HC Deb 06 March 1978 vol 945 cc467-9W
Mr. Ogden

asked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he is satisfied with his Department's procedures on national insurance contribution arrears; and if he will make a statement.

Mr. Ennals

Yes. I take it that my hon. Friend's concern arises from the book "The Pencourt File", which contains two allegations concerning me. Both are untrue.

The first allegation is that, as Minister of State in 1969, I ensured that no action was taken about unpaid national insurance contributions in respect of Mr. Nor- man Scott. The decision to treat Mr. Scott as either self-employed or non-employed for national insurance purposes and to waive action, including civil proceedings, to collect arrears of contributions was reached by officials in the light of standing instructions. The query from Mr. Peter Bessell MP was one of the 50 to 70 inquiries from Members which I dealt with each week. Any suggestion that I influenced the Department in order to protect Mr. Scott or anyone else from legal proceedings is untrue. Nor is there any truth in the suggestion that, as a result of Mr. Bessell's intervention, Mr. Scott or his wife received national insurance benefits to which they were not entitled.

The second allegation is that, as Secretary of State in 1976, I asked the Director General of the BBC to stifle inquiries being made about my Department's handling of social security matters and papers concerning Mr. Scott. This is not so. The facts are as follows. Mr. Penrose and Mr. Courtiour, who said that they had been assigned to this work by the Director General of the BBC, were making inquiries about the Department's contacts with Mr. Scott. I did not wish to disclose information about a claimant to people who might feel under no obligation to respect the confidentiality of the information provided to the Department by the claimant. I therefore sought a meeting with the Director General in order to satisfy him that the allegations being made were without foundation. As a result he was able to satisfy himself that there was nothing further to pursue with my Department.

In view of widespread misunderstanding, I should add that the Department does not keep one master file on every individual. A variety of files and documents are used to deal with different types of contact between individuals and the Department. Following a detailed inquiry which I ordered in 1976 all the Department's social security records and files relating to Mr. Norman Scott can be accounted for—either as still in the Department's possession or as routinely destroyed in accordance with the Public Records Act—with the exception of a folder used to administer a 1962 claim for sickness benefit. This is presumed lost or accidentally destroyed when the local office retaining it was closed in 1967; in any event, it would only have contained a few formal documents since other papers in it would have been routinely destroyed by 1964. There is no foundation for the suggestion that a file concerning Mr. Scott was stolen from the Department's local office in Chelsea.