Social Security Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, March 22, 2018

Official Report 441KB pdf

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Benefit Automation

Agenda item 4 is an evidence-taking session on benefit automation. Nahid Hanif and Richard Gass’s submissions were circulated separately to members on Monday.

I warmly welcome Richard Gass, who is the welfare rights and money advice manager at the Glasgow city health and social care partnership and chair of Rights Advice Scotland; Nahid Hanif, who is from West Lothian Council; and John Campbell, who is from North Lanarkshire Council. I give each of you the opportunity to outline briefly some of the benefit automation work that you are doing in your councils.

Good morning, and thank you for inviting me along today. In Glasgow, there is limited automation of benefits—it is restricted primarily to school clothing grants and free school meals. Those two entitlements are managed by a single application form. In subsequent years, a person is re-awarded the entitlement on the basis of a prior application without the need to fill in a new form. Indeed, the 22,000 recipients of the school clothing grants have had their entitlement continued.

However, a number of folk were entitled to but not receiving the school clothing grant. By looking at the housing benefit and council tax records, the council was able to identify a further 5,400 folk who ought to have been receiving a school clothing grant. An automated process was put in place whereby a letter explaining what was happening was issued, together with a PayPoint voucher. That was reasonably well received, and 87 per cent of the recipients cashed their vouchers. If we add 87 per cent of 5,400 to the 22,000 initial recipients, the take-up of the school clothing grant works out at 97 per cent.

Our intention is to expand that approach to free school meals. You cannot send someone a free school meal; you can only give them an entitlement to a school meal, and the onus is on the parent and the child to take it up.

In Glasgow, we have cashless payments in schools. Those who pay for school meals bring money to school and have it put on to their cashless card at the till. For those in receipt of free school meals, the money can be put on to their cashless card behind the scenes, but it is still visible in the classroom who is and is not physically handing over cash.

ParentPay is perhaps a better scheme. The scheme is being piloted in Glasgow and is used by other local authorities. It allows all school costs to be paid online, including school trips, after-hours activities and school meals. Avoiding the need for children to bring cash into the classroom might remove the visible difference between those who get free school meals and those who do not.

The pilot in Glasgow was carried out in four schools: one secondary, two primaries and one nursery. In one of the primaries, there has already been a 92 per cent take-up, with parents currently loading cards online. That is a project for the future.

Another area in which we have semi-automation is in relation to the bedroom tax—if we are allowed to call it that. In Glasgow, we mitigate the tax through discretionary housing payments, as do other councils. We do not require folk to make annual reapplications but will continue their initial applications year after year for as long as funding is available. We take the view that either claimants or registered social landlords can make applications, to avoid people missing out.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to greater automation is data sharing, in that we might have information that we are allowed to use for specific purposes but its use for purposes beyond those has to comply with data-sharing protocols and the forthcoming general data protection regulation. In some of the councils that I polled prior to coming here today there is concern that, with the roll-out of universal credit, and with housing benefit transferring over to that, some of the data that we would otherwise hold will be lost and will instead be held in DWP systems. Although some information will still be held in the council tax system, an element will be lost. We need to be mindful that, whatever changes come about, adequate data-sharing protocols and legal frameworks should be put in place to enable automation to continue or expand.

Thank you very much. I invite Ms Hanif to tell us about work in West Lothian.

I thank the committee for inviting me along this morning. I reiterate what Richard Gass said. In West Lothian, we, too, are working on making it easier for people to apply for the school clothing grant and receive payments. We have been working with our housing benefit team to identify people who are within the income thresholds for the grant. We send out completed forms for them to sign and send back so that payments can be made to them. In this academic year, we sent out 2,000 application forms, with a return rate of 1,358. There was agreement that that rate was quite low and that we should try to boost it, so we did a second batch with the same forms and got an additional 110. Work is under way to try to contact people who were sent forms but did not return them. We want to understand fully what the barriers are and why people are not sending back the forms and getting money in return.

As with Glasgow’s pilot scheme, in West Lothian we have cards for education services so that children do not take money to school. Parents are making payments online as well. Again, the take-up for that is not as high as we would like it to be. Our anecdotal evidence is that there are barriers to online services in that parents are not confident about using them to upload money or that it is being done securely. We are working with our adult basic education teams to identify how we can help people who might need assistance with online payments.

That is the big part of the automation that we are doing in West Lothian. In our submission, I have given details of work that we are doing on semi-automation as regards period poverty. The council executive approved an allocation of £18,000 to pilot a period poverty payment to women who applied for crisis grants. The Scottish welfare fund member of staff would be trained to ask those sensitive questions. If there was a need for an extra payment, an extra £5 would be paid automatically on top of their Scottish welfare fund payment. That work started this year to help women to purchase sanitary products.

We have also been quite successful with semi-automation in our benefits campaign. It is a joint initiative that involves a range of council services and community planning partners in an area engaging with families that are affected by the benefit cap and supporting them to manage the reduction in their housing benefit. Using the housing benefit systems, we were able to identify the people who would be affected by the benefit cap. We then phoned those for whom we had a phone number and discussed with them how they would manage. If there was an indication that they would experience financial hardship because of the cap, they were automatically given the discretionary housing payment for the full financial year to help them with their finances. We sent letters to the people for whom we did not have a phone number. I believe that 83 households out of a possible 86 received the DHP because of the benefit cap.

We are looking at how we can automate other things to make it easier for people to get their maximum entitlements. Under universal credit, 18 to 21-year-olds who fall under certain criteria will get their housing costs paid through the Scottish welfare fund. Having spoken to our housing benefit and Scottish welfare teams, we are considering how we can identify those people and get that payment made automatically rather than having to wait for applications to come in and so on. I second what Richard Gass said about data sharing. More could be done but, because of the data-sharing protocols, it is difficult to share all the information that we would need.

Thank you. Finally, I invite Mr Campbell to talk about North Lanarkshire.

Thank you for inviting me. I do not have much to say, as Richard Gass and Nahid Hanif have covered it all. When I saw the committee’s question originally, I was going to ask you whether you are talking about automation or self-management, because one goes with the other, as I say in my written submission. In North Lanarkshire, the only automation that we have is around school meals. Other than that, we do work that is similar to that of West Lothian Council and Glasgow City Council with regard to take-up of the school clothing grant through council advice and information services, the citizens advice bureaux and the independent sector. We also work closely with the education service.

The council is about to launch a digitisation of council services over the next three to five years and welfare is one of the areas that is being looked at in that. We would look at housing benefit, the council tax reduction scheme, school meals, school clothing grants, blue badges, education maintenance grants and any other welfare benefit that the council administers on behalf of the UK Government, the Scottish Government or itself. For there to be an element of self-management in those areas, there would need to be automation at the end of that process. That would be the council’s main aim on that.

The council will need to consider the full service universal credit, which will be rolled out in North Lanarkshire in April, particularly in relation to housing costs. After the introduction of the live service of universal credit in North Lanarkshire in March 2015, there was initially quite a drop in the number of people claiming for the council tax reduction scheme because of some of the reasons that Robin Haynes talked about earlier, such as people not making the connection or not being advised. We will try to ensure that it is easier and seamless for folk to claim.

Another issue is data sharing. In relation to health and social care, North Lanarkshire Council has introduced a making-life-easier self-management system that uses the LifeCurve tool. People go through that and it ultimately directs them to places where they can get information, assistance or advice. That relies on people doing it for themselves. Our experience in social work is that, where it is left to claimants or their families to make claims for benefits, claims are often made incorrectly or are not made at all. Automation would need to be as easy as possible, meaning that, at the very first point of contact, all the relevant and correct information is collated and shared with the folk who would allow the automation to take place.

I do not have any more to add, because Richard Gass and Nahid Hanif have covered the other areas.

09:45  

I want to drill down into the evidence that you have given us. From your perspective, the intention behind automation is to maximise people’s income and ensure that they are in receipt of everything to which they are entitled. Ms Hanif, you said that you sent letters to people and you got a certain response, and then you got more responses when you followed that up. Do you think that the people who are most in need and are the hardest to get to are the ones that are still not engaging with you?

Absolutely. Our experience through the advice service is that the most vulnerable people do not open or read letters, because of where they are at that point in their lives. We do not get a huge response to letters. The telephone calls about the benefit cap that I talked about had more impact than letters, which is why we are doing some information gathering on the clothing grant to find out why people did not respond.

Is that the experience across the panel?

Yes. When we were doing work on what is known as the bedroom tax and on the benefit cap, we found that phoning or texting got a bigger response than writing. When the bedroom tax was introduced, we did a lot of door knocking to encourage people to claim their discretionary housing payments.

In Glasgow, there was a working group on the benefit cap that involved registered social landlords. We divvied up the work so that the RSLs looked after their tenants and my team attempted to address the benefit cap for private sector tenants. There were about 200 private sector tenants and we decided to write to them to advise that we would be coming to visit on a particular date and that they could cancel or rearrange that if they wanted to. Rather than put the onus on them to ask for advice, we decided to bring advice to their doorstep. We found that to be more successful than some other campaigns.

Thank you for your evidence. It is clear that your councils and other local authorities are doing incredible work to ensure that more people get their benefits.

The committee is interested in the whole concept of semi-automation and deeper automation, and the Scottish Government has stated a similar interest. If the Government were to take further action to encourage local authorities to do more in relation to automation, what would need to be done to remove the barriers, such as the data sharing issues? Can anything be done?

Any legislation introduced by the Scottish Government needs to address the legality of sharing information. We will still have the GDPR, so we will have to ensure that the declaration on any application form is sufficiently clear that information will be used in a way that is ultimately for the person’s benefit. We must draft the regulations with our eyes open.

In some areas, we will need to bring together two parts of the equation in order to complete the sum. When the disability benefits are devolved, receipt of what will be the Scottish disability living allowance—I do not know what the proper title will be, but it is called DLA for now—and the Scottish carers allowance will entitle folk to the severe disability premium and/or the carers premium in the council tax reduction scheme. We will need to ensure that there are connections between the two benefits, so that a person should not have to come forward to say, “By the way, I have received DLA—what does that mean for council tax?” We should put things in place internally to make that connection seamless.

Do the other panellists have a view?

I agree with Richard Gass.

Further to that point, depending on a person’s circumstances, they may qualify for different benefits, which further complicates matching those benefits. Richard Gass spoke about the uptake of free school meals, and I think that John Campbell did, too. It is one of the more difficult benefits, and it is interesting to know more about it. In Glasgow, for example, about 5,500 families have not taken up their free school meals. Can you give the committee any advice or information on how that take-up could be increased?

I do not know if we have the answer to your question, but a potential barrier may be that people do not want to eat the school meal. If a child’s friends are taking their dinner money down the street, the child may not want to use their free entitlement because they would be separated from their peers. School meals perhaps need to be attractive to those who could buy them, and a good step forward may be a change in how catering is delivered in school.

I heard that point loud and clear, and I recognise that it is a big issue for free school meals. Can the free school meals benefit be matched with another benefit, or is that too difficult? If a person qualifies for housing benefit, they qualify for a school clothing grant—that is easy because the data can be matched. Are there benefits where the data can be matched with that needed for free school meals assessment?

If a person claims housing benefit, the application should capture sufficient information to determine a school meal entitlement. A system of automation could advise a family of their right to free school meals. An onus on the family to take up the right may be a barrier. It might help if there was a scheme such as ParentPay and the parent was advised that their child’s card had been automatically credited with the value of free school meals, so they would not have to do anything other than turn up at school and take the meal.

Does the assessment of whether someone qualifies for free school meals include income and working tax credit?

The family needs to be on means-tested benefits or have tax credit below a certain figure. The housing benefit application form should capture all that information.

Good morning. You have highlighted that access to data is the most important factor for automation to go further. I do not want you to feel sorry for me, but I am on three committees and, in this week alone, the Justice Committee, the Education and Skills Committee and today’s committee have discussed targeting probably the same people in different aspects of their lives. The frustration is that every committee has heard, “We can’t get access to the data.” The data is there, but we have difficulty accessing it. It sounds as if John Campbell is trying to reinvent the wheel with his LifeCurve system, as he is re-collecting the data that is needed.

Is the data that is needed available elsewhere in someone else’s system? How do we find a way to access such data so that we do not end up using resource to collect something that we already have in a server somewhere? The more we protect people’s data, the more difficult it is to help them. How do we solve the problem?

There are two ways. One would be to have software developed that could automatically identify certain entitlements and issue a letter to the households saying, “You have claimed housing benefit. We have identified from your housing benefit claim that you also qualify for free school meals. Your child’s card has been loaded.” If the software can be updated, that is great, but there would be a cost to adapting the software.

The other way would be for local authorities to run reports on data that they already hold, and then have officers go through and process that data to draw up a list of households that they want to write to or visit.

The common theme that we have heard this week is that the DWP has the data and that the difficulty is in getting access to it. The data is there, but it is difficult for councils or anybody else to get it.

Councils can get some access to that data, but they are restricted in what they can use it for. Again, that goes back to Richard Gass’s point about changing the legislation. That would allow the information to be shared more easily—obviously for the right reasons—so that we could get some access, although what we could use it for would be restricted.

One of the barriers is declaration. When claimants sign for benefits, they sign a declaration to say that the information will be used for a specific purpose. There may be scope to go back and look at declarations, to allow that data to be used more widely.

There are data-sharing regulations that give local authorities the legal right to access information. We enter into a memorandum of understanding with the DWP and we are given permission to access its client index system to obtain that information, but only for the specific purpose of the administration of housing benefit, council tax, school meals, the Scottish welfare fund and charging for residential and non-residential care. If other areas are identified, there may need to be a negotiation between the Scottish Government and the Westminster Government to expand the data-sharing regulations. If there is a duty on us to do something, that could be the leverage for a change.

I am laughing, because that is the same answer that I have been hearing all week. Everyone has basically said that the Scottish Government and Westminster need to sit down and find a way to make it work.

I am particularly interested in the example that Ms Hanif provided about the clothing grant. That is a massive step forward. In some areas, kids are told at assembly, “If you think you might qualify, pick up the forms from the school office and see how you get on.” A letter sent to those who you know qualify, with a populated application form, is a massive step forward, but we are talking about benefit automation, where benefits are paid to someone who is eligible regardless of whether they have applied. What is preventing you from taking the next step and not just sending people a completed application form to be signed but automatically sending them their entitlement and their school clothing grant?

For West Lothian Council, it is to do with the declaration. The information that housing benefit claimants had provided was used specifically to calculate their entitlement to housing benefit, so if it was to be used for another purpose our legal team felt that they needed another signature. That is why they chose to do it in that way.

Are you saying that people had signed a declaration saying that the data could be used for that purpose and you used the information to identify their eligibility and to populate an application form?

That is right.

If you can do that, why not just give them the grant?

We also need bank details to be able to make payments into bank accounts. We did not have all that information.

Was there no thought to sending a cheque to those who qualified automatically?

This is the first time that we have done it, and we have learned a lot from the experience. As we move forward, we hope to be able to streamline the process further.

As I said, it is a massive step forward. I just wonder about taking it to its logical conclusion, since we are talking about benefit automation. Thank you for clarifying that.

10:00  

In Glasgow, we did that very thing: we looked at our information and sent PayPoint vouchers to 5,400 households, 87 per cent of which cashed the vouchers. I appreciate that there might be issues about whether councils have the authority to do that. However, I am fairly sure that the declaration on Glasgow City Council’s application form says that information can be used to assess other council entitlements, so we managed to overcome that barrier. We did not have people’s bank details, so we used PayPoint, which we use for Scottish welfare fund payments and other functions.

That is helpful. Thank you.

I want to come back to two points and perhaps get a wee bit more information on them. IT phobia must be quite a big issue for some people—it certainly is for me. In Edinburgh, we can pay for all primary school meals and trips online. However, there must be a fairly reasonable percentage of members of society who do not have online access and so will be held back by such an approach. How do you mitigate that?

We still need to make facilities available for people to bring cash into schools. Although that is perhaps not desirable, it cannot be the case that if parents are either not able to access online facilities or do not feel confident in doing so, they then do not make payments and end up getting bills or red reminders from the council. Therefore, schools still need to provide for cash payments to be made. We do not want that as a long-term solution; we want to provide support and training to families. Schools could perhaps demonstrate the ParentPay mechanism to families at their parents’ evenings, so that parents who are not confident in using it can see how it works and then feel greater confidence in going home and trying it themselves.

In any of your local authorities, have you ever tried having laptops at schools and having teachers help parents through the process there and then?

No.

Not to my knowledge.

To go back to Mr Adam’s comment about sharing and holding data, will local authorities be affected by the new regulation that will come in, as far as what you already hold on people is concerned? As members of the Scottish Parliament, we have been told that we need to get people’s permission to hold such information, beyond what we have now. Will you lose information in the springtime because of that? Secondly, how much can you already share between education and health and social care? Is it seamless or do you need people’s permission to do that?

In Glasgow, we feel that we are able to share information from the authorisation that is on housing benefit and council tax application forms. I cannot comment on whether that declaration will be sufficient after GDPR. I would like to think that it will be, but if it is not, the declaration will have to be revised to make sure that it is.

Can the information that you hold on someone at the moment still be held after the new regulation comes in?

I presume that the information can still be held on council tax or housing benefit, but the barrier might be whether we still have permission to share that information with education services. If education services already have information that we have shared, we might ask whether they are allowed to continue to hold it. If it no longer complies with the GDPR, they will probably not be. The GDPR will be a headache for us, but we hope that it will not be an insurmountable problem.

Would the other two panel members like to comment on that? We are not that far away from the regulation coming in now. What provisions are you making for beyond the spring and the summer?

I cannot comment on that. In West Lothian, there is a working group for GDPR, but I am not involved in it. I am not sure whether John Campbell can comment.

Managers in North Lanarkshire Council have all been given training on the new GDPR and are aware of its coming in. However, we will probably have to wait for instructions or guidance from the council. It will cause some concern and a lot of issues for advice and information services—in particular, in getting consent and knowing what they can and cannot use that information for. There is already an element of that. There will be major concerns in councils about the data that they hold, how long they can hold it and who they can share it with.

Mr Campbell’s evidence suggests that automation could eliminate stigma and, more importantly, value judgments. That has already been discussed this morning. I do not know whether I correctly picked up what Mr Gass said. Did you suggest that it is still possible for those who are in receipt of free school meals to be identified by their peers?

I believe so, because children are intelligent and, if there is a process whereby folk hand over cash at the front of the class for their school meals and certain folk are not invited to do so yet they receive school meals, it is probably pretty easy to join the dots. However, if there is a mechanism whereby some parents pay online and only a small number of folk pay cash at the front of the class, it will be less easy to identify the reason for children not handing over cash.

Obviously, it has been a while since I was at school, but I remember the double line in the dining room. I understood that more had been done to make sure that that difference was being disguised better. Stigma is a huge issue and we all understand why people are reluctant to take up benefits that clearly describe them as being from a low-income background. Do you feel that, with progress, if we are really serious about it, automation could help to get rid of some of the stigma?

Yes. It would all be in the background and nobody would know that it was happening. Whether it were free school meals or school clothing grants, the money would be sent automatically and parents would spend it in the same way as parents who were not eligible for it spend their money. There would be no line to show where the money had come from so they would look like anybody else in the community.

It is a huge concern, because we hear about a lot of free school meals not being taken up, probably by pupils who most need to take them up.

We recently passed the Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017, which requires the Scottish Government to set out what, if any, measures the Scottish ministers propose to take to support local authorities to consider the automatic payment of benefits and support. What support might be helpful for local authorities to make the process easier?

Automation will require IT systems that are fit for purpose, and perhaps the systems that they have now might not be sufficient. Having support for the resourcing of the software upgrade would probably be very welcome to local authorities.

I declare a local interest, as I am from North Lanarkshire. You mentioned the ambitions of the council to redo all its computing systems and automate them. Have you been feeding into the process to ensure that whatever comes out at the end is fit for the purpose of achieving the ambition to automate the paying of benefits?

We have been and will continue to be involved in that process, particularly around welfare, as our interest lies in making sure that people get the benefits that they are entitled to. The idea is that there will be one system, people will have one unique reference number and the system will hold all the details that will allow not just welfare activity but other council activity to happen automatically. Again, it is tied up with self-management, which makes it semi-automation, because the individual—the resident—will have to do the first thing before everything else can fall into place and we can feed into it.

My concern is perhaps old-fashioned, but it has been my experience in North Lanarkshire that claims have not been taken up. Although we do a lot of great work in health and social care—as do housing services and the third sector—we know that large numbers of people in our area are not claiming the benefits to which they are entitled. When we eventually reach people, we sometimes find out that services have been involved in the past and the person has said that they would claim the benefit themselves, yet they had not gone on to claim it or they tried to but found the situation to be too complex. My issue with automation is that if the information is not correct at the very beginning, people can still miss out.

There are complexities with even just the one benefits system because there are grey areas, such as the severe disability premium and the carers element for the council tax reduction scheme that Richard Gass mentioned. Would an automated system be able to pick up those grey areas, where there is an underlying entitlement to a benefit, rather than a benefit that is being paid to a person?

In 18 years in computing I never met a pragmatic computer.

I want to follow up Jeremy Balfour’s question. I know that the ins and outs of GDPR will be a matter for your information officers, so my question is not a technical one.

I was interested in what Ms Hanif said about declarations and the different points at which we gather permission for folk that live in our areas. Will GDPR and your new systems provide an opportunity to look at what is needed to allow automation to go ahead? I ask that in the knowledge that it is very easy for politicians to sit here and say, “Here’s a good idea, so why aren’t you doing it?” I recognise all the complexities that you have described in your evidence, but does that change present an opportunity because things will have to be done differently, as we all recognise?

Bear in mind that I did get a day’s training in GDPR. I am just trying to recall it all. [Laughter.]

There will be opportunities and we try to be proactive, but there will also be that bit of being passive because of the potential consequences for you as the individual data controller, or, potentially for the council, if you do not get it right. It is worth exploring whether things can be done differently.

We can make our consent forms as wide as we like, but the DWP or other organisations might say that we can only use the data for a specific reason for a specific time and, once it is done, it is done. The DWP might be right to say that, so that, for example, we cannot go back a year later and say, “I still have a mandate for Richard, so I can still ask for information about him.” It is complicated and we need to get it right. If we are moving towards automation, there must also be movement on data sharing.

If you go to the other extreme and ask someone to sign something that covers council tax benefit, housing benefit, this benefit, that benefit and the one that is yet to be invented, you might get to the point where, because someone is really wary about giving their permission as a consequence of all the stuff that they have seen about Facebook in the media, they do not make their claim or give up before they get any advice. We have to watch that we do not go the other way.

The answer might be to find some way for legislation to make it legal for that data to be transferred in specified circumstances. That is the case for some other areas.

You might not be able to answer my question, but I will put it to you anyway. The more successful that you are, the bigger the budget needs to be. For example, if those 5,500 children and families in Glasgow had automatic entitlement, it would increase the local authority’s expenditure. Are you picking up any concerns in your local authorities about the implications of deeper automation?

I am not privy to folk’s worries in different quarters. If that money can be reclaimed from either the Scottish Government or the UK Government it would not cause concern, but if the money would put pressure on already stretched local authority budgets, ultimately that would be a concern.

10:15  

Do you have any other thoughts on automation that we have not covered today?

For me, automation could work only for some straightforward benefits whereby a person would automatically get the benefit if they could satisfy a list of requirements. I talk about the judgment value, but that is for the straightforward benefits. If you take a benefit that requires consideration and a decision-making process, automation could be quite complex.

We come across people who say that they have been told by folk that they cannot claim certain benefits and, when we ask why they could not claim them, they say that the person told them that they did not meet the criteria. The people who decide on applications work for the DWP—we complete the form and send it in, but it is up to the DWP to decide whether the person will get the benefit. We have to bear in mind that there are some benefits that have discretion—particularly those related to disability, such as DLA, personal independent payments, attendance allowance and so on, where automation could be quite difficult.

I thank all the witnesses for attending the committee this morning.

10:16 Meeting continued in private until 10:58.