Social Justice and Social Security Committee

Meeting date: Thursday, June 29, 2023

Official Report 628KB pdf

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Disability Benefit Processing Times

We will now hear from Social Security Scotland on disability benefit processing times. I welcome David Wallace, who is the chief executive of Social Security Scotland; Ally MacPhail, who is deputy director of strategy, change, data and engagement at Social Security Scotland; and Sue Scotland, who is deputy director of the social security programme management and delivery division in the Scottish Government’s social security directorate. All the witnesses join us in the room.

Before we begin, I remind members who are online to allow broadcasting colleagues a few seconds to turn your microphone on before you start to speak, please. You can indicate with an R in the dialogue box in BlueJeans if you wish to come in. Again, I ask everyone to keep questions and answers as concise as possible.

I invite David Wallace to make a brief opening statement.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak to the committee this morning. I will not reintroduce my colleagues. You will hear from them as they answer questions. Thank you for introducing them, convener.

It has been just over six months since I last appeared in front of the committee. There are a number of new committee members whom we have not yet had the opportunity to welcome to the agency. I very much look forward to welcoming you to Dundee. We are looking at a time in September for those members who can join us.

When I joined you in December, we were in the midst of extending the Scottish child payment for people under 16. We now have over 300,000 children in receipt of the Scottish child payment and, in total, we have paid over £240 million since it was launched in February 2021. Since that appearance in December, we have also completed the first winter heating payments to almost 400,000 eligible clients in Scotland.

Members will know and appreciate that social security is one of the largest delivery programmes and transfers of powers under devolution. By the end of 2024-25, we will deliver 16.5 million payments a year to people in Scotland, worth around £6 billion to an estimated 2 million people. We have done this by building a brand-new public service from scratch, and we have introduced 13 Scottish Government benefits, seven of which are entirely new forms of financial support that are available only in Scotland.

I have spoken before to the committee about the pace of delivery. Again, I will use the example of the Scottish child payment, which went from inception to its initial delivery inside 18 months. We do that by working closely with colleagues from the Scottish Government to create the new social security system in Scotland. Scottish Government colleagues work with ministers on the policy, processes and systems, and Social Security Scotland uses those to deliver the benefits.

We also work in line with the ministerial decisions on who can be paid benefits and how much they should get. This is also a joint programme with our United Kingdom colleagues from the Department for Work and Pensions. I am happy to answer questions on that, although I give the usual caveat that I am unable to comment on the policy behind some of the benefits.

Turning to processing times, I want to be absolutely clear that I know that some of the benefit processing times are far longer than is acceptable. I share the frustration on that, and we as an organisation are absolutely committed to giving clients decisions as quickly as possible and making sure that we have the information required to get decisions right the first time. We expected that processing benefits would need a little bit of time to settle in, and that is very much in line with all new benefit launches, including the 2013 launch of personal independence payment.

I assure the committee that we are committed to getting it right for our clients, and we are taking urgent action to address and improve the processing times. Action is already under way to reduce those times, and I believe that we can demonstrate that those actions are having an impact. We have included in our written submission information on some of the work that is going on, and I will reiterate some of that. We have already made changes to the application form for clients. We are drawing far more on our in-house health and social care practitioners to make early decisions that are based on their expertise.

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We have made a number of changes to how we handle calls so that we can ensure that our clients are able to speak to us about applications. We are reinforcing with our clients how they can help us with supporting evidence to reach timely decisions. We are also taking a comprehensive look at every step of the journey, from people applying to benefits right through to payments. We will ensure that we do anything that that identifies to help processing times.

I look forward to taking your questions. Thank you for your time.

Thank you—that was very helpful.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. It was interesting that David Wallace acknowledged from the outset the concerns around processing times. Our constituents are certainly talking about that. I looked at your social media feed last night and, clearly, that is where a lot of traffic and anger are. What parts of the process are contributing to that long process time? Is there a difference between adult disability payment and child disability payment, and how they are being managed and processed?

A number of things are going on, so I will outline a couple of them and ask colleagues to come in as well. As I said in my opening statement, adult disability payment in particular is still a relatively new benefit—we are still less than a year on from having launched it. Everybody involved in that process has been new to the organisation, and we have new systems and processes. For the past eight months or so, we have had more applications coming into the organisation than decisions being made so, inevitably, we have built up a head of work although, as you rightly said, those are clients’ applications that we need to process. We are now in a position where we can demonstrate that we are processing far more applications than are coming in. Think of filling up a bath with applications; we have spent seven months filling it up, and now we are starting to really get into those applications.

The main difference between the child and adult disability payments is that we have the ability to do consultations on adult disability payment. The main element that we are seeing initially as a bit of a blocker is the supporting information. There is a bit of a difference between child and adult disability payments when it comes to getting quality supporting evidence. For children in particular, we find that schools are generally aware of how a condition impacts on a child, so they are quite a rich source of information. Aside from the consultations and where we might get supporting evidence from, both benefits are essentially in the same position.

So it is not necessarily an issue about capacity in the organisation and processing time?

I would not describe it as a capacity issue at the moment. As you know from previous benefits, we build up capacity as the benefit goes live and, as that happens, our first applications are the first time that we see things. We have people who are new to the organisation, and they are picking up a process for the first time and seeing a client with a particular condition for the first time. Clearly, the more experience they build up, the quicker that becomes. It normally takes about a year to get somebody from joining the organisation to their being fully effective in making decisions. Clearly, we are only really just hitting that period for some of the people who have come in. At the moment, it is less about the overall resource of the organisation and more about making sure that the resources that we have are up to that wider capability and able to make decisions.

Have you reviewed the information that you provide to clients during that period? A lot of people have said that they have been asked to provide information seven times. Have you reviewed how people are kept informed of where they are on that journey, including how long it may actually take, so that expectations can be managed?

I will say something and then bring in Sue Scotland, who can say a bit more about her role and how we are working on that.

We have certainly been looking at the information that we give to clients through the process. I mentioned in the opening statement that we have already made some changes to the application form to try to emphasise to people that, if they have supporting evidence, they should give it to us. We recently published some research, which is the first bit of research about people who have gone through the adult disability process. Coming through from that, there was certainly a feeling that clients believed that it would be easier for us to get information. Although we can, of course, collect information on behalf of clients, we still need to go to the same people to get that. Therefore, if clients have information available, we have been trying to be clear in the application process that they should please give us that. The classic example that we use is a prescription list. Lots of clients will have a prescription list available, and if that can be shared with us early, that helps us to make decisions.

We have also tried to put in place a step so that, when we first look at an application, we get back in contact with the client and ask whether they have anything else. The client will have given us some stuff or asked us to collect it, but we will ask whether they have anything to hand that they think would help.

I will ask Sue Scotland to reflect on the point about informing clients.

I work for the Scottish Government on the programme—we look at the service design and then the implementation, and we work very much hand in hand with the agency. When we delivered ADP and CDP, our teams continued to work with the agency to look at and prioritise some of the activity that we were seeking to deliver. From a notifications perspective, we are revisiting the end-to-end journey to see whether we can add in any steps. There are definitely steps that we can put into that process, and that review is under way.

As David Wallace mentioned, we are also working on the applications and how we can interact with clients at a much earlier stage, rather than wait until later in the journey to ask for information that may seem to be asked for in the wrong order. We are looking at that early-stage interaction. We are also looking at digital and different ways in which we can interact with clients much more regularly as their application progresses through the service.

Good morning. I want to ask about getting supporting information from third parties. David Wallace mentioned schools, and you clearly have to get information from health boards, local authorities, general practitioners and, maybe, third sector organisations. The Scottish Commission on Social Security said:

“Eliciting timely and detailed supporting information from busy professionals, which is focused on daily living and mobility activities, will be challenging.”

What steps are you trying to take to smooth that process and reduce processing times by getting information in a more timely manner from those third-party organisations?

I absolutely recognise the comment that has been made about that being challenging. Some of that is the work that I outlined to Mr Briggs. One of our first steps is to say to clients, “If you have information, please give it to us.” That will help us to make more timely decisions. We are also working very closely with GPs and health boards, as you described, to try to make that process easier. As I referred to at the start, there is some internal learning for us to do in picking up the new processes, in how we ask better questions of health professionals and in how we find the right health professional who may be in contact with a client.

In the very early days, we said that we should not rely on GPs. Our early reflection was that we probably still relied a bit too much on GPs for information when, actually, they are not always the best people for that, as they may not be in direct contact with the clients daily. Therefore, it is probably easier if we find the healthcare professionals who are able to do that.

As I outlined, we are also using our health and social care practitioners far more. As you will be aware, when we launched the adult disability payment, one of the fundamental changes that we made from the UK system was to bring health and social care practitioners into the organisation. We have colleagues in the organisation who have a vast wealth of knowledge and expertise around all of the conditions that our clients may have. One of the improvement actions that we have taken is to ensure that, if we are struggling to get supporting evidence, we consider whether there is enough in the application—that does not necessarily lead to a client having a consultation as such, but a case discussion might help the decision maker to understand the condition and the impact of it.

Ally MacPhail might want to say a little bit about how we are working with that set of stakeholders, in particular. We will continue to work with health boards to try to get the information that we know is there. A portal is in place for GPs, in particular, to help to provide information, and we are working with GP surgeries to ensure that that is active as well. You will be aware that we recently introduced an ability to pay third sector providers to give us the information as well. That is a relatively recent addition that we have put in place to ensure that that is not a barrier.

Ally, is there anything else that you want to mention?

I will mention just a couple of things. I was going to mention the fee to third sector organisations, which is helpful. We have an operational reference group, where we engage on, I think, a six-weekly basis with third sector organisations and provide information on what we are doing operationally, so that they can understand what we are doing, how we are doing it, and some of the challenges and learning that we face. That forum is about engagement. On the point that was made by SCOSS, that is about the feedback loop of what we are experiencing and the challenges in processing cases, and also how third sector organisations can support us in doing that in a timely fashion.

That has been happening. The engagement with the stakeholder community has been fairly constructive in that area. Those organisations recognise that they can help us in that space to gather information more quickly and reach more speedy decisions. Over the summer, we are looking to roll out a further engagement plan, again with that stakeholder community, where we set out what we are trying to do and how those stakeholders can help us in doing that. Again, conversations have been on-going, but we are looking to build on that. David Wallace will probably lead on some of those conversations with senior stakeholder representatives, so that they understand exactly what we are looking to do.

We have touched on processing times. Once you get that supporting information, and it is complete, what is the delay between having the information and making a decision on an individual’s case? How long is that period, on average?

We probably do not have that particular measure to hand. We could certainly take that away and see, but we probably do not have that direct measure in place. I am looking to Ally, who might tell me differently.

We do not have that measure. Are you referring to any potential blockers once we have the information?

Yes.

I suggest that there are not any, but we can provide more information on that.

We have spent time with our case managers to understand what they do with that supporting information, and how they do case conferences with our professional colleagues in health and social care. That is part of the improvement action that we are taking. There has been a real desire, through the values of the organisation, to get to the right outcome for the client. It has perhaps been in the minds of our staff to continually seek that extra piece of information, which may or may not exist. We are building capability and confidence in our staff so that they understand the information and are able to understand the impact on the client, and can make a decision at a point that is helpful. The organisation is still learning.

I suggest that there are no such blockers, but perhaps there is an issue with our confidence and how we use the evidence that we have.

Are there on-going information technology problems?

Do you mean in relation to making decisions?

I mean in processing cases.

No.

What about duplicate profiles?

There will be some duplicate profiles. For newer members, in particular—I might bring Sue in on this point, as well—I note that the programme of delivery, which I outlined at the start, is one of the Scottish Government’s biggest technology programmes. As, I think, you are aware, we are delivering it in an agile way, which means that we deliver enough technology to deliver the benefit, which allows us to go on and deliver more benefits. Throughout that process, additional functionality comes into the system. The consequence of being agile—it is a feature of delivery, rather than an error, as it were, in the system—is that, when we launch a benefit, we do not have the complete technology in front of us. If that is perceived as an issue, it is a consequence of the way in which we are delivering the benefit.

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That is an issue for the individual who cannot get a decision because there is a duplicate profile. An IT fix needs to be done to merge the two profiles so that a decision maker can make a decision. They cannot make a decision until the two profiles are merged. The information that we had on a particular case—it is now resolved, thankfully, but it took five months—was that there was an IT issue.

I am happy to look at that. Duplicate profiles do not commonly come to me as an issue. In the case of your constituent, that is clearly unacceptable, and they have my apologies; I am happy to take the matter away. Duplicate profiles do not come to me as one of the major things that need to be corrected in the system, so I am happy to look at that instance.

Okay.

I ask Sue whether that has crossed her radar.

That has not come into any of the work that I have been doing.

Such things will exist in all systems. Five months is too long to rectify a problem, but all systems potentially have duplicates that we need to eradicate in order to make sure that the data in them is correct. I had not heard about that problem, but I am happy to take the matter away.

The wider point about agile delivery is a really important element of how we are delivering. Audit Scotland has reported on the progress of the programme at various points; it has highlighted agile delivery as being the right mechanism for us to use, although doing so means that, at various stages, we operate using what we term a minimum viable product.

Thanks very much.

I will bring in James Dornan, then Katy Clark. James is joining us online.

Good morning. I would like to discuss the consultations. I understand why there was an expectation that consultations would not be the norm, given people’s bad experiences with PIP, but the consultations that have taken place for ADP have generally been very well received. Are staff spending a lot of time trying to make decisions without a consultation when, sometimes, a consultation might very well be what is needed?

Staff are not deliberately trying to avoid putting cases to consultation. As Ally MacPhail said, our staff are absolutely focused on trying to get what is best for the client, including when doing so potentially adds to delays in the system. The example that I give is from when Sue Scotland, Ally MacPhail and I sat with some of our decision makers to look at the matter.

Even when we think that there is enough information to make a decision in a case, if the decision maker thinks that a higher level of award might be merited, we try to get additional information to support that. It is not as simple as our saying that we do not think that there is enough information to make a decision in a case. The organisation and the people in it have committed to getting the best possible right outcomes for clients. Bringing health and social care practitioners into the organisation and trying to switch the 80:20 ratio—in the UK system, about 80 per cent of people have an assessment, and we were trying to turn that around—was about us thinking that the evidence on which to make a decision would already be there in 80 per cent of cases. It was not about there being a target for not using consultations.

As part of the improvement, we are looking at cases to see whether we could come to a decision more quickly if we put a case through for a consultation. You also highlighted the fact that feedback from clients who have gone through the process is, on the whole, overwhelmingly positive. For them, it feels very different from going through the assessment. That is good, because the system was entirely designed to be different. We are not scared to put people through consultation if that is the right thing to do. It comes back to the wider point that our teams need to find the right balance in respect of information, getting decisions right for clients and pulling cases to a quick conclusion.

All the reports are very complimentary about how consultations have been dealt with. Given that, is there a danger that trying to speed up the process—I completely understand why you want to speed up the process; everybody wants that—will jeopardise potential outcomes, or do you have safeguards in place to make sure that that is not likely?

I would like to think that we have safeguards in place to do that. We have fundamentally changed what a consultation looks like. The guidance that our health and social care practitioners have when they are completing consultations means that doing more consultations will not mean that we suddenly revert to what happened under the UK system. That will not happen. It might, however, cause a bottleneck in a different place, so we are really mindful of that and are careful in trying to ensure that all the improvement actions do not just create bottlenecks elsewhere in the system.

Our making sure that we have the capacity to do more consultations, if we do them, will be really important, but we will not jeopardise what it feels like to undergo a consultation, because to our clients, as you will be aware, making it feel different from the previous assessment system was one of the fundamental 2016 consultation responses. When we look at what makes the system different, that is a fundamental part of it. There are other elements that we could talk about—in particular, local delivery and up-front support—but we will not jeopardise what it now feels like to go through a consultation with the organisation.

Nothing but good words have been said about the process. I will leave it at that, convener. Thank you very much.

I now hand over to Katy Clark, who will be followed by Paul O’Kane, who is joining us online.

I want to ask about the extent to which we are currently still in a settling-in period. In your submission, you said that

“it was always expected that processing times would need a settling in period … while staff gain experience and new systems are introduced.”

You have said that, usually, it might take a member of staff up to a year to really get across the whole role. The child disability payment has been available nationally since November 2021, but there does not seem to be any indication that processing times are going down. Do you consider that we are still in the settling-in period in relation to that specific benefit?

I think that we are still, overall, in a period in which we are settling in. When we moved swiftly from looking at the child disability payment to looking at the adult disability payment, some of the expertise that had helped us to launch the child scheme moved across to the adult scheme. Although, on paper, the CDP looks like something that has been more stable for longer, that is not necessarily the case.

When I made my opening statement, I talked about the layering of benefit upon benefit. Over the Christmas period, clearly we were launching a benefit that did not fully bed in before we launched the next benefit, which put extraordinary pressure on people, so guidance changes. That goes back somewhat to agile delivery. Even though the child disability payment might have looked stable, we were still making changes to the system, which would have affected our decision makers and our client advisers who were dealing with that system. We do not just launch a benefit on a single platform, say that it is stable, then complete and leave it. The organisation is, in effect, going through a period of consistent change, which can be challenging for staff who are working on the benefit. I take the point: we have had a year longer on the CDP scheme so, on paper, that should mean that we are in a better place in respect of how to approach the matter.

Can you indicate when you think processing times might start to come down for the child disability payment?

Internally, we are making good progress on that. The thing that gives us confidence internally is that we are seeing the productivity of our people really start to increase, which is driving how many decisions we make. Over the past couple of weeks, we have been making far more decisions in the organisation than we have ever made. Our record weeks for numbers of decisions made have been the past couple of weeks. The more we can do that, the more we will cut through the head of work. We are hoping, by the end of the summer, to bring that average time under the 80 mark, and, as a stepping stone, we will continue to work on processing times.

Thank you. Will you keep the committee advised about progress on that and whether there are specific problems? If you could proactively share that with us, that would be very helpful.

You will have seen that there has been a lot of publicity around the personal independence payment and the fact that decisions on it are currently being made more quickly than decisions on adult disability payments. Do you expect the gap to narrow over time, or do elements of the adult disability payment decision-making process mean that it is likely often to be lengthier than the process for decisions on the personal independence payment?

I will not focus on the gap; the gap could narrow because PIP applications have increased, which clearly nobody wants. I am more focused on bringing down the processing times for our clients rather than measuring the gap in relation to the DWP. You are right that some things are fundamentally different in our system—we have talked about information gathering—so the systems are not always completely comparable. The main thing for our clients is, as I said, that we bring down our processing times, rather than that we measure the gap with the DWP.

I have to say that the DWP has done an extraordinarily good job of bringing down its processing times. Historically, that has clearly not always been the case. I referred to benefit launches. If you look at the profile of processing times, you will see that, when PIP was launched as a new benefit, the processing time went up to 35 weeks before it was brought down. We are following a profile that is similar to but lower than the one for that benefit launch. I do not see this as a competition or consider DWP to be a comparator for our clients. For us, it is about getting our processing times down.

I do not see it as being a comparator either, but claimants have said to me that their experiences with Social Security Scotland are worse than those that they had with DWP. They have also said that they did not believe that that could be possible. Do you agree that we need to ensure that we have the highest standards and the quickest processing times, and that the expectation is that the process will be better than it was with DWP? If DWP’s processes are getting better, I very much welcome that. How quickly can we expect better processing times for the adult disability payment?

By the end of the summer, we should start to see that. There will be a bit of a lag in our published statistics, but I am happy to come back to the committee and to keep it informed.

It would be very much appreciated if you could keep us closely advised. Thank you.

How are processing times impacting on clients? What is the view of the impact that they are having, and how does Social Security Scotland keep people informed and updated throughout the process, while they are waiting? Is there regular communication? Are there set points in the process at which communication is proactive?

I will reiterate what I have been saying from the start, Mr O’Kane. Everybody in the organisation is completely committed to our clients. As I described in some of my other answers, part of the reason for the increasing times is that we have been trying to get absolutely the best for our clients. No client should be in a cycle in which they have not had communication from the agency about processing times. We have also been trying to do some things using telephony. Under our system, it is not unusual to phone a client to ask about the supporting evidence and to say where we are with it.

We would like to get much smarter in our use of technology; Sue Scotland referred to that in previous answers. Nobody is waiting for the entire duration of the average processing times before they hear from the organisation. We expect clients to be contacted multiple times during the period. In the case of some applications, we will simply have lost contact with the client; such instances push up the averages. Again, that is where, as an organisation, we need to become clearer about how we close off cases in which we have, for whatever reason, effectively lost contact with clients and cannot communicate with them.

Sue Scotland might say more about how we can improve that and, for example, whether we can look at communicating by text message. When I was here in December, Mr Balfour asked a question about the possibility of having a direct portal for clients. He asked whether it would it be helpful for the client to be able to dial in and see the progress of their application. At the time, I said that that would, of course, be helpful for clients. We continue to look at such things. Sue Scotland will come back in on the question of automated contact with clients.

This is about automation and personalisation—it is not about just sending a generic text message, although we will update people via text message. As well as taking that proactive step at the start of the process, we are looking at ways in which we can have touch points throughout it. It is good to have such interaction with a person and to have people calling clients to say that we have received their application. That has been received very well by clients.

We are also looking at the end-to-end journey that I mentioned to see what automation we can put into it. It is not simple, but we are looking at automation proactively as an overall improvement for the client journey through the process.

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I will expand on the point about the telephone system and people who call for advice. I have seen data showing that one in five calls was left on hold for over half an hour, and that 28,000 calls waited over an hour. The longest call waiting time that was recorded was, I think, three hours, seven minutes and 25 seconds. Obviously, there is a particular issue: I do not know whether it is about the volume of calls or about not having a robust enough system in place. Can you say something about the action that is being taken to rectify those issues?

Certainly. I am conscious that those numbers are unacceptable. They probably relate to the last statistics that we published. One thing that we have done internally is to be far more actively engaged in moving resource directly on to the phone lines. Rather than try to have a fixed resource based on what we think will be the volume of calls coming in, we now have performance managers inside the organisation who actively manage every individual call queue and move resource as required. We are already seeing the numbers come down quite significantly.

I will bring in Ally MacPhail. In the stakeholder forum that Ally referred to, we have asked whether people are starting to see improvements on the ground, and we believe that the answer is that they are. Ally, do you want to reflect on that point?

There are a couple of points to make. We recognise that the numbers that you quoted are not acceptable, so we have put measures in place to seek improvement. We have done a few things. I hope that we are being a bit smarter with management of queues by trying to direct our clients to the right queues so that they get to speak to the right individual to talk about their case more quickly. We are seeing an impact and benefit from that; we are hearing that from the stakeholder community.

On the point about technology, we have spoken to our supplier about how we can best use the technology that we have available to us. We are starting to see benefits that we can implement through various activities that we can take forward, including gathering management information. We have also had conversations with other suppliers in the sector, including NHS 24, about what they do well and what we can learn from that. As you would expect, we are looking at our process with a view to improving things. As David Wallace said, we are, anecdotally, starting to see feedback that suggests that a difference is being made in that area.

Sue, do you want to pick up that point? As I said in my opening statement, we are looking, end to end, at every place where our clients interact with the organisation to see whether we can make improvements. We will include technology in that review.

In the end-to-end review, as we review each step in the process we look at where and when we can bring in improvements. We look at the short, medium and long terms—at what we can do immediately and what we can plan for the future. That is very much a joint activity between the agency and the Scottish Government’s programme. Prioritisation and how we do that is at the heart of what we are trying to do as we take opportunities to improve the journey for our clients.

If I may, convener, I will ask another question. David, you mentioned that you expect to see call waiting times coming down. Do you have a timescale to work to for bringing them down? Do you have targets for that so that we will be able to analyse what improvement looks like?

We are taking those actions now. Internally, we now see call waiting times, on average, below the 20-minute mark. We will continue to monitor that and try to drive it down. Again, it will take a little bit of time for the numbers to be reflected in the published statistics, but the work that I described on active queue management has helped to drive times down.

I am not saying that we will look at that in the future; I am saying that we are doing it fundamentally now, in order to try to make the telephone experience of clients who phone the organisation far better. We will absolutely see the numbers coming through in the published stats; we see them now, internally. As Ally MacPhail said, when we speak to our stakeholders, they tell us that they also see improvement.

This is similar to Katy Clark’s request: it would be useful if the committee could be updated on progress with that, if there is willingness to do so.

I am happy to do that.

Thanks very much, Paul.

I will bring in Marie McNair, after whom we will come to the end of the session, unless other members have questions.

It is good to see you all at the committee. Understandably, the session has focused on processing times. I found your written submission very helpful. Social Security Scotland and the DWP have different approaches. Illustrating that point, in section 12 of your submission, you state that both the CDP and ADP

“improve significantly on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefits which they replace.”

To give some context for what we are dealing with, can you expand on what you mean by that?

When we speak about child and adult disability payments in particular, I always highlight three significant changes that were made to the process. The first is the application process. Huge effort was invested in working with clients to get the online application to a point at which people could readily and easily use it. We have done some sessions with MSPs and constituency staff to try to illustrate to them what the front end of the process looks like. For example, we think that use of photography in a disability application form is quite groundbreaking. Prompts remind clients that some things that they might have normalised in their life will actually help them to qualify for a benefit, so we advise them to think about those things, as well. The application process was absolutely a key change that we made, up front. For disability benefits, around 70 per cent of our clients now use that channel.

We were also really clear that all channels should be available for all benefits. That digital channel suits people who are digitally able or who are supported to do it digitally, but we are also available through telephony, so if people want to make an application over the phone we help them to do that.

There is also the channel of meeting face to face. The second big change that I always talk about is the local delivery function; we now have people based everywhere in Scotland to help people with applications. The rationale for that is that people should not have to go to a third party to negotiate applying for a benefit. The premise is that, if you want to apply for a benefit, we will help you to do it. Our local delivery teams are in every area; I am happy to recirculate a list of contacts. I know that some members have been meeting our local delivery representatives, and we absolutely encourage that.

In appropriate instances, we have people who can go into the houses of people who need support with claiming disability benefit. Anecdotally, we hear examples of people who would not previously have applied for benefits doing so. When we speak to our local delivery teams, they say that they are building up their own relationships. They might be in a library every Tuesday for a month or so, thereby destigmatising applying for benefits, before somebody comes and tells them that they need help and support. That is the second fundamental change.

As has been touched on previously, we have also moved towards bringing health and social care practitioners in and we have thought about what a consultation feels like.

Bringing those three things into the organisation are the major changes that we have made to the system. Those were all driven by clients’ experience. That leads us to say that we believe that they are improvements, because they are what clients asked for way back in the 2016 consultation.

Thanks. Those changes make the process much more accessible. Comparisons are made between processing times for PIP and ADP. Given that the decision-making processes are very different, do you think that those comparisons are of much value?

I go back to my answer to Ms Clark. It is inevitable that people will make such comparisons. I do not think that they are hugely helpful, although it is difficult to say that against the backdrop of there being a processing time that is clearly unacceptable. I make it utterly clear that we want to bring the numbers down. The systems are different, however, especially at the front end. As I said earlier, our teams are absolutely focused on trying to get people the right benefit and the right level of benefit. Inevitably, that has added to some early processing times.

The comparison will be inevitable, but I think that you are right; I would always be cautious about such comparisons. For me, it is about making sure that the process works for the client. What I will say—I should have said it in response to Ms Clark’s question—is that the thing that we usually focus on is the customer charter. Again, it is not a charter that we came up with: it was driven by clients and people in Scotland and what they wanted. Timeliness is a measure in the charter, but it is one of 50 or 60 things that measure overall what it feels like to engage with the organisation.

The measure that I keep coming back to—I have probably cited it before—is that we ask clients, “Were you treated with kindness?” For a public organisation that is processing applications, that is quite a novel and innovative measure to have put in place. In the past two years, 94 per cent of people have said yes—they were treated with kindness. Inevitably, just now, our times are going to be compared with DWP times. Over time, however, I would like to step back to the charter and say that processing times are a measure, but there are other things that people told us really matter to them.

The number of redeterminations is low. What more can be done to promote the claimant’s right to a redetermination?

Again, there is probably something to be said about direct notification. There is certainly a need to work with stakeholders on being clear. We work with the advice sector, with which we will continue to make that point. I do not think that I put it in the submission, but there is also availability of VoiceAbility. The Scottish Government—separate to Social Security Scotland, for obvious reasons—has funded and supported VoiceAbility as an advocacy service for people who are claiming disability benefits. We are working closely with VoiceAbility on referrals, and we are working closely with the advice sector to make sure that that availability is understood.

Again, there have been changes to how we operate that process. One of the first things that a client who is asking for a redetermination will get is a call from the organisation asking whether they have more evidence and whether there is anything else that we can do to support a redetermination. Again, we have made that process far easier to navigate, which puts a bit more onus on the organisation to make the process work.

This is my last question. The number of appeals is also low, so what can be done to promote the right to appeal?

The situation is similar to that with redeterminations. I would be cautious. We are back to asking, “How new is a new benefit?”. There are probably just a handful of appeals at the moment because of the effect of the lag in the system. We will see appeals coming up as more and more cases flow through the system. At the moment, I would say that there is not a settled level of appeals in the system; we have yet to see that.

When it comes to raising awareness of the right to appeal, we will undertake activity with our stakeholders and VoiceAbility to make sure that it is understood that that is an option.

I will quickly bring in Katy Clark.

I am just a little bit concerned by what you are saying and I wonder whether there is appreciation in the agency of how important it is for people to get money quickly. I very much welcome what you are saying about evidence that claimants are finding that the agency is treating them with more kindness and respect. If that is the case, that is a massive advance on where we were in the past.

As you know, however, the reality is that the reason why most people are claiming benefits is that they are in financial difficulties. Some people are in extreme financial difficulties, such that they cannot heat or eat. Can you reassure the committee that you understand the client group that you are dealing with, the importance of ensuring that cases are processed quickly and that people receive money quickly, for the reasons that I have given?

I absolutely did not mean to give the wrong impression. What I was trying to say was that, against that background, of course processing times are the absolute focus of the organisation. As we move forward, the charter is due to be reviewed next year. The whole package of measures is something that really does matter, but the current processing times are absolutely the single focus of the organisation. I would not want to leave you with any other impression.

That is helpful to have on the record. Thank you.

That brings us to the end of our questions today. I thank the officials for joining us, and we look forward to visiting them in September when we go to Dundee.

That concludes our public business. We will continue in private session to consider the remaining items on the agenda. Thank you, everyone.

11:00 Meeting continued in private until 11:29.