§ Caroline FlintTo ask the Secretary of State for Social Security in what ways his Department and its executive agencies deliver services to meet the needs of the public as consumers, with particular reference to families. [124643]
§ Angela EagleWe are modernising the way the Department's services are delivered to provide a comprehensive, dedicated service, focused on the needs of our key client groups: pensioners, working age people and children. We have appointed a senior member of the Departmental Board as the consumer champion, responsible for giving consumers a voice at the heart of the Department.
We are restructuring the Department to focus on our client groups: through a new pensions organisation focused on the needs of pensioners we will develop a modern and integrated service easily accessible from one point. We are bringing together the responsibilities of the Employment Service and part of the Benefits Agency to create a dedicated agency for people of working age. And 708W we are working with the Inland Revenue to introduce the Integrated Child Credit from 2003 to bring together help for children provided through the tax and benefits system.
We are also reforming the Child Support system to provide a simple, straightforward child maintenance system that is fair and which people can understand. In the meantime we are already taking action to improve the more commonly used forms of our service delivery, including:
gathering client's views through consultation and evaluation, such as the Better Government for Older People Programme, to help design and improve the quality of our services to the public;making it easier for people to understand and resolve questions about benefit entitlement through the new decision making and appeals procedure;re-designing our benefit leaflets and departmental website to allow people to find the information they need more easily and to do more business with us electronically;providing a direct tele-claims service to pensioners so that we can take claims from Retirement Pension and deal with queries over the phone;offering one-to-one personal help under the New Deals and the ONE service to enable people to take up jobs and training opportunities open to them, already 306,476 people have found work through the New Deals—including nearly 51,000 lone parents through the New Deal for Lone Parents;extending opening hours of the Child Support Agency so that the public can contact us when it is convenient for them, increasing the use of the telephone to gather information and making more staff available to offer a face to face interview.