 Hei, gyd-doedd y gwaith, a hynny yn blyniad yr ysgolwyddoedd y Feithiau Ryf defendedeb cwm嘅f 2015. Can everyone please make sure that the mobile phones and other electronic devices are on silent, or switched to airplane mode? Agenda item 1 is our first business today and it relates to the Work programme. At its meeting on 10th of March, the committee considered its Work programme in private and it agreed a number of inquiries and evidence sessions that it expects to conduct in 2015. Those include an enquiry into women in welfare, a session of oral evidence on the impact of welfare reform on children's services, a session of oral evidence on the bedroom tax mitigation and an enquiry into the welfare powers to be devolved following the recommendations of the Smith commission. There are a number of procedural points in connection with the work programme, which must be agreed in public. The committee is asked to agree the following points. A, that the consideration of any oral evidence received will be completed in private after the end of the public session. B, that decisions on witness expenses will be delegated to the convener. C, that all draft reports will be considered in private. And D, to authorise the convener to seek approvals for committee events where necessary. Do the members agree to those proposals? That allows us to go to agenda item 2, which is an oral evidence session from Paul Gray, who is the chair of the Social Security Advisory Committee. The SSAC is an independent statutory body that provides impartial advice on social security and related matters. Paul has undertaken the first review of personal independence payments, which was mandated by the Welfare Reform Act 2012 for the Department of Work and Pensions. The SSAC has also produced a report this month on changes into ESA regulations. Welcome to you to the committee, but I believe that you are here back in 2012 to start by asking to provide a brief opening statement, and then I will open it up to questions, if you do not mind. Over to you. Thank you very much, convener. Would it be sensible if I talked about the PIP review and then separately, if you want to ask me questions about the SSAC role in relation to ESA, we can move on to those. It would be sensible to keep the two parts separate, I suspect. As you have said, I was invited by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to undertake this first statutory review of PIP. I think that the first point that I ought to make was that the fact that I am a chair of SSAC is a parallel role from the fact that I was asked to undertake the first independent review, and I was conscious in responding to that invitation that I wished to avoid any possibility or perception of conflict of interest between the two roles, given the possibility that, during the time that I was undertaking the PIP review, there might be routine business on PIP coming to SSAC, so I can make clear at the outset that were that to happen, I would step outside SSAC in terms of consideration of any routine business on PIP so that I wasn't seen to be wearing too many hats at once. As it happens, there was no business that came to SSAC on PIP, and therefore the issue didn't arise, but I'm keen to make that distinction clear. When I started the review in April or May of last year, there was already a huge amount of noise around the early introduction of PIP as a result of the very major problem that had developed around delays in the processing and, in particular, delays in people being called to the new style PIP assessments. So a lot of the initial evidence I was gathering was focusing very heavily on those delays. After a short period, I decided that, while it was important for me to understand the impact of the delays, there had already been a lot of attention in the Westminster Parliament, indeed, in this Parliament on those delay issues. I decided that, although it seemed to me and I made clear in my report that resolving or completing the resolution of the delays was an absolutely fundamental priority, that, in my view, was unnecessary but not sufficient factor in order to address a number of fairly major underlying issues in the way in which the process was operating. What I've sought to do in the review is to, as it were, look beyond and behind the delays and focus on what seemed to me important underlying issues that ought to be addressed, even as and when the delays issue is resolved. I also, given the fact that this was a statutory review mandated, as you said, convener by the the Welfare Reform Act, I felt it was right that I should take the broad structure and the broad parameters of the assessment criteria that had been established in legislation as broadly given. There had been major processes of consultation, which had led up to the final design. Although, as I said in the report, it was clear that those might not have been commanding universal support, it seemed to me the right focus for me in undertaking the review was not to be reviewing the basic parameters of what Parliament had decided in Westminster, but looking at the way in which the whole process was being implemented. As I gathered and distilled the evidence that I was getting from a whole range of approaches, a lot of written evidence that I received, but I also had lots of meetings, focus groups with claimants, talking to all the players, involved a lot of conversations with the organisations representing disabled people. As I distilled all that evidence, it seemed to me the issues fell under three broad headings, as indeed has been summarised in the report that I think the committee has heard from SPICE. First was issues around the claimant experience of going through the process of claiming PIP and then ultimately receiving a decision. Secondly, processes and procedures around the obtaining of evidence to support that assessment and decision making process. Thirdly, issues around the overall effectiveness of the assessment. In very broad terms, I think my summary findings under those three headings are that, as far as the claimant experience is concerned, even discounting, if you like, or putting to one side the very unfortunate reality of long delays, is that, on its current design, the claimant experience is a very disjointed one for claimants and that there are important issues to be addressed there. As far as obtaining the necessary evidence as concerned, I was very strongly struck, the more discussions and conversations I had, particularly with claimants, that the PIP process is widely viewed and seen as being about, quote, having a medical. In fact, the whole way in which the benefit has been designed sought to emphasise that this is an assessment of the functional impact on disabled people of underlying health conditions, not an assessment purely and solely about the medical conditions. What I found as I observed assessments in process and other sources of evidence was that there were a number of ways in which the process seemed to me to feel kind of over-medical and under-functional. Also, I thought that the current arrangements for collecting the evidence, frankly whether kind of medical or functional, currently leaves a fair amount to be desired. In terms of the overall effectiveness of the PIP assessment process, my summary conclusion was frankly that it was a little bit too soon to judge, is it, being effective in the way it is intended. There was still, even by the time I got to the end of my review in December, quite a limited number of awards or decision awards being reached. I could see some indications that suggested to me that there were questions to be asked about the consistency and reliability of those early outcomes, but that evidence was frankly rather patchy. So in that third area of my focus, I've concentrated the recommendations I've made about ensuring that processes and systems are significantly improved so that, as the caseload starts to build under the rollout of PIP, there will be much more reliable means of assessing the fairness and consistency of the awards across different claimant groups. So those are my kind of three broad areas of focus. Again, in the SPICE report that you've had as a committee, there's a kind of summary of my key recommendations, which were 14 in all, spread across those three main areas of focus, but I also decided to make another three-way split in my recommendations in terms of the time period in which I was recommending that they should be fully implemented. The first group, unimaginable, unimaginable, I called the short-term recommendations, were things that I emphasised I thought should be fully completed before the PIP rollout gets to the stage of what's been termed managed reassessment. I think this is a kind of rather critical point to focus on. As a committee, I'm sure is aware, the rollout has been phased with all the early focus being on new claimants to PIP. People who are not in receipt of the legacy benefit DLA but are coming fresh to the process. There's also been and the great majority of claims which have so far been decided on fall into that category of new claimants. There's been a fairly small proportion of reviews of existing DLA awards either in the small minority of cases where that award was time limited at the time of the initial DLA award or when claimants have themselves concluded they wish to reapply for PIP possibly because they felt their the functional impact of their conditions had significantly worsened since their original DLA award. But the great majority of current DLA claimants have yet to go through the PIP process and the Westminster Government's announced schedule is to start that final but kind of principal stage in the autumn of 2015 and the more I thought about this that seems to me the point at which any kind of underlying difficulties strains and tensions in the PIP process really come into sharp focus because it's at that point people who've been in receipt of a DLA award quite often awarded to them without any time limit placed on it will face the start of a process of kind of mandatory reassessment under PIP and the expenditure projections that the Westminster Government has provided as PIP was being developed and in successive budget documents do assume that a significant proportion of existing DLA claimants will not receive a PIP award or will receive a lower PIP award and DLA award. Also in some other cases the assumption is that people will receive a higher award under PIP but in net overall terms the plans and the expectations of the of the Westminster Government are for significant reductions in expenditure under PIP rather than DLA and that seems to me to be as that process starts to roll out clearly the system is going to come under a lot more pressure seems to me to be one thing to however difficult to say to a new claimant for PIP I'm sorry you haven't met the criteria you haven't gotten award it seems to me to present a significantly larger issue and a challenge to say to somebody who's been in receipt of a DLA award for some years you have been reassessed for PIP and we have concluded you're either no longer entitled to any DLA award or any PIP award or to a reduced one so that was why I wanted to focus the uh put a sort of time plan on my recommendations and there's some things I thought it was absolutely essential ought to be kind of fully in place and properly operational before that next phase of the roll out started then there were some other things where again unimaginably I called the medium term recommendations which I felt should be well on the way to implementation at the start of that phase and finally one recommendation I termed long term where I've recommended a frankly fundamental redesign of the whole claimant process for PIP to make it much more integrated more joined up and in this day and age increasingly digitally enabled for the increasing proportion of people for whom that will become a preferred approach I was also influenced in making that sort of time split on my recommendations by where the political calendar is in two respects firstly that we have the UK election in in May 2015 so those recommendations I was making which on any basis would take a fair time to implement are likely to fall in UK terms to whoever forms the next government in Westminster but secondly towards the end of my review period we had the Smith process in Scotland of course the conclusion and recommendation there that PIP and some of the other disability benefits should be devolved to this parliament and this government and therefore I thought it was also appropriate to be flagging up some things I thought were for more longer term consideration which could in UK terms fall under a different jurisdiction and in Scottish terms certainly would fall to this government and this parliament so just to give a very quick flavour in conclusion of the where the focus of my specific recommendations were in terms of the claimant experience I've stressed the importance of improving claimant communications in all kinds of ways including a fundamental revamp of the decision letters that are sent to claimants once a decision is reached which I have to say I found quite difficult to follow and interpret and my suspicion was many claimants would find them at least as difficult to understand the importance of improving the relationships between different players in the decision process the outsourced assessment providers the health professionals doing the actual assessments and the DWP staff who actually make the final decisions based on the input from those assessments I saw some evidence of improving relationships between those two groups but I saw a lot of scope for more work being done to make sure that was a better relationship and as a result a much better process for claimants and then in the the longer term as I've already indicated I think the the current process can be made significantly better much better joining up of different parts of the process at the moment it seems to me the owners is largely on the claimant to navigate their way around different bits of the process and ring up different people to find out where's my claim got to seems to me in this day and age for any claimant or customer process the owners should be on the providers in this case DWP and the outsourced providers to do the joining up and to give kind of single points of contact and ease of claiming so that's I think quite fundamental long-term change and in particular allow claimants a simple way to check where they're where their claim has got to at the moment that is extraordinarily difficult they're having to make lots of phone calls to different places getting lots of unsatisfactory hands-offs. In terms of improving the way evidence is obtained I've recommended looking at the scope for much better joining up of information that various parts of government or governments already hold at the moment the PIP process is very insular and self-contained there are quite a lot of people who separately have to go through an assessment process for ESA who also go through the PIP process DWP during the review did start the process of seeing if some of that information can be brought together I've encouraged going a lot further and I think there's potentially a lot more scope to think about other aspects of joining up around evidence in particular in relation to social care assessments again there's a significant overlap of the caseload there and I made some recommendations about the way in which the assessment the face-to-face assessment processes operate I felt that having observed quite a number of them there wasn't enough transparency for claimants to see what information was being recorded by health professionals and then finally on the the kind of effectiveness of the assessment I highlighted two specific aspects of the 12 criteria for assessment which I didn't think was working terribly well what was turned activity 11 around understanding people's mobility needs I thought there was a lot of confusion there similarly I thought the way in which people's need to use aids and appliances was possibly not being implemented in the way intended but then looking a bit further ahead I was quite concerned that as I said earlier on early evidence suggested to me there could be some inconsistency around the way in which awards are being made I was particularly concerned that focus should be given to ensuring people with mental health conditions or fluctuating conditions to make sure assessments there are done consistently and I was concerned to note that there wasn't yet a full and proper evaluation strategy in place and published for how the department would over time as PIP is rolled out be fully assessing the consistency of awards so that kind of gives a flavour of the areas of my recommendations in terms of a response from the UK government I'm pleased to say that the UK government agreed to publish my report as soon as it was completed without making kind of any observation about the recommendations so that they were out there in the public domain everybody had an opportunity to see them and then in I think was in February this year about two months after my report DWP has produced its initial response where it has focused just on my short term recommendations which was frankly broadly what I'd intended in the way I'd structured the recommendations I'm pleased to say out of nine of those recommendations something like eight and a half have been fully accepted the one that was only partially accepted actually I'm quite happy the spirit of my recommendation has been met because it's one thing for a government to say the recommendations have been accepted it's another thing to see whether they've actually been fully implemented so I kind of reserve judgment as to how comprehensively my recommendations will actually be implemented sorry I've spoken a little bit too long but I hope that's helpful convenio in members to give the background to the review yeah thanks very much paul is a very comprehensive background to the work that you've undertaken I think it's chimes a lot with the information that we've had experiences that witnesses have told us about their journey through the system we haven't looked in great detail yet at the process because it's still in its infancy if you like it's we still have to see how it does developing and we to see how some of the statistics around the new system start to to mount up but it's it has been made clear in scotland at least that there is a hope that because the outsourced deliverer of the assessments is a public sector body that there might be an improved service in scotland in comparison to what might have been the case in your assessment did you look at the work being done by salis or was it was it not part of your I didn't I didn't specifically see any of the work of salis I did observe assessments being undertaken by atos who's the prime provider as it were in in scotland and in other parts of of england and also of capitol who have significant parts of of england and wales in their coverage so the assessments I observed I think were very largely those undertaken by as it were the direct employees of atos and capitol but I had quite a lot of conversations with atos about the way in which they were looking to build and develop their own supply network which as you say includes some public sector bodies in scotland and indeed in england quite a number of the the subcontractors if that's the if that's the right phrase are public sector bodies I didn't frankly kind of observe any obvious difference between somebody who was technically employed by a private sector body and technically employed by a public sector body generally I was impressed by the commitment and capability of those particular health professionals that I observed in operation and I think it's important to bear in mind you know we are talking in terms of all the face-to-face indeed the paper assessments being undertaken by qualified health professionals in a sense kind of regardless of technically who their employer is in terms of the delays initial discussions we've had with salis have indicated that they believe that they are undertaking the assessments in the timescale that they would be expected to but the delays are because of a lack of appointments being provided by the DWP is that your experience? Not entirely I mean the appointment process for the assessments is essentially the responsibility of the assessment providers it's not on my understanding done directly via DWP the kind of in broad terms the the different bits of the process people go through that there's an initial process of engagement with the DWP to seek to determine some basic kind of issues of eligibility to claim the benefit once people have gone through that kind of stage one process the stage through process of setting up an assessment process is handed over to ATOS and CAPITA and I'm not sure exactly how ATOS manage their their relationships with their subcontractors in terms of of making appointments I think it's probably done centrally by ATOS and CAPITA so I don't quite recognise the point you make what I do recognise is that there's then a a third stage in the process after an assessment has taken place and that is when the paperwork goes back to the DWP for the formal decision making process and if one my sense looking at where have the delays arisen for different people they have been they haven't been particularly concentrated in one place they've been kind of across those different parts of the process so to be frank I think the responsibility for the delays is a shared one between DWP DWP and the providers ultimately DWP I think as the people designing the system need to be accountable for ensuring the process works to best effect and clearly both during the period of my review and since I was conscious of lots of discussions going on between DWP and the providers to try to improve things okay Kevin thank you convener Mr Ray thanks for if you're in for the committee today while the convener has already stated we haven't done a huge amount of of work in this particular area as a committee all of us have been out and about around the country talking to folks and I have to say in terms of the lack of communication which you've pointed out from my experience what I've been finding is panic in most cases and in many cases absolute terror because folks do not know what is happening to them and that goes for new claimants and also those folks who are going to be reassessed who have have no time yet about when they are going to be reassessed obviously pointed that out what has the DWP response been to that because while folk are in this limbo that panic and in some cases terror will continue well I think two things one there clearly has been action taken to start to reduce the delays and the Westminster Government I think announced early this year that the the average delay was in terms of getting an assessment undertaken was down to 14 weeks I think in terms of keeping people better informed again during the course of my review there was a start of a process of where people had given a mobile phone contact seeking to send text messages proactively to inform people a bit better where things were that was at a very infant stage I've specifically recommended a lot more be done about that the underlying difficulty about the way the the claimant process has been set up is that the different IT systems do not talk to each other as effectively as they ought to so that at the point that somebody has got through stage one and is waiting for an assessment to take place with with the provider as I said to the convener most of the focus there is most of the information is held by the outsourced provider what I experienced and I regarded as entirely unsatisfactory was I sat in and listened on telephone lines on a number of occasions both at DWP and at both Atos and Capita and I was dismayed by the number of occasions on which some I would sit in on a DWP call line somebody would ring up and say you know can you tell me what in their state of panic or whatever is you describe Mr Stewart saying where is my case somebody would look on the system notes they had at DWP and say sorry we don't know you're going to have to ring up atos and vice versa I saw the same things happening I saw just kind of looking on people's screens people who'd rung up you know seven eight nine times still not getting information I spoke to in some of the focus groups I had with with claimants two separate people told me well we've now got into a routine we ring up at 10 o'clock every Monday morning and we're still not getting the information so I think sorry to come more directly to your question what have DWP done about it so far I think they have taken action to try to reduce the delays the amount that has been done and that it's possible to do with present systems to get into much more proactive contact with claimants to keep them up to date with where their claims are is fairly limited and that's why I'm recommending or moves as fast as it's possible to do to a position where there is a reliable single point of contact that claimants can come to and find out what is the status of their claim I mean the figures that we have for January 2015 in terms of average actual clearance times median it says for new claims was 20 weeks from the point of registration to a decision made in the claim 14 weeks from the point of referral to the assessment providers to a decision made in the claim in 12 weeks for an assessment that is a huge amount of time for folk to be in limbo and the DWP in terms of the systems that don't talk to one another between the providers and them have they got special measures in place to try and resolve that situation in terms of systems talking to each other I can't tell you exactly where they've got to in terms of action to put in place sufficient resource to reduce those elapsed times then clearly there is a certain amount of action my own view at the point I concluded the review was that more still needed to be done I think just on your figures I think it's fairly say the the 20 weeks is the is the total figure and the other figures you gave is the the periods within those 20 weeks for different parts of the process okay people are extremely well informed about what these changes will actually mean I mean it's not unusual for folk to tell me that they know that 100,000 folk in Scotland will lose all our part of their their benefit by 2018 and they also know that in some cases they'll lose as much as 3000 pounds in terms of that kind of situation one of the things that surprised me in terms of conversations I've had with with folks and probably a good example is talking to multiple sclerosis sufferers MS sufferers in Aberdeen not so long ago um they were suggesting that the loss of the mobility components of their benefits could lead them to to having to stop work or their carers having to stop work you've looked at the processes of these changes have you looked at the impacts of these changes which as suggested by some may actually cost the state more I mean in terms of following you know the kind of individual impacts the answer is no I was fully aware of the assessments that the UK Government had made as I referred to earlier of the expected impact of the changes from DLA to to PIP I think in terms of the position in Scotland you're probably referring to the analysis that the government did which I think was referred to in the paper you have in front of you from from SPICE that points to the fact that some people will get a lower award some people will lose award some people will get a higher award in terms of the amounts of money I'm not sure to be honest it's terribly helpful to talk about what is the kind of average loss that people will incur because there will be quite a wide distribution and I did look up the figures of what is the average level of a DLA award in Scotland and it's 83 pounds something a week so we're talking about four and a half thousand a year or something like that so and the maximum award for somebody getting the maximum on both the what was in DLA known as the care elements in PIP is known as the daily living and the maximum amount of the mobility which is the same terminology for both awards is 137 pounds a week so there somebody is on maximum we're talking about sorry I can't do the sums immediately something like 7 000 pounds a year so what you will see in terms of the impact on individuals who have a changed level of award will vary a great deal across that spectrum um uh there will be some people who will be getting a kind of increased award within the spectrum conceivably but I suspect rather unlikely uh you could have somebody on a kind of maximum award for both at the moment and getting a nil award I think frankly that's extremely unlikely what is much more likely is that there will be some people getting the maximum rate who might move to the lower rate some people getting the lower rate may move to a nil award and vice versa um uh that you will have some people currently not getting a DLA award and I think there's a particular group around people with mental health conditions uh who um for whom the DLA process was frankly not well designed and in my view the PIP process is and criteria is somewhat better designed so you'll have some people uh uh moving up that income scale but of course the the underlying rationale for DLA and PIP has never been uh uh under this Westminster government or its predecessors an income replacement benefit and obviously what is the impact on people's incomes is clearly uh very important but uh in terms of thinking ahead how in Scotland you might want to uh redesign PIP I think there are some fundamental questions to consider about is it right to kind of stick with uh the current kind of philosophy uh of PIP which is not as an income replacement benefit it's not means tested it's not taxed it's independent as whether people are in or out of work whether those are the right criteria to hold or whether you would want to look at it more in terms of the impact on people's income. One of the key things that the Westminster government has stated in terms of this welfare reform is to try and get as many folk into work or keep folk in work as possible. Now one of the things which we found convener during the course of our deliberations in this committee is that many folks some people with very serious conditions want to work for as long as they possibly can that is one of the things that we have found. I think it would be a tragedy um that these changes will actually maybe impede folk from continuing to work which you know is a great fear amongst certain folk out there either impeding them from going to work or impeding their carers from going out to work which actually creates as they see it a greater burden in the state because there will be less tax going back to the state in terms of of them not being able to work any longer. And I think it would be really um well I think it has to be done an impact review on what these changes from DLA to PIP will actually have and folk's ability to work. The fact that we may be cutting off folk's independence even further by making these changes and I just wonder if your body intends to look at these impacts to see if what is being done here actually is creating a situation where we are denying folk their independence and actually stopping folk from going out to work. Well I think I'd relate that to what I was saying about having a much clearer evaluation strategy for PIP than I see existing at the moment. I agree with you that an important criterion the law to fit into an evaluation strategy is precisely your challenge what impact is the introduction of PIP having on enabling people either to get into work or to stay in work and clearly that has always been an important design criterion behind DLA and indeed PIP for many years that for some people who aren't able to work on any basis then it provides them with means to kind of support their extra costs in daily living what I think can be particularly important around ability to be employed into to work as fully as possible is the mobility component so I absolutely agree one of the criterion one of the criteria that should be established in the evaluation criteria strategy is the impact on employment. I actually found it quite difficult to track information at this stage about the employment status of people getting the early PIP awards or not getting them so I'm absolutely with you in terms of that's an important evaluation criterion one final question if I can convener and you mentioned mental health conditions and the convener and I previously attended an atos assessment with an actress playing the part of somebody with a mental health condition and you know they probably had their best assessor on the go that day it would be I think fair to say but one of the things which we have found in evidence that we've had from others with mental health conditions to this committee we have found that you know there is still it seems a lack of awareness of the difficulties that some folk face with the conditions that they actually have and you've highlighted in your report that we must get better at dealing with that situation but how do we ensure that the assessors out there are completely utterly of fae with the day-to-day difficulties that some folks with mental health conditions have? How do we ensure that assessors are aware that you know when folk go for assessment they often put on their best face and you know that maybe the one day in a month that somebody is at their top form and we've heard is I think the convener would agree where we've heard a folk going to assessment and then for the week two weeks afterwards they've been really ill because they've tried to boost themselves for that assessment and you know that's taken a huge amount out of them how do we get the assessment of folk with mental health conditions absolutely right? I think the short answer is absolutely ensuring the right level of training and experience sets is reflected amongst the assessors. In one of the focus groups that I held with claimants it so happened there were quite a large proportion of the people there with a mental health condition. I think their experience they were very openly telling me about varied fairly considerably some had felt that the assessor that had seen them understood very well the nature of their challenges others were less impressed so what I've sought to emphasise during the review not just in my report but in the conversations I've been having is about the importance of ensuring the training that is given to assessors who don't have a specialist mental health background is sufficient to make them fully conversant with the issues and to know frankly if they are facing an issue where they might feel the need to refer the issue to a mental health specialist. The statistics that Mr Stewart referred to earlier come from the DWP's most recent statistics on this. It's the fourth set of statistics that they've produced and they were released last week. Given that the volume of pet applications is changing and the volume of processes has changed, are you convinced by the statistics so far that the general direction of travel is to improve times in terms of people being assessed? I won't claim to be on top of the latest figures. I think that the direction of travel is right. I mean it's clearly I won't say better than less bad than it was at particularly poor points in 2014 around the point I started my review. Is it as good as it should be? Probably not yet but I finished my review in December and to be honest I've not been keeping a kind of regular tab on it day in day out since. I'm sure there's still scope for improvement. You mentioned in your report suggesting using a thumbs up portal to keep people informed about the situation. Can you say a bit more about why you think that that might improve the client experience during the process? I think that it picks up comments that Mr Stewart was making earlier. If you as a claimant in any kind of process are struggling desperately to find out what's going on and you're phoning this one and phoning that one and being kind of fobbed off, that's a very bad experience. I think if one thinks about what I personally would observe as best practice in other spheres and sectors for example in the insurance sector which I know is not a precise analogy but I think it has some interesting parallels. If you find yourself in the middle of an insurance claim as indeed I found myself last year following a motor accident traditionally it can be very hard to find out what's going on. I was quite impressed the experience I went through there of having regular text messages from my insurance company telling me exactly what stage things had reached. I knew there was one phone number I could ring up and a central point of contact who could tell me what was going on with somebody who had access to all the information about you know the two insurance companies were involved, the two drivers who were involved, the various garages who were involved in fixing vehicles and what I'm advocating is something kind of broadly similar here. There are lots of players involved at the moment in this. I think it's perfectly feasible in this day and age to put together a system where you can bring all the information in one place. Now should it be a kind of online portal or should it be a single telephone point I think I wouldn't pretend we're at a stage now where an online tracking device is going to be the perfect option for every PIP claimant but I think increasingly over time we're finding in all kinds of spheres people either directly or people on their own behalf are using online tracking systems to see where they are in a particular process. Internet deliveries is a kind of huge example now where you're expecting a parcel by and large with most providers now. You can find out exactly where that process is. I think the same approach could be applied in PIP but you probably need to supplement it for people who remain uncomfortable with online with a much better integrated telephone system or whatever. My next question is, has any significant work been done with the client base to ask them how they would be best likely to be informed? The idea that everything would go on to a portal is of concern to me especially since the Scottish Government has put dignity as a huge part of what's happening here and whether just improved customer service and improved communications should be the key to this. Has anyone asked the client base about how they want to be kept informed? I'm only very informal in conversations I had with asking people about what would be a better service and some were saying online, some were saying a reliable telephone service. I don't particularly want to emphasise I think there's a particular technical solution. I made that suggestion. I think I said such as an online tracker. I don't want to be presumptive about this. I think it would be a very good thing for DWP and indeed Scottish Government in carrying forward to get input on exactly what kind of joined up service is required. What I'm in no doubt about is that a joined up service is required, not a disjointed one. I think that's a bit of a different picture on it slightly for me, so thank you for your answer. May I apologise, convener, to you and to Mr Gray for my later arrival? Mr Gray, you mentioned that the UK Government has accepted eight and a half of the nine short term recommendations. Is it part of the role of your committee to monitor and implement them? One of the points I made maybe before you came in, Ms Goldie, was to emphasise that I did not undertake this review simply because I was chairman of SSAC. The Secretary of State asked me to undertake this review and as I was explaining earlier that I was at some pains to make clear I wasn't doing this as or because I was SSAC chairman. In terms of carrying forward the implementation of this report, no, I don't think it's a specific responsibility of SSAC. I don't think, frankly, it's a personal responsibility of mine. I was asked to undertake the review and I reported. I think the responsibility rests squarely with Government to follow through the implementation. A more general question about whether SSAC might take a continuing interest in this is a more open question. SSAC has two roles in UK statute. One is in relation to formal scrutiny of draft regulations that come to us. That's a statutory role. Our other slightly free arranging role is to decide within pretty limited resources, frankly, what are wider issues within the welfare system that we think it is valuable for us as a committee to look into. Over the last year, we've done a number of reports on different aspects of the welfare system. It is possible that my colleagues and I might conclude that an in-depth look at PIP might be appropriate, but there's a whole range of issues that we could be spending limited time and resources on. As I said, there's certainly no presumption that there's a role here for SSAC because I did not undertake the review as chair of SSAC. You said in your introductory general remarks in relation to assessments that your impression was that there were more overall medical and less functional. I think that the word was the one that she used. This is a question slightly in consequence of the area being examined by my colleague Mr Stewart. Can you, for the benefit of the committee, just tease this out a bit? Yes. The assessment criteria for PIP, which are spelled out in great detail in my report, spell out over 12 activities of daily living or mobility, the degree of functional impairment or support need that people have, whether it's in relation to mobility or different aspects of care, whether it's preparing food, washing and dressing, toileting needs. What the assessment is trying to do is say under each of those headings on a sliding point scale, what degree of functional support do people need in order to carry out those aspects of daily living or those aspects of mobility? The fundamental thing that's being assessed is how much can you do, what extra support assistance do you need in order to carry out those activities. That, to me, is functional. Clearly, people's underlying medical conditions have a very strong influence and impact on that. The fact that people have functional impairments is that whether physical or mental reflect their underlying medical conditions. However, I think that we all know from everyday experience that two people with absolutely identical underlying medical conditions will not necessarily have the same functional impact. I think I said somewhere in my introduction to the report if I can find the phrase. The key premise here is that different people with the same underlying conditions may well experience significantly different functional impacts. This will reflect the complex interaction of many factors, including physiological, psychological, motivational and social. Functional assessment is not a precise science and accurately and consistently assessing several million awards in this way is a formidable undertaking. That's really the distinction I'm on. What I observed both in written material and when I watched assessments is that all the first questions that are asked are about medical conditions. I sort of understand that because you have to start there, but the clear impact I think that's having on people, and I certainly observed it in the claimant groups I talked to, is that they felt a large proportion of the time in the assessment and the early stages of the assessment were all about medical and that I observed having quite a large impact on whether kind of people understood that this actually is a functional assessment. So everybody almost without exception talking to me referred to when I went for my medical. They didn't talk about when I went for my assessment and I'm pleased to see in the DWP's response my recommendations on this point that they have undertaken to seek to both make clearer to claimants in all the kind of literature and the award material and emphasise to the assessors that the amount of time and focus spent on medical information should be kept to the necessary minimum and thorough exploration of the functional impact, the reliability of functional impact should be more thoroughly explored and focused on. Final question, if I may, convener. Again, it's rather in consequence of what Mr Stewart was examining you on. What would I do without you, Mr Stewart? It's this broad area of the state or condition of the individual when presenting for assessment and Mr Stewart made an important point, which is a lot rest on that one session, on that one occasion. Did you think that the assessment process was sufficiently flexible to allow the assessor to get an accurate impression of what the applicant may be confronting, particularly given your very helpful comment just a moment ago, that we can't just look at this as a medical diagnosis and confirmation of what the medical condition is. That actually has to be considered. What does that mean in terms of mobility and independence and dignity, as Clare Adamson was saying? Up to a point, that would be my summary response of how satisfactory that was. I probably had the same thought, as Mr Stewart referred to, that I spent quite a lot of time observing assessments. When you're an observer to any process, you inevitably constitute interference in that process, even if you don't intend it. Mr Stewart, I think, reasonably observed that there may be a tendency to encourage best behaviour on the part of the people you're observing. What I saw in what I viewed as the kind of best assessments was a very clear focus by the assessor in exploring, having discussed what's the kind of impact today and what was people's descriptors, was so how typical is this? How many days a week is it like this? How many days a week is it worse than this? How many days a week is it better than this? How variable is it? Does it fluctuate? I think I saw some very good examples. I observed a few examples, which I wouldn't say were bad, but they were less good than that. In talking to people who'd gone through the process and the written evidence I got, I got quite a lot of input that said, we don't think this reliability exploration and the fluctuating conditions dynamics for many people are perhaps being explored as fully as they should be. It's for that reason that, amongst my recommendations, I've emphasised the importance of further focus being given both in the training and the evaluation and observation of assessments of ensuring that that is done appropriately and reliably. It's very, there is a kind of a difficulty of doing that consistently reliably in face-to-face assessments. There are of course a proportion of assessments which are done on paper and the judgment's reached, there's no need to call the person to a face-to-face assessment. I think it's particularly important to make sure where decisions as it were just being made on paper that there is enough evidence presented on paper again to allow assessors to judge that issue of, it is a variability. I agree, I think it's quite an issue. Getting to a council of perfection on this will be really difficult. Is there a need to emphasise it more? I suspect so, yes. Have DWP and their response picked up and made the right noises in response to my observations and recommendations? Yes, they have, but as I said at the beginning, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. Very briefly, I can read a following on from that answer, which is I think most helpful. The mandatory reconsideration available to a claimant is within one month of the decision being taken. Is that sufficiently flexible? In terms of the length of time, I think in most cases it should be as long as there is adequate resourcing in place to make sure that the reconsiderations are done. Where it could be a difficulty, I think, is if part of the issue that a claimant is bringing into a mandatory reconsideration is I think there is evidence that was not given sufficient emphasis or which I don't feel was kind of brought to bear, then I think there could be an issue of the elapsed time in going out and gathering that additional evidence, so I can see a potential difficulty there, but I would hope that the process is sufficiently flexible that if somebody wants to go through mandatory reconsideration feels that there isn't, there is some evidence that they've not been able to lay their hands on that they would actually proceed with the application for mandatory reconsideration and point 2, the evidence that they feel needs to be obtained. Mr Gray, on paragraph 9 of your executive summary, you talk about the published data on PIP awards and how 55 per cent of new claims have received an award, and that's higher than was originally expected. Even the office of budget responsibility is now projecting a higher success rate for new claims than the original forecast. You've also made the perfectly reasonable observation that this whole process is about cutting costs ultimately. Last week, on the last committee hearing, we heard research from Sheffield-Hallam University that shows that the treasuries increased its anticipated savings in terms of the transfer from DLA to PIP by £1 billion to 2017-18. Although we are comparing new claims to transfer claims, it seems to me that there is a danger that assessors will be under tremendous pressure to assess claimants on the basis of the funds available rather than need. That's clearly a risk. What I saw and observed was assessors looking to do the assessments on the basis of the very precise descriptors that are laid down in those 12 functional characteristics and, similarly, departmental decision makers are doing their best in what is a difficult process to come to the best judgments they can. I certainly didn't see any evidence to suggest that, but clearly you're right to highlight that one could conceive of that as a risk. Given that the number of successful new claimants is higher than anticipated, might not the number of DLA-to-PIP cases be higher than anticipated, which would obviously affect the number somewhat? Frankly, I think that all outcomes are possible. All those projections are done by people doing their best to come up with estimates of what they think the impact of a change in the system will be. The likelihood that those estimates are absolutely spot-on is probably not very high. As you pointed out, what we saw in the first phase of new claims is the favourable outcomes being rather slightly higher than had been assumed. As I said earlier, I think the big test of this process and of the reliability of the current assessments is what will happen when existing DLA claimants are being reassessed under the new process. That's where the bulk of the impact will come through. At the point that I wrote the report of the awards decisions that have been reached at that stage, 96 per cent were new claims and only 4 per cent were the small proportion of people on DLA who had come forward for reassessments. There is very little evidence at the moment of what will happen in that critical phase. You did a lot of work on the claimant journey and the experience. You mentioned the assessment letters as being difficult to understand. There is also an issue about the length of the form itself. I understand that the PIP-2 form is about 35 pages long. That will be very difficult for some people, particularly people with a learning disability. Why did you not make any particular recommendation about the length of the form? There is a difficult balance to strike here. If you are trying to do a reliable and thorough assessment that goes back to the questions that Ms Goldie was asking me about a complex assessment of functional impact on 12 different criteria, it calls for quite a lot of detailed information. Equally all right, it could be put off to some people who are going through that process. However, I did not feel that that was an area particularly that I thought in the early stage that it was right to recommend significant changes, because I think that there are kind of risquies that dilute the quality of the information that is informing the decisions. I should declare an interest here, convener, in that I have a close member of my family with a learning disability. I am going to pursue that line of questioning. I would not imagine that many people with a learning disability would have been new claimants. Therefore, I understand that it is hard for you to talk about their experience, but you mention the experience and some concerns that you have. However, there is no evidence, as yet, presumably, because not many of them are new claimants. Clearly, there is a real danger here that people who are extremely vulnerable will have difficulties in getting essential benefits. Do you think that we should be putting more in place to protect those people in terms of advocacy and making sure that they are steered through the process properly? There is a big issue underlying your question about the degree of support that is available to people who have difficulty claiming whether it is a learning disability or any other impairment. Traditionally, that has been a significant role for third sector organisations. At a time of stringency, they are facing pressures on their ability to support people in claims. I certainly heard evidence that quite a number of the organisations that have traditionally operated in this space to support vulnerable claimants are finding it difficult to resource the degree of support that some claimants are feeling that they need. However, in a sense, that feels to me the bigger issue and the more important issue rather than too much information being sought from people in order to validate a claim or otherwise. Is there something built into the system if a person does not have that third sector support or advocacy support? Are there safeguards built into the system to ensure that those people do not fall through the net? Not in the sense that it seems to me the clear presumption that now, as indeed in for many years past, is that for this type of benefit there is access to it, but fundamentally it is the responsibility of the individual to come forward to seek to claim it. I think that it is a big issue. I am not sure that it is a new issue in relation to PIP, other than possibly that third sector organisations find themselves as doing many other organisations under greater financial pressure now than they may have been in the past. Reassessments are a big part of the process mandatory reassessment. Do you think that that is necessary for someone who simply has a very severe disability, which means that they cannot work, that they need to keep going back through the process of mandatory reassessment? Well, I think that it is appropriate to be flexible about this. One of the things that I commented adversely on was a sense that I got that in terms of the early awards under PIP that seemed to be rather a heavy focus on what I thought was most unfortunately termed interventions of people being gone back to check if there have been any change of circumstances. I think that it is not unreasonable to move away from a system where either explicitly or implicitly people are on complete lifetime awards for benefits, so some degree of periodic review seems to be not unreasonable. I think that that ought to be flexible. For people who clearly have severe impairments where all the evidence suggests the likelihood of their improving is minimal, that should be at the least intensive end of the spectrum, but conversely, where there is a significant likelihood of change in one direction or the other, it is not unreasonable to have some kind of review process. Is there enough flexibility to take account for the fact? We have already heard that the whole process is quite stressful. If someone has a condition that is very severe and is not going to change if someone is paraplegic or has severe learning and physical disabilities, it is not going to change to put them through that stressful situation. I am not sure that there is yet enough flexibility, but we will not really know until this key stage of mandatory reassessment rolls out. One of the things that was early focus on and where I think a significant improvement was introduced, thanks in large parts of excellent work by Mcmillan Cancer, was around people with terminal illness conditions. The very early days that was a very unsatisfactory process, a new streamlined and as it were bespoke process that is suitable for people and that particularly difficult stage of life has been introduced and has been widely welcomed. What I am concerned about is not just taking that particularly difficult segment at one end of the spectrum and saying that everybody else is in exactly the same position. As part of redesigning the system and being flexible, I think that I used the phrase somewhere that it should not be one-size-fits-all and it should have those flexibilities within it. However, as I say, it is not unreasonable that an underlying principle of review is built into the system. I am going to take Margaret and if I have time to come back to Annabelle and Claire for short supplementaries, I know that Paul has to be away by 12 o'clock so that people can be like me. I can probably spare a few minutes for it. I do have a plan to catch it up as one. Thank you convener and good morning. It is the worst of coming at the end when most of your questions have already been asked. I will ask a question around the disconnect between IT systems, which we have spoken about earlier. How likely is it that that is going to change? Will the resources be provided to ensure that there is better and easier access to information for applicants? I am not sure, because it is not my responsibility, but I have made clear that that is a priority to sort it. Given a degree of experience in formal lives in running big programmes, including IT systems, I see no technical reason why they should not be done. If it is not, I would regard it as highly regrettable, because going back to my phrase about it being disjointed, it is just unacceptable. We look forward to that being pulled out. I am not the implementer, but I hope that I have made my views very clear on it in the report and subsequently today. Like most of my colleagues, I was surprised to hear about the communication and the letters that were sent out. You said that you could not really understand the letters that were sent out as the outcomes of assessments. I am pleased to hear that that is being reviewed and will be looked at. How often are the staff checks carried out? How often are the quality checks carried out on the likes of letters? How consistent are those? I think that it still leaves a fair amount to be desired. I cannot give you precise figures on what proportion of letters are checked. Where I was keen to put most focus was having, as it were, the standard structure of decision letters in a much better shape. It would be a big step in the right direction. One of my criticisms was that the fundamental structure of the standard letters was wrong, because you had to get to something like the bottom of the second page to find out whether or not you got an award. In any letter that is seeking to explain what might be quite a complicated thing overall, the first thing you need to know when you read the letter is that you have been awarded at rate X or you have not been awarded and then there is lots of explanatory stuff that possibly needs to follow. I do not think that it is as much about individual checking of letters but having the basic templates that people use in a much better and more sensible structure. There is, as I know again from former lives, there is always an inherent difficulty with social security benefits of making sure that, if I can be blunt, the letters are not overly influenced by legal advice and legal requirements without being rude about legal profession or not deliberately rude about legal profession. Quite often you can get in a position where lawyers say these kind of precise words need to be used and I think it is important to listen to that advice carefully but then think actually how do we get the best marrying between what needs to be said legally in order to reflect the law but doing it in a way that the average person has the opportunity to have a decent chance of understanding what is being said to them rather than feeling that there is a lot of legal speak being put to them. Similarly for the lack of consistencies in assessments and I have already heard about the letters, how often is that going to be checked up on just now and will there be an increase in the number of those quality checks carried out? I do not honestly know the figures on that. What I am moderately pleased about is the commitment from DWP to have a major review of the structure of the letters. Is there a timescale for when your recommendations will be implemented? Well, what I termed by short term recommendations, I said that they should be fully implemented before the start of management assessment, which up to this point has been said to be October, starting in October this year. That was a time frame that I put on what I thought would be right. I am taking it as implicit, if not explicit, in the department's response to the report that they are accepting that. I will take Annabelle and clear questions together, because I think that we both reacted to something that was being said, so I think that they might be connected. Annabelle, do you want to go first? It is very brief. Is it possible to accept the merit of a principle of reviewing an assessment without that being incompatible with a presumption that, in certain cases, reviewers, as Joan McAlpine pointed out, would, to most people, be unnecessary? Can the principle not be honoured in the implement, but there can be introduced a presumption in certain cases that further assessments are clearly unnecessary and, indeed, will only subject the claimant to distress? Absolutely. I think that some of the evidence that the committee has taken has shown that the process can, indeed, be detrimental to the health of the people involved in special mental health cases, and some of them are with MS, MND and cerebral palsies, as we mentioned. They are not going to get any significant improvement and, indeed, probing us to when end-of-life, the doctor took a set of lifetime scales with them and things, can be absolutely dehumanising for people. I just do not understand why that cannot be built into this process. I think that, in a sense, that has been built into the special rules cases for terminal illness already. Someone diagnosed with MND, the average lifespan is just over two years. So, at what point do they become terminal terminally? I mean, they have been given a terminal diagnosis as many people with cancer have, but their medical staff might not have said any timescale into which they expect them to reach any end-of-life situation. And this is the dehumanising aspect of the whole thing. Some people are so ill that they are never going to improve and get out of their situation. It seems that the system should be able to cope with that. I think we are in danger of firstly agreeing on this, rather than disagreeing, in that what I was saying in terms of seeking to build in flexibility is that for people who have not been diagnosed as terminal ill within six months, but have sear severe disabling health conditions, I would have thought that it was appropriate, certainly, to make an award with at least a very long time period before the possibility of a further review. Whether it is appropriate in any case of people who have not formally been assessed as being terminal ill, it is appropriate to say that it is a lifetime award. I think that you can kind of argue that either way, but I think that I am accepting the principle of what you are all saying of recognising the severity at the point of either a new award or the first PIP award for a DLA claimant and be sensible and flexible about the time period indicated for any review. Okay, I said that you wanted to do away with 12 o'clock, but I am going to abuse the fact that you said that you had maybe just one or two minutes. Just one more question on PIP, and it's just the type of question that a convener asks anyone who has come in front of the committee, if there was something else you would want to add to what you've already said, but a specific sort of question to get you into that territory, if you were presented with a blank sheet of paper at the moment and asked to put down your thoughts on PIP, where would you start? If I had a genuinely blank sheet of paper and I was starting in a system where there wasn't a legacy benefit, I'm not sure that I would... I think I would ask kind of fairly fundamental questions about whether the key underlying principles of this benefit are the ones that you want to adopt in the present circumstance. So would you, for example, have... keep it kind of completely independent of income? Would you keep it completely independent of tax? I think it's a question that would be worth asking in those circumstances. The problem is nobody has got a blank sheet of paper here because there is this existing caseload of DLA, and the challenge you have in Scotland in thinking about how you want to look at this in future is that it's the classic one in any change in social security benefits of what do you do about potential losers? Mr Stewart and others have pointed to the kind of power of that point. So saying, you know, we don't... we want to kind of redesign PIP in a very different way to DLA, but with kind of... without impacting on the existing caseload is really difficult. So I guess one possibility, if one concluded actually we want to have something quite different in future, would be to treat new claims differently from existing claims. But of course that... the kind of legacy runs on hopefully for many years, and one hopes most people aren't in the position of near-term level and understood that actually there's a very long time period to run through. So I'd like to have more of a blank sheet of paper than actually, I think, anybody realistically faces. I'm sorry if that's not very helpful, but I think it just reflects the challenge that anybody has in saying, I want to reshape a social security system. Yeah. No, that's perfectly fair. I won't take up any more of your time asking questions. I know you want to get away, but we did mention that you had looked into ESA regulations. We were contacted specifically by a member of the public about a question to do with ESA regulations, so if you don't mind, we'll write to you. Okay, well, I'm happy to spend kind of two minutes on that, if you like. Well, we'll ask the question, and you're happy to do that. The question focused around the proposals designed to address the Government's concerns that existing ESA rules encourage claimants to loop around the system. The intention is that claimants that have been found fit for work should be prevented from returning to ESA, and that's a benefit that, during the assessment phase, has no element of conditionality, that unless an existing health condition has deteriorated significantly or a new condition has developed, they want to address that issue. The person who's written to us wants to know what evidence is there in support of the alleged loophole in the first place in those ESA regulations, and is there any statistical information about the number of people who are said to be using it? Yeah, well, here I do speak with my SSAC chair hat on in that this was a set of regulations that came to us last autumn, as they're required to do under the statute. Those were the very questions that we asked ourselves as a committee, and when we had DWP officials presenting the draft regulations to us, and that the initial decision that the committee has to take on these occasions is are we having explored them going to say we're content that they should proceed without a formal process, or do we, as the committee, wish in the terminology to take them on formal reference and then potentially go out to consultation? On this occasion, we took the latter view for essentially the reasons that your correspondent was flagging, that the information that was presented to us on the actual or potential number of people who were looping the system was frankly very thin in the documentation that was presented to us, and as we explored it, and particularly in the consultation process, there were a number of quite serious concerns we had about the way in which the impact these changes would have. Again, particular issues around people with mental health conditions to come back to one of the issues we've been talking about earlier. Largely because, or partly because we didn't have clear evidence presented to us by the department, we went out to consultation. We had a couple of meetings including one in Glasgow, one in London, with representative bodies to seek to explore what was the likely reality. In fact, during that process, the department did then come up with some estimate of the number of people who might be affected. They looked at the total number of people coming to ESA assessments and looked at what proportion of those were people who were reapplying with what seemed to be broadly unchanged health conditions, and actually it was something a little under 4% of the total were of that category. So in our report, back to the Secretary of State, which was because he had to publish and lay before the Westminster Parliament, our recommendation was in fact that the regulations change should not proceed. We were not persuaded of the case for a number of reasons, and we made a number of more detailed recommendations if the Secretary of State in his wisdom or otherwise chose not to follow our recommendation. Some mitigations we thought should be put in place. His decision was to proceed with the regulations, but I'm pleased to say that most of the other more detailed recommendations that we made around ensuring guidance was much improved and various other changes were adopted. I'd be happy to write to you with more detail on that would be helpful. If you want to pursue it, all those reports need to be published and laid in from the Parliament. The document that I'm happy to leave with your secretariat includes both our full report and the Secretary of State's response, but I'm very happy to have more correspondence about it as well. I think that that would be very welcome, if in the hopes to clarify the situation. It's an interesting example of the way SSAC operates in relation to current Westminster legislation, and you might want to reflect on the need for some similar processes, as benefits are devolved to Scotland. That's certainly worth considering. It's something that we'll be looking at when we look at the Smith commission recommendations. Paul, thank you very much for your time this morning. I found that very helpful and enlightening. We may have to look at having you back at some point in the future as things progress, but I certainly found it helpful this morning, and thank you very much for your time. I'll bring the meeting to a close by pointing out that our next meeting will be because of the recess on 21 April, where we expect to hear oral evidence on the impact of welfare reform on children's services.