Employment and Support Allowance appeal

[antone]

yes, like i said i apollogise for my attitude as i havent really been able to control it much recently. just the name jobcentre or dwp sets me off

 

No problem mate. Rest assured, the system frustrates the staff as well - Erika mentioned this in another thread.

[ErikaPNP]

Papers get lost frequently for many reasons. Sometimes yes it is the staff working for DWP who mis-file. More often however mail goes missing before it lands on a DWP staff member's desk and more usually before it even reaches the correct office. This happens in the hands of contracted companies such as Royal Mail Opening Unit, TNT couriers and the staff who are contracted to distribute the mail within the office whom are not employed by DWP. Since the introduction of processing centres, mail no longer goes directly to the office from the customer unless it is being transported by courier from a Jobcentre.

 

Mail posted to DWP goes to a "po box" who are contracted to open the mail (for reasons of security), and transport it to the correct office. Often the mail gets transported to the wrong office. I've seen this where I have been assisting people with appeals and I get the paperwork - the post stamps on each piece of mail tells a story of its journey. I've had one piece of mail with postmarks for 4 different offices at different dates before it reaches its true destination.

 

When the mail gets to the correct office, it is handed to another contractor who will work within DWP offices but are not employed by them. They are employed by the contractors. (can't for the life of me remember the name - antone might know). They then deliver it to the post section (sometimes this is the same team who do filing) who sort through it and deliver the mail to the correct department.

 

The same happens with couriers with the exception that they deliver sealed packages to the DWP office. It then goes to the contractor to the post section to the right department.

 

So there you have it. Mail goes missing more often than not because it isn't DWP staff who get to handle it from start to finish, because contractors are misdirecting it. I've lost count of the number of times a piece of mail I have sent has been misdirected, which is why I no longer send recorded or special delivery unless I have a specific employees name.

 

If you have a specific employees name who will be dealing with your piece of mail, I have a little tip for you. Mark the envelope with their full name and mark in bold letters on the front of the envelope "RESTRICTED". Then send it by special delivery. This is not infallible either but I've had a lot more mail arrive at its correct destination and within a reasonable time frame by doing this.

 

Honeybee - Antone will give you more of an inside look - as you know I do not work for DWP but because of the nature of what I deal with I have contacts there - some friends too. I can tell you the following:

 

The staff are not well paid - they are grossly underpaid (contrary to popular belief), with a large proportion of the workforce who work full time claiming "top up" benefits themselves such as working tax credit, childcare costs and child tax credit. For part time staff, some of them will also receive housing benefit/council tax benefit. I have actually helped some DWP staff claim these benefits and fight appeals too. In the course of helping them - or rather referring them to someone else to help for council tax/housing benefit/tax credits I have seem their payslips as evidence of their income. The figures would shock the people who think they are on huge pay packets. The pay banding differs from one grade to the next. It can also differ depending on what area a perso works in. For example, someone working in London would earn far more than someone doing the same job in a remote area. The higher level staff (higher management) are most definately overpaid - no question about it, but the lower bands - the ones who work on claims, make decisions and deal with filing are on abismal rates of pay for the work they do, which is why their unions are always campaigning for fairer pay.

 

From what my contacts say (particularly the ones whom have been there for several years) it is not the confortable job it once was. They are given targets which are often unrealistic, and as a result, unacheivable. They see new staff not being trained properly on the most basic of things let alone the complicated areas, the managers focus on targets, statistic ect and not the customer service aspect until they get a complaint. This differs from office to office: some staff have told me they are treated like schoolchildren and spoken to much the same. The staff who deal with customers and take forward ideas to improve the service to the customer often have their opinions totally dismissed, particularly if their idea stands in the way of making statistical figures look good. As antone pointed out in another thread, little things that don't affect a person's claim are homed in on whilst the bigger matters which take more time to sort out are often left to fall by the wayside. Because of all of these factors (and this is just the tip of the iceberg from what I have heard) a lot of staff no longer see working at the DWP as a "career" and leave soon as they can.

 

DWP have also stopped employing permanent staff. They now only employ people on temporary contracts. This results in an even higher turnover of staff, and a higher number of inexperienced staff as experienced staff are often pulled off of doing what they do best to sort out the cock ups. People who had permanent contracts before this new rule came about obviously keep their permanency. I can only speak for staff who work at the offices that I have dealings with, which is quite a broad number. I too, have been surprised by the difference in the manner of staff between one office and another.

 

I often also hear stories of how rubbish and out of date the computer systems are. The computers are fine it's the programmes on them that are out of date. New benefits such as are built onto old benefit systems which are not user friendly. Antone will be able to say more about this. Most letters are computer generated, not hand typed (other than clerical claims and complaints which all receive personal responses). Another tip - you can tell whether a letter is a system generated one or a personally typed one most often by the font on it and the wording used.

 

In my dealings with DWP staff I have often found that some staff are as equally frustrated by how the system fails the customers. There are of course and always will be some who think because they get to make decisions, and are employed by the government that they are "god" and will have an attitude problem - the power goes to their heads. This will never be eradicated and is evident in a lot of jobs not restricted to the civil service.

 

Antone will be better placed to answer more questions. I can't give a full view from a staff member's perspective - only what I have experienced, what I have seen, what I am aware of and what I have been told first hand.

[antone]

Antone, can you tell us more about a typical benefits office please?

 

The DWP must be a massive organisation, but it doesn seem very efficient. The NHS have everyone in the country and seems to manage not to lose papers left, right and centre.

 

Are you saying the staff are being badly managed? And are they well paid and well-treated, for example? You might be saying that the way the place is organised by the higher ups is not good, or maybe it's the IT system ?

 

Sparky, please don't blame Antone. He doesn't work for the DWP - had the great good sense to leave, and he helps a lot of people on the forum.

 

Antone, I'm genuinely interested in what you know, because I for one would like to know more.

 

HB x

 

Well, I could write volumes about that sort of thing. The DWP as a whole has around 120,000 staff. The ones you deal with on a day-to-day basis are likely to be involved in what's called Operational Delivery - in other words, actually processing and paying benefits. I don't know specifically how many of those there are.

 

They're not, in general, well-paid. Around 49% of DWP employees are Band B staff, otherwise known as Administrative Officers, or AOs. That means they get between £15,000 and £18,000 per year, well below the national average. After tax and so on, a first year AO probably is not much better off than a person on benefits. The next grade up includes their line managers and many of the Decision Makers, and they get up to about £23,000 or so depending on length of service.

 

Difference between, say, the NHS and DWP? Well, the first thing, and this is critical in my opinion, is that the NHS has a clearly-defined role: "heal the sick" and, while there's disagreement on how best to achieve that goal, there's no real question of what it's for in the first place.

 

But the DWP is subject to a lot more direct political interference. Goals and priorities change regularly at the whims of politicians, and this means that a lot of the time the staff are running to stand still. Most staff don't really understand ESA all that well, for example, and how could they? It was introduced to meet a political need, not a social need, and the staff who work on it were either yanked away from other benefits or departments (I worked for DFID, when I started as a civil servant, not the DWP), or recruited in a hurry and told "Read these notes quickly and start answering the phones!"

 

It's hard for people who haven't experienced it to understand just how chaotic things can be. I'll do another post about how things work on a daily basis, how mail gets lost and so on, but a lot of the problems stem from the dual responsibility of DWP staff.

 

Basically, they are required to pay benefits correctly and on time (despite common assumptions, they do not gain anything from not paying benefits that are due) and are hassled if they don't. But there's also a responsibility to protect taxpayers' money from the infamous "scroungers" and "welfare cheats", and it's a real responsibility. Nobody (and that includes most genuine benefit claimants I've met) wants to see people [problem] money off the taxpayer - indeed, I see that as a particularly offensive form of theft because it hurts those in genuine need, and the people who fund the benefits system work hard for the money they pay in tax and NI.

 

Most staff are conscientious about this responsibility, and DWP staff take abuse, on a daily basis, that would cause many other people to simply walk away from their jobs. And of course, as Erika mentioned in a post on another thread, they do not have the power to change the system, but they still have to deal with the problems that a bad system can create.

 

And I do believe it is a bad system, but I've ranted enough about this already. I'll do another post about the mechanics of it all after I eat my dinner

[honeybee13]

OMG, it's even worse than I thought. Thanks for your time explianing, Antone and Erika and I hope it didn't spoil your appetite, Antone. It's not hard to see how everything could be improved, if the people higher up did it properly. I just wonder at the arrogance of whoever decides on this month's strategy in thinking they can throw it all together that way.

 

It's food for thought for me and confirms what I already thought about letting politicians run things too hands on. The Dome springs to mind.

 

My best, HB x

[antone]

On a daily basis, Erika has analysed the problem of lost mail quite well. From a practical point of view, I'd say that much of it shows up eventually - indeed, most stuff isn't "lost" at all. It's just horribly delayed and while it's feeding through the system, nobody really knows where it is.

 

These problems are avoidable, of course - the Royal Mail and FedEx do OK at tracking letters and parcels through their systems, so it's obviously possible. But the expense of setting up a foolproof tracking system at DWP, HMRC and so on would be horrendous. And just try finding a politician these days who's prepared to say "What we need to do is spend more on the benefits system!" Long-term, it would be a useful investment and would save money overall, but how many politicians think long-term?

 

Even when the mail is in the office where it's supposed to be, finding it isn't easy. These places are not local Jobcentres: processing offices have hundreds of employees. If a piece of mail intended for my ESA section ended up on the desk of a JSA or IS processor, tracking it down would be an impossible task.

 

This sort of thing is why I find the idea that mail is intentionally lost to be laughable on its face. Why would the processors do such a thing? Tracking down missing mail takes up a huge amount of their time, and they certainly have no personal interest in not paying claims or the like. When I did ESA callbacks (that is, after you called the BDC customer service number, I was the guy who called you back in three hours, ideally) my heart would sink when I saw that the call was about a missing medical certificate, because I knew I would be spending the next half hour scouring the whole damn office for a piece of paper 3 inches by 6 inches and which looked identical to the other 500 certs we'd received that day.

 

It wasn't all bad - some changes our managers came up with did improve the system, to the point where I could be spared from these tasks to become a DEX. That's a person who helps others make the confusing and antiquated computer system do what they actually need it to do.

 

There's another thing, of course, the computer systems. There are loads of them, but ESA is driven by the system created at the time JSA was introduced in the early 90s. It's showing its age very badly, it's inflexible and you have no idea how many hours I spent yelling at the screen in futile rage. "I just want to pay the SDP from 02/05/2010! Is that so f***ing hard to understand?!" It's designed, of course, to protect against processor error, and it would do that quite well if it didn't make it necessary for processor to kludge things when they know perfectly well that what they're trying to do is perfectly correct. These kludges cause problems further down the line, of course, but no-one has time to think about that.

 

Maybe I should just do an "ask the former ESA processor" thread for people who want to know why things happen and what can go wrong

[honeybee13]

I can't tell you in detail, but I know people who work in offices where mail is scanned electronically as soon as it is received, and put onto the internal network. With all the people available, it can't be beyond the wit of man, or woman, to come up with a workable system.

 

I feel very sorry for anyone trying to work around something as archaic as this.

 

I'm speechless, which my OH would tell you doesn't happen too often.

 

My best, HB x

[davina2]

I always send my DWP letters by recorded delivery. Does this mean they wouldn't get lost? Someone obviously need to sign for them and I have a record of it. Or am I too naive to believe this?

 

Re Jobcentre staff, I was personally told by them that they cannot help me, I am over qualified, with long work experience, they do not have jobs in my field on their system etc.

[antone]

I always send my DWP letters by recorded delivery. Does this mean they wouldn't get lost? Someone obviously need to sign for them and I have a record of it. Or am I too naive to believe this?

 

Re Jobcentre staff, I was personally told by them that they cannot help me, I am over qualified, with long work experience, they do not have jobs in my field on their system etc.

 

The point is that the fact that a letter has been signed for does not prove that it has actually landed on the desk of someone who can process it. Yes, someone is required to sign, but it won't normally be a benefit processor. The main reason to send documents recorded would be if you have enclosed a non-replaceable original and might subsequently need to complain if you don't get it back.

 

Erika's earlier posts on this thread explain the mail handling procedures well. In general, don't bother to spend the money on recorded delivery

[cbbc]

Hi, I have had 2 doctors notes lost and some evidence I sent to the tribunal. I always have it signed for but it doesnt make an difference you still have to send duplicates.