Child Support Agency (Hansard, 16 June 1998)

§ Mr. Keith Bradley

The administration of the Child Support Agency is a matter for the Chief Executive, Mrs. Faith Boardman. She will write to my hon. Friend.

Letter from Mrs. Faith Boardman to Mr. Terry Davis, dated 15 June 1998:

I am replying to your Parliamentary Question to the Secretary of State for Social Security about Child Support Agency compensation payments, normally referred to as special payments.A special payment is considered where a clear and unambiguous error by the Agency has resulted in an actual financial loss to the customer which is not recoverable through other means. No set target has been given to the Agency for the length of time taken to award such payments. Each case is carefully considered on its individual merits and depending on the complexity of the case, the length of time required to reach a decision can vary considerably.The Agency has a discrete unit to deal with claims for special payments. This ensures that each case receives individual attention and helps achieve fairness and an appropriate standard of consistency in an essentially discretionary scheme. All cases are now treated with priority and are normally dealt with in order of the date of receipt.The number of claims is small compared with our overall caseload of over 770,000 live and assessed cases. But it has risen as a result of the increases in the Agency's current workloads and of our recent actions to clear the backlog of maintenance applications which had accumulated in the Agency during its first 2–3 years. In 1997/98 the Agency cleared 595,000 maintenance applications compared with 357,000 in 1996/97 and reduced the number of maintenance applications over 52 weeks old from 225,000 to 110,000.We recognise that the length of time taken to deal with special payments in some instances has been protracted; we have recently reorganised our resources in this area and streamlined procedures with the aim of resolving special payments more speedily. As a result, the majority of individual claims which had been outstanding have been processed since December 1997 and the time for dealing with new claims has reduced significantly. Since December 1997 a total of 585 new cases have been cleared and 1719 new cases are at various stages of action. We also recognise that by improving our underlying service and efficiency we can avoid the need for such claims. We are on course to clear the rest of the backlog of maintenance applications over 52 weeks old by the end of 1998/99.We acknowledge that in the past our basic levels of customer service have been unacceptable and we are sorry that our failings may on occasion have caused inconvenience, frustration, distress and financial hardship. During 1997/98 we developed the Customer Service Strategy, our customer service improvement plan for the next four years. The Strategy will improve performance standards; information and openness; consultation and choice; courtesy and helpfulness and provide value for money. We have begun action on some of our customer service initiatives but it will take three to four years to deliver everything. However, we expect customers to see some real improvements by the end of 1998/99.I hope this is helpful.