§ Mr. Rookerasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will list all his Department's local offices where disputes are taking place.
§ Mr. Newton:At present the following offices are closed to the public because strike action is being taken by some members of their staff: Erdington, Northfield, Washwood Heath, Sparkhill, Ravenhurst, Handsworth (all in Birmingham) and Oxford (Supplementary Benefits only).
In three other offices—Bury, Colchester and Dundee East—eighteen members of staff employed on contributory benefits only are on strike in connection with a dispute over staff inspection.
§ Mr. Rookerasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will make a statement on the first year's operation of his Department's local office in Walsall Road, Perry Barr, Birmingham, showing how the work load and staffing have changed, including visits and abandoned visits, and overtime worked.
§ Mr. Newton:As the hon. Member will have seen from section 4 of the description of the Department's local office complementing system which I recently sent him, no simple measure of a local office's work load is available.
Since the Perry Barr office opened, about 4,800 visits to supplementary benefit claimants have been made and about 1,400 (for various reasons) abandoned. The maximum number of outstanding visits was about 750 in March this year; it is now just over 250.
The staff employed at the office has risen from 113 at the outset to 122 currently. Not much overtime was worked until February 1982. Overtime then ran at about 1,400 hours for two months. For the next four months it declined to about 750 hours and since then to about 400 hours.
§ Mr. Rookerasked the Secretary of State for Social Services if he will make a statement on the current dispute in his Department's local offices in Birmingham.
§ Mr. Newton:Talks between Department and trade union officials are continuing in an attempt to resolve the dispute. Apart from this, I have nothing further to add to my reply to the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) on 20 October 1982.—[Vol. 29, c.163–4.]
§ Mr. Rookerasked the Secretary of State for Social Services how much overtime has been worked in his Department's local offices for the latest convenient period; and if he will provide a breakdown as between contributory, non-contributory and means-tested benefits work.
§ Mr. Newton:The information requested covers the four-weekly period ending 31 August 1982 and is as follows:
314W
hours Contributory benefits staff 10,656 Supplementary benefits staff 59,167 Total 69,823 No separate figures are available for non-contributory benefits work. Overtime worked in local offices on noncontributory benefits is included as appropriate in the above figures, depending upon which staff carried out the work.