulation introduced by Government is being used to deny her the £1,000 to which natural justice says she is entitled. Her main concern now is to see this pernicious regulation changed so that others are not, at their most vulnerable, penalised as she has been.

Not once has any Minister, with this full and awful story at their fingertips, acknowledged the nonsense of this system and undertaken to change it so that others do not suffer as Corrina Smith has done. Perhaps the Minister can give that undertaking tonight, so that Corrina's misery will not have been in vain.

7.29 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Social Security (Angela Eagle)

The Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, my hon. Friend the Member for City of York (Mr. Bayley), wrote to the hon. Member for North Thanet (Mr. Gale) on 23 February and asked that his condolences be conveyed to Mrs. Smith over the death of her husband, a point in the letter that the hon. Gentleman chose not to quote. I should be grateful if he would also convey my condolences to Mrs. Smith.

The hon. Gentleman has written a number of letters on this matter and I will respond to the points that he raised tonight and those in his latest letter dated 28 March. If there are any other points at issue which are not covered, I shall of course write to him again.

Mrs. Smith's husband tragically died in June of last year. She subsequently claimed widow's benefit. She is not entitled to widow's pension because she is aged less than 45 years and there is no entitlement to widowed mother's allowance because she does not have dependent children. As the hon. Member for North Thanet acknowledged, there is no issue in that respect.

I want to deal with the issue of the widow's payment. It is a tax-free lump sum payment of £1,000 paid to widows who are under state pension age, or whose late husband was not in receipt of retirement pension. Entitlement is based on the late husband's national insurance contribution record. Widow's payment is intended to provide immediate support to enable a widow to adjust to her changed financial circumstances and to help her deal with unexpected costs immediately following bereavement.

There have always been time limits for claiming widows' benefit. It has always been recognised that a reasonable period ought to be allowed in which a person can make her claim, and she should not be penalised for a short period of delay. The current rule, again as the hon. Gentleman pointed out, is three months. Unfortunately, Mrs. Smith's claim for widow's payment was out of time by some six weeks and was therefore disallowed. The nub of the hon. Gentleman's complaint is that it should be possible to extend the three months time limit if there are good reasons for doing so. There is no disagreement over the fact that Mrs. Smith's claim fell outside the time limit. The problem relates to the fact that the time limit is absolute.

The history of the widow's payment is simple. It was introduced in 1988 by the previous Administration to replace a benefit known as widow's allowance. The widow's allowance had been a weekly benefit, but the widow's payment was a one-off payment of £1,000. It was never up-rated. Hon. Members may be aware that we are about to replace it with a bereavement payment, which we plan to introduce in April 2001. Bereavement payment will be a tax-free lump sum of £2,000 and will be available equally to men and women. Entitlement conditions will be the same as for widow's payment.

At the time—widow's payment was introduced in 1988—an absolute time limit of 12 months existed for the purposes of making a claim. The back-dating was automatic. There was no need to show good cause for a delay in making a claim. Hon. Members may recall that the good cause test for late claim applied in the case of a number of other, mainly income-related, benefits. It did not apply in the case of contributory benefits such as retirement pension or widows' benefits, for which slightly more generous rules were considered appropriate because they were contributory benefits. The difference amounts to the fact that if there were no good cause for a delay in claiming one of the income-related benefits, there was no back-dating at all, whereas for the contributory benefits there was a 12-month time limit, whatever the reason for the delay.

Strictly speaking, for the contributory benefits it was not really a case of back-dating. Rather, a claimant had 12 months in which to make a claim. Twelve months was the period prescribed in primary legislation. Apart from exceptional cases in which a husband's body had not been recovered or identified, or where the woman was unaware of his death, the 12-month limit was also absolute. A claim outside the absolute limit will inevitably fail.

Then in April 1997, the previous Administration replaced the 12-month time limit with a three-month time limit. It remained an absolute rule, as it still is. There is no statutory basis for any payment to be made if, as in this case, the claim is made after the time limit has expired. There are internal rules about ex gratia payments that can be made if an individual is given clearly erroneous official information which results in loss of benefit. That was not the case. Officials in the Benefits Agency local office telephoned Mrs. Smith on 22 November to find out whether there was any possible way in which she could be helped because there had been official misinformation. They established, however, that there had been no official contact with her on the issue of the widow's payment until the out-of-time claim was received.

I appreciate very much that in Mrs. Smith's case there were good reasons for the delay in claiming benefit. The circumstances of her husband's awful death meant that there had to be an inquest. It was not her fault that the inquest was adjourned and that, by the time that it eventually took place on 12 October, the three months had elapsed. I also appreciate the fact that at a time of traumatic loss, a widow may not be best placed emotionally or otherwise to make the business of claiming benefit the first priority. The hon. Gentleman may think that that is a cliché but I keep saying it. In the DSS we deal with many tragic cases, but I repeat that there has never been any discretion as to whether the prescribed period of three months, or the previously prescribed 12 months, could be extended. As that is an absolute rule, the reason for the delay is immaterial.

It may be asked why we do not introduce a good cause provision, which would help to avoid such situations. The problem with the good cause rule was that it had become so overlaid with case law that decision-makers found it extremely difficult and time-consuming to wade through the decision-making process. A wholly disproportionate amount of time was taken to make such decisions, and there was still inconsistency and uncertainty about the outcome.

The previous Administration, of whom the hon. Gentleman was an enthusiastic supporter, therefore replaced that system with a set of specified circumstances which left little room for doubt whether a claim could or could not be backdated.

There is an argument that the three-month rule should be extended. That would not help Mrs. Smith, as it was not in place at the time of her husband's death. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of things that wherever a fence is erected, people fall on the wrong side of it. If we extended the claim period to six months, some people might still lose out by the odd week or two by not making timely claims.

The information on backdating is contained in leaflets written in plain English and widely available in Benefits Agency offices, post offices, libraries and general practitioners' surgeries. To complicate the rules or introduce new rules to differentiate between different benefits would cause the re-appearance of the problems that the previous Administration sought to iron out by introducing the new rules.

Mrs. Smith appealed against the decision that she had been given. The appeal tribunal subsequently upheld the decision, as the hon. Gentleman said. Appeal tribunals are independent of the Department. It is essential that they are independent and that they can reach decisions in individual cases by applying the law to the facts of the case. It would be entirely inappropriate for me or any other Minister to seek to interfere in the decision of a tribunal. In all the changes that we have recently introduced to the way in which appeals are handled, we have been careful to ensure that the independence of the tribunal has been safeguarded.

Mrs. Smith's difficulty lay in the fact that some misinformation may have been given to her by her solicitor over the telephone. First, it appears that she may have been told that she could not claim widow's payment until a death certificate was to hand. If so, that information was wrong. The claim should have been made without delay, as the information leaflets for widow's benefit make clear. Had Mrs. Smith contacted the local office, she would have received confirmation of the message contained in the leaflet that any delay in claiming may affect entitlement.

If a claim had been made on time, there may have been a delay in payment while the evidence of death was obtained, but there would have been no question of breaching time limits.

Secondly, it appears that Mrs. Smith was not advised that she could have applied for an interim death certificate. It seems to me that on both of these points the complaint ought to be made against the solicitors.

On the wider issues that this sad case raises, let me say that we aim to modernise the delivery of social security.

Mr. Gale

Will the hon. Lady give way?

Angela Eagle

We have introduced a range of changes to the ways in which decisions on social security claims and child support are made. We have made it easier for clients—

Mr. Gale

Will the hon. Lady give way?

Angela Eagle

No. I am in the middle of replying to the hon. Gentleman.

Mr. Gale

The hon. Lady is not replying—

Mr. Deputy Speaker (Mr. Michael Lord)

Order.

Angela Eagle

We have made it easier for clients to get a full explanation and for us to put mistakes right more easily. We have made changes to the way in which appeals are handled, to cut down on the time that people have to wait for a decision. That is now down to an average of 14 weeks.

These and the other changes that we have introduced are the first step in modernising delivery. We want to make the system more accessible for potential claimants and more straightforward for our staff. We want to provide claimants with advice to help them with their claims, but we cannot stop wrong advice being given by third parties.

People should be advised of the need to claim benefit at the right time. Such advice is available from our offices and from other sources, such as citizens advice bureaux. Leaflets are available on how to claim each benefit. In addition, in tragic circumstances such as those in Mrs. Smith's case, the registrar issues a registration or notification of death certificate. That can be sent to the nearest social security office and can be accepted as a claim for benefit.

I recognise that in Mrs. Smith's case, the delay because of the inquest may have caused the confusion. However, the information is available, and there are voluntary organisations that can help and give advice in such terrible circumstances.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Thanet for raising the sad case that we have considered, even though, despite examining it carefully, I am afraid that I am unable to offer much comfort to him or his constituent.

Question put and agreed to.

Adjourned accordingly at twenty minutes to Eight o'clock.