Schedule 1
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
1:30 pm
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and Leamington, Labour)
The appropriate level of staffing for the commission will be down to the commission. That is not just a neat formulation. I shall say more about that in a moment. Of course the appropriate level will depend on choices that the commission makes about how it wants to deliver these services. As the hon. Gentleman knows, we have published indicative figures of what we expect the impact on case load to be. That will emerge as we proceed and as the reforms come into play. The commission, charged as it is with certain duties, will need to assess the appropriate staffing level to deliver on the commitments that the Bill will give it. I trust that deals with the hon. Gentleman’s point.
I also want to pick up the operational suggestions made by the hon. Member for Mid-Bedfordshire. I was concerned about the model she proposed and I am not at all convinced of its workability. As I understood it she wanted an individual caseworker assigned to each case. I think that she will accept, on reflection, that that is not achievable or realistic. Each case does not require constant attention. They require spasmodic attention. Therefore, any individual caseworker will be handling any number of cases. We do not know when an individual call will come asking the agency to deal with a case.
We want clients of the agency to be able to call at times that are appropriate to them, which may be outside normal working hours. One cannot assume that one given caseworker will sit waiting for the phone to ring in case there is a call on that particular case. A number of people will inevitably need to be able to handle any customer query or issue coming in. The secret is to have a good back-up system which ensures that any single operator dealing with a call coming in to the agency can get in front of them in a timely fashion all the relevant information about a client’s case. That is the work and investment that is now being made in the IT system.