DWP skewered in Carers Allowance inquiry

The head of the Carers Allowance inquiry has told MPs that there is a ‘force of resistance’ in the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). Liz Sayce was giving evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee session on what the department has done since her review.

Spoiler: it’s sweet fuck all.

DWP “minimising” problem, says Sayce

Sayce told the committee that rather than own up to their problems and attempt to do better, the DWP has instead attempted to “minimise” the problem. She also said the department had been focused on deflecting blame.

Chair of the committee, Debbie Abrahams, asked Sayce what she thought the DWPs progress had been like, since the carer’s allowance issue was first revealed in 2018.

While Sayce acknowledged that small improvements happened, she skewered the DWP:

What didn’t happen was there was no overarching plan to address the recommendations that the [2019 Work and Pensions] committee made, ensure that the issues and really the injustices that carers had faced with overpayments and nobody senior tracking it

Sayce’s review finally made it clear that the DWP’s ‘systemic’ issues were to blame for many carers being overpaid and that no blame lay at individual carers’ feet. However, just days after her review was published, a senior DWP figure published a blogpost still blaming carers.

Neil Couling wrote:

Incidentally what has been missed in all the [media] coverage is that this error (and hands up we made it and we will put it right) affects only a relatively small number of cases and wasn’t the cause of the original complaint. Because at the heart of the overpayment issues in CA is a failure to report changes of circumstances

Speaking about Couling’s blogpost she said:

I was really distressed by that blog, as I am sure many people were. Because what you were hoping for from senior people at that point was to really share with colleagues across the department the seriousness of this – what has been learned, what is going to be put right. Not attempt to minimise or again place a responsibility back on the carers, as if it was their fault.

Culture of ‘resistance’ in DWP

She then went on to talk about the culture of the DWP as a whole:

When I was doing the review, I found people at different levels who were serious about wanting to improve things, including front line officials. And since then I can see that there are some people who are really wanting to learn and wanting to make change

But there’s also these almost sort of forces of resistance, which which worry me, and it’s about culture.

Sayce did say, however, that it was heartening to see ministers and the permanent secretary refuting Couling’s claims.

She said she thought there was a ‘job to be done’ to ensure everyone across the DWP. Which lined Abrahams up nicely to ask what Sayce thought that ‘job’ should involve.

In her answer, Sayce threw shade at senior officials like Couling:

Culture change is a difficult thing, isn’t it? But I think the first thing is that the there needs to be a modeling from senior people across the department about the importance of learning, the importance of getting things right for the people who are claiming the benefits

Hypocrisy

Sayce also called out the hypocrisy of the department penalising claimants for not responding quickly enough when they have excessive wait times. Asked by Joanna Baxter if she thinks the DWP customer charter for carer’s allowance is enough, she said:

One of the things that came through in the review was that sometimes, maybe for understandable reasons, the DWP didn’t respond very promptly. Somebody would communicate, and they didn’t get a response in a swift timescale, but they were expected to respond within specified timelines.

She continued:

The charter says something like… ‘we’ll reply as soon as we can’ So then you think, well, can the carer reply as soon as they can? There should be a kind of reciprocal rights and responsibilities here

She also raised the issue that while the DWP have contracted out the helplines jobs to bring down wait times, those on the end of the phone aren’t experts. So customers then have to wait for someone actually within the department to get back to them, which can often get lost. Sayce said this is something that also needs to have better regulations.

Speaking about staff, Sayce said that’s why she felt senior members of staff had perhaps brushed the issue under the carpet:

I felt that sometimes there was a kind of effort to almost minimise what had gone wrong to reassure staff that they hadn’t done anything. And actually that’s the wrong thing to do. As a leader in such a circumstance what you need to do, I think, is to own the problem, explain why the system wasn’t right.

DWP culture needs demolishing

Finally speaking about the culture again, she said more needed to be done by senior figures

I think it’s important with culture change to understand where you’re at, to understand what you’re doing, to shift the culture and to track it. The senior team needs to be on that case. It needs to be a bit more systematic than just good intent.

Sayce is right, that more needs to be done to change the culture in the DWP. But when they’ve had so many chances to improve, it’s hard to be as positive as her that they actually want to.

The DWP is a department entrenched in demonising poor and disabled people. For a positive culture shift to happen it needs to be completely stripped back to the bare bones and built again from the ground up. As a department that wants to actually support those who need it, not work against them.

Featured image via the Canary