Social Security Benefits (Hansard, 27 January 2004)

§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Hollis of Heigham)
My Lords, our priority is to maintain services to our clients. We are confident that we can run a near-normal service and that payments will be 99 issued as usual for benefits, pension credit and child support. Payments of tax credits are made by the Inland Revenue and would not be affected.

§ Lord Higgins
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for that Answer and for confirming that tax credits and the Inland Revenue are not affected. However, is it not the case that the transfer of responsibility for some payments to the Inland Revenue is already causing problems? The Inland Revenue has always been rather better at collecting money than paying it out. Having paid out too much money, it is now clawing it back with excessive enthusiasm and causing considerable distress.
As regards the areas affected by the proposed industrial action, which I understand include benefit offices, pension offices and so forth, people may manage for a day or two, but what plans do the Government have to ensure that payments are made if industrial action were to take place over a matter of, say, weeks rather than days?

§ Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, if the House will allow me, it may be worth mentioning those who could not be affected by virtue of payment methods. First, it is worth emphasising that more than 55 per cent of those receiving benefit payments—around 20 million benefit payments are made each week—are on direct payment. Therefore, they are paid automatically into their bank accounts and will not be affected. A further third—mainly pensioners—receive order books that are rolled out automatically and, therefore, are not affected. Of the remaining one-fifth or thereabouts—mostly people on JSA and paid by giro—if they cannot sign on, they will be paid as though they had signed on.
My understanding is that the only people who could be affected in the event of sustained industrial action, which I very much hope will not occur, would be those brand new clients seeking jobseeker's allowance for the first time: that is, a client may turn up at his or her local office, and it is closed, and the management are not be able to put in alternative staff, and the office is in a sufficiently isolated rural area where the client could not go to an alternative office. That scenario is very unlikely. We had industrial action between September 2002 and April 2003. Not one local office was closed and all benefit payments were maintained.

§ Earl Russell
My Lords, the Minister's objectives are unobjectionable. But what information does she have on the amount of suffering and hardship that may be caused to a claimant by two days' loss of benefit?

§ Baroness Hollis of Heigham
My Lords, the only people who could have a two-day loss of benefit—over and beyond the usual arrangements that we would make for bank holidays, Christmas, snow, or whatever—are those that I identified in isolated rural areas in the event of closure of an office and there being no alternative office for them to go to. Clients in hardship, with dependants or, say, former prisoners, 100 and so forth, could go to the local social services department for emergency payments. That is the fallback. However, I must say that when we had sustained industrial action over six months, that situation did not arise.