Schedule 3
Child Maintenance and Other Payments Bill
5:45 pm
James Plaskitt (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions; Warwick and Leamington, Labour)
I welcome the hon. Gentleman’s invitation to get philosophical, which I will do in a moment. I always welcome such invitations.
I want first to respond to the questions raised about IT systems by the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, who reiterated some of the facts that I gave the Committee about the current situation. Of course we must get the IT right, as I said.
The hon. Gentleman asked about future arrangements. CMEC will simply take over the existing CSA IT systems, bearing in mind that in the meantime it will have gone through the operational improvement plan enhancements, which I outlined in more detail this morning. The CSA’s existing IT contract will novate to CMEC, and from that starting position it will be open to the commission to determine its IT strategy, giving consideration to its objectives and available resources.
Paragraph 51 to schedule 3 inserts new paragraph 50A to the Child Support Act 1991. That simply replicates an existing provision under the Social Security Act 1998; and section 2 of that Act stipulates that decisions can be made or issued not just by a person acting on behalf of the Secretary of State, but also:
“by a computer for whose operation such an officer is responsible”.
That applies specifically to decisions made under, among others, the Child Support Acts of 1991 and 1995. The provision was originally introduced to allow automated decision making.
Social security and child support legislation states specifically that decisions must be made by particular officers or the Secretary of State, and, by extension, officials acting on his behalf. Technically, prior to the Social Security Act 1998, no decision could be made by a computer. At that time, many processes were automated; computers would take relevant data and often make complex calculations, for example, about the amount of benefit owing. However, because there needed to be a “decision maker”—that is a technical term—an officer would have to sign off a computer printout for each person affected. Section 2 of the 1998 Act did away with the need for that laborious and bureaucratic clerical process. The amendment would require that process to be reinstated for any decision taken by the commission. That would, no doubt, require changes to existing processes and IT, and would build back in inefficiencies that were removed in 1998.
I reassure the Committee, as the Committee was reassured in 1998, that staff rather than computers will be used to make decisions requiring the exercise of discretion or judgment. The decisions that will be automated are those that follow set rules and processes, such as for maintenance calculations. As the hon. Member for Forest of Dean asked me to do, I can reassure the Committee on the general notion of computers making decisions, which sends an Orwellian chill down the spine. We should think of it more as computers determining an outcome, based on criteria or rules established by the true decision makers—the commission’s personnel or, indeed, us. The software applies the law to the facts of the case. Computers are not exercising judgment between options, which is what most of us would normally understand by the concept of a decision. Furthermore, they are simply doing what they are told to. The ultimate responsibility remains, of course, with those who do the telling.
I hope that with those reassurances, the hon. Member for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey will withdraw the amendment.