§ Mr. Cyril Smithasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will hold an inquiry into the administration of the child benefit centre at Washington, and publish the results of such inquiry; and if he will now publish the number of complaints received about this department in the last 12 months.
§ Mr. DeakinsNo. During the last 12 months there have been 1,433 cases, raised through hon. Members or the media or directly by claimants to child benefit, which were treated as formal complaints. In nearly one-third of these cases the Child Benefit Centre was not considered to be at fault. No record is available of the larger number of cases in which claimants have included some220W criticism in correspondence with the centre, the question generally being settled to the satisfaction of the claimant.
Child benefit operations are being closely monitored with a view to reducing complaints to a minimum, but the level of complaints should be seen against the scale of operations. The centre maintains payments for over 7 million families with over 13½ million children, involving during the last 12 months the issue of 8 million order books and the return or recall of 1½ million order books. Over the same period, 825,000 new claims have been received and over 800,000 children have left school. Since January the centre has also taken over the administration of million payments of child benefit increase to one-parent families.