Child Support Agency (Hansard, 4 November 1998)

§ Angela Eagle

We expect the Child Support Agency to provide a consistent, fair and efficient service to all its clients. We have set out proposals for radical reform in our Green Paper "Children First: a new approach to child support" (Cm3992).

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 Ms Joan Walley, dated 3 November 1998:

I am replying to your Parliamentary Questions to the Secretary of State for Social Security about face to face appointments and staffing levels in the Child Support Agency.

The Agency is divided into six front-line Business Units; a Business Unit consists of a Child Support Agency Centre and associated field offices. Information has been provided for the Midlands Business Unit.

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As part of our ongoing commitment to improve significantly the quality of service to our customers, the Agency offers local interviews to both non-resident parents and parents with care. Where a customer requests an interview, and the query cannot be resolved by contacting them by telephone an interview will be arranged.

I am quite convinced of the need for much increased face to face contact to make our service more responsive to the needs of our customers. By increasing face to face contact we will provide customers with better explanations and improve their compliance and co-operation. Additionally, increased face to face contact should reduce the incidence of fraud.

We are in the process of changing our organisational structure, and we aim to offer significantly more face to face contact. It is our intention that more interviews will be offered, to more people, at more stages of the process and at more locations. A two month face to face trial has recently commenced involving 17 field offices nationwide with 65 staff dedicated to providing this face to face service.

The Agency's field offices deal with cases where a local interview is requested either by the parent with care or the non-resident parent. Additionally, field offices deal with cases where the Agency instigates a request for an interview; for example when:

a Reduced Benefit Direction is being considered

paternity is disputed

the Child Support Officer decides that an interview is the best way to progress a case

Information held on interviews does not differentiate between those requested by customers and those instigated by the Agency. However at 30 September 1998 Midlands Business Unit had approximately 400 interviews waiting to be carried out; in 1997–98 the average number of interviews carried out each month was 489. Information on the number of people currently waiting for an interview is not available, however early results from the face to face trial show that approximately 70 per cent. of interviews are carried out within 6 days of a request being received.

At 30 September 1998 the Midlands Business Unit's staffing level (whole time equivalent) was 1,220.6; this consists of 812.0 for the Dudley Centre and 408.6 for the associated field offices.

As part of our reorganisation we are transferring paper processing work from the field to the centres. Consequently the number of staff in the field network will reduce significantly over the next three to four years. However, we will be looking to increase the number of locations where we will carry out interviews; using facilities outside DSS. Field resources will then be focused specifically on improved face to face contact with customers. We expect the availability and amount of local face to face contact to increase significantly over the next year as a result. This is originally the area on which field staff were intended to concentrate at the start of the Agency; paper processing work was undertaken only as a short-term measure to help the Agency deal with the number of applications it received in the early years.

I hope this is helpful.