§ Mr. Kilroy-Silkasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will make a statement on the experiments with a 679W multi-purpose claim form for means-tested benefits.
§ Mr. OrmeI have received a detailed report by my Department's social research branch on the experimental use in Salop of a multi-purpose claim form for some of the means-tested benefits administered by the Department and local authorities. The results of this experiment were disappointing. The extent to which simultaneous claiming of two or more benefits from different sources was successful was surprisingly low; and the increases in the number of successful claims to some of the benefits were achieved only at the cost of a much higher failure rate. A second experiment has been running in Brighton. While these experiments have been in train, some other local authorities have been exploring the possibilities of co-ordinating forms and procedures and the use of computers in this field. The results of the Brighton experiment are now being evaluated and the social research branch hopes to produce a report by the end of next month. In the meantime, I am placing a copy of the Salop report in the Library.
In their evaluation of the Salop experiment, the researchers suggest that the complexity of the benefits themselves may be largely responsible for the poor results achieved. The possibility of simplifying the conditions of entitlement to some of the benefits is being studied in the second stage of the review of the supplementary benefits scheme.