Fact-finding Visit
Agenda item 6 is next. Linda Fabiani visited Dumfries and Galloway Council because it has one of the welfare reform pilot projects. She will give us a report on her visit.
The visit was just before the summer recess—on 14 June—and this is the first opportunity to report back on it and to give Dumfries and Galloway Council the courtesy of having the report on its pilot on the official record, as are all the other pilots on which the committee has reported. The chief clerk, Simon Watkins, and I undertook the visit.
The DWP pilot for Dumfries and Galloway focused on digital inclusion and budgeting support. Digital inclusion was chosen because of the poor broadband coverage in the council area. For example, only 59 per cent of homes there have broadband and 25 per cent of the area has no coverage at all. There is a history there of assisting people to claim housing benefit and council tax reduction in local offices.
The digital pilot has operated with an online housing benefit and council tax reduction form since November 2012. Claimants are encouraged to access forms by self-serve initially, then they are assisted if necessary. The objectives were to increase the digital uptake from 58 per cent to 68 per cent, with 50 per cent of that being self-serve. Public access points have also been developed to reduce staff costs and to understand barriers to claiming online before universal credit comes in. The results reported on the day of our visit were that 47 per cent of forms received were self-serve against a target of 50 per cent, but 68 per cent of those were completed digitally, against 58 per cent for those who were assisted.
Barriers to digital access showed up fairly early on including people having no home broadband access, the quality of people’s broadband access at home and computer literacy and confidence. The latter was a big issue with people who were coming in for assistance, and we were quite impressed by the level of assistance that they got. There was an issue, too, about public access points not being convenient for claimants. My general comments will perhaps show why that was the case. There was also a need to change claimants’ expectations and those of the staff, because the staff in local offices had always been very hands on. Part of the pilot project was to teach the staff to be a bit more hands off and to encourage people to self-serve.
As far as budgeting support was concerned, the council has run budgeting courses for those referred from Jobcentre Plus. There were some successes, but there was a difficulty in encouraging attendance. Five out of 12 courses scheduled were cancelled, although 64 people went through the course. There is a general issue in Dumfries and Galloway with distances, people having to travel, transport and so on. However, what also showed up very clearly as a problem was confidentiality, especially in small communities. Because of the kind of rural area that Dumfries and Galloway is, people know each other, so embarrassment was quite a clear issue. Some of those who had attended and who knew people in the community who had chosen not to attend because of embarrassment at being seen to attend something that was about their not being able to manage their money said that to us. It was felt that it might therefore be worth looking at having a greater number of one-to-one sessions rather than group sessions.
I am laughing here, convener, because I am hopeless with acronyms and I am reading my note, which says that the biggest technical issue was understanding APR, and I do not have a clue what APR stands for.
It is interest rates.
Is it that simple? I was frightened to say that in case it was something much more complicated.
We know that people tend to look at all the adverts that they see on television and say, “Oh 5 per cent—that’s not bad”, without totting it up over the year or the length of a loan. It is the annual something rate.
Annual percentage rate.
Thank you, Annabelle. People do not understand what their total debt would be should they take out a loan.
The average age of the attendees was mid-30s and there was a high single parent count. There was a significant level of debt for those who attended, and the average debt was £25,000, which is a lot.
Three members of the council’s welfare reform sub-committee attended. It was interesting to see that, despite their party differences, they spoke as one about the problems with the bedroom tax.
On geographical factors, as I said, Dumfries and Galloway is a huge area with a high degree of rurality. There is also an issue around the lack of one-bedroom properties. Dumfries and Galloway Council does not own any properties because they were all transferred, and if I remember rightly, the council said that it had no one-bedroom properties at all, so there is a particular difficulty there. The council, on behalf of the housing partnership, said that it does not particularly want to provide one-bedroom properties either because it sees such properties as being inflexible. That goes back to what we have been saying for a long time about Scotland’s culture of building homes for life rather than transitory properties that people take for a wee while and then move on from. In an area of the particular nature of Dumfries and Galloway, that can be seen as much more important. The council has briefed the Secretary of State and it has written to Lord Freud on the issue.
The council wanted to emphasise the needs of the council area—I have mentioned its rurality—in respect of the public transport system. There are vast areas to cover and the area has a low-wage economy and a high level of retired people. There was particular mention of the high level of subsidy that the public transport system needs to allow people to access places such as Jobcentre Plus. There are particular difficulties there. There is a lack of employment and the jobs that are on offer are generally very low paid.
I will round off by saying that there has been an 800 per cent increase in claims for discretionary housing payments. That was when we visited the area in June; we are a bit further down the line now and it would be interesting to know what the current situation is. It was also interesting to note that, at that point, even as far back as June, it was being reported that the
“Scottish Welfare Fund demand locally has been higher than anticipated”.
Dumfries and Galloway Council feels that it has particular issues and problems and it is seriously concerned that they are not being addressed by the Westminster Government’s welfare changes.
Thank you very much for that comprehensive report, Linda. Does anyone have any comments or specific questions?
The one thing in the report that jumped out at me was that
“Scottish Welfare Fund demand locally has been higher than anticipated”.
That is interesting because it runs contrary to some of the information that we are getting that demand has been lower than anticipated. We will probably have to get to the bottom of that. Might it be possible to get a little more information on that so that we can compare the experience in Dumfries and Galloway with that in other areas?
That might be useful.
There was a point about barriers to digital access and how it is asking a lot to ask people to do everything online. Linda, you said that we would need to change claimant and staff expectations; what did you mean by that? What are the current expectations?
I picked up that because of the nature of the area and the local service that had been provided before, there was very much a culture of being able to sit down with someone and work through the process and of the officer doing most of the work for the claimant. Because of the changes to the welfare system that are being imposed, there is a recognition that people will have to be more computer literate if they are to work through the process on their own. If someone makes a mistake on a form, they could end up having to visit a food bank or, in some cases, could be fined if their mistake is deemed to be at that level. There was very much a wish to make people more self-sufficient in making their claims—clients and staff, because the staff are used to helping folk so it is quite difficult for them to sit back and tell their clients that they have to do it completely on their own now. I was talking about how people on both sides of the system expect that it should work.
I asked the question because we can promote digital access and so on, but if it does not work, the alternative is that we rethink our approach and perhaps say that digital access is not the way forward because it is exclusive and some people will never be able to cope with it.
We can say that, as long as we do not say that this was “our approach” because I will have nothing to do with the kind of stuff that has been imposed on people.
Yes, but are we not also talking about access to the Scottish welfare fund and other Government resources?
No, this is just about the DWP pilot.
I was talking about in our dealings with the Government generally.
It might well be interesting to ask about not only this pilot but the others, given how long it is since we visited them. Perhaps we should ask for a general update.
The pilots all indicated that they would keep us informed, so that should not be too difficult. We will probably ask the clerks to clarify the situation.
Can council tax reduction not be claimed through the system either?
I do not know.
It is just that we are responsible for that.
We have a session scheduled for later this year that will look principally at discretionary housing payments, and we intend to focus mainly on the pilots that we have visited. That will give us an update on where they have got to.
Perhaps we could address Ken Macintosh’s issues as part of that.
It is important to clarify that we are talking about a DWP pilot and it is the DWP and the UK Westminster Government that has said that, in principle, all applications must be done online. That is where the debate about digital inclusion and exclusion stems from, and the committee has looked at the issue in reasonable depth in the past wee while.
If there are no other points, I thank Linda Fabiani. That was very helpful and we will keep an eye on the information that she received and on the information that we receive from all the pilots that we have visited during the past few months.
That brings us to the end of the public part of our meeting and we now go into private session.
11:43
Meeting continued in private until 12:31.