§ Mr. Kilroy-Silkasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will make a statement on the A Code.
§ Mr. OrmeThe A Code consists of instructions to local office staff administering supplementary benefit and covers both procedural matters and the rules of benefit entitlement. The code is now being re-written to separate these two elements, and the policy of the Supplementary Benefits Commission, which I welcome, is to make the rules of entitlement as widely known as possible, mainly through the publication of its handbook. This handbook is now being expanded to include fuller information on entitlement, and we will then have clear guidance, available alike to our staff and to people claiming benefit, all published in simple language.
I have also arranged for officials to consider how best to make publicly available as much as possible of the remaining guidance in the A Code, other than instructions necessary to protect public funds against fraud and abuse and measures to control and detect them, which it would not of course be right to publish.
This is an aspect of open Government to which I attach very great importance. I intend to make publicly available all our guidance on supplementary benefits, drawing the line only at the kind of necessary exemptions I have referred to, so that the people know as much as possible about their rights and about our policies and procedures that affect them.