 Good morning, everyone, and welcome everyone to the 21st meeting in 2018 of the Social Security Committee. Can you remind everyone present to turn off mobile phones or other devices to silent mode so that they do not disrupt this morning's proceedings? We have not had any apologies this morning and we shall move to agenda item 1, which is a decision to take items in private. The committee has asked to agree that item 7 consideration of evidence and item 8, pre-budget scrutiny, are taken in private. Is the committee agreed to that? Yes. Thank you. We move to agenda item 2, subordinate legislation. The committee will take evidence on the relayed first-year tribunal for Scotland social security chamber and upper tribunal for Scotland composition regulations 2018 in draft. This instrument is subject to the affirmative procedure. I welcome, surely, our several cabinet secretary for social security and older people. Now, in batty, head of complaints, re-determinations and appeals policy and Colin Brown, Solicitor of Scottish Government, welcome all of you this morning. I invite the cabinet secretary to make an open statement and then we will move to questions after that. Following my previous appearance of 4 October to discuss six out of the seven sets of regulations that are required for establishing the new chamber, I am pleased to be here today to discuss the final set of regulations. Those were withdrawn and relayed to address a concern raised by the DPLRC. The tribunal composition regulations will allow the tribunal service to have panels that best meet the needs of the particular case that it is considering. While the regulations set out, the cases will normally be considered by a legal member sitting alone, there are a number of exceptions. For example, employment injury cases, there will always be two members, a legal member and a medical member, whereas for disability assistance cases, there will always be three members, a legal member, a medical member and a member with disability experience. The regulations also provide flexibility to vary the composition of tribunal panels where needed. The main example is in relation to the upper tribunal. It will allow the president of the Scottish tribunals to decide on a case-by-case basis what the most appropriate composition of the tribunal would be. That was highlighted as a key requirement during the consultation. The provision was also revised to address the concerns that were expressed when the regulations were initially laid on 13 September. I therefore move the motion in my name and would of course be happy to take questions from members. Thank you very much, cabinet secretary. Do we have any questions? Jeremy Balfour. Good morning, cabinet secretary. Thank you very much and thank you for your introduction, which was very helpful. Can I just seek clarification in regard to section 4 of the composition and, in particular, subsection 4? The authority to determine the composition of the first-year tribunal will be made by the chamber president. I welcome the remarks that you make about that. The first-year tribunals, particularly the DLA pit ones, will always have three members. I suppose that my slight concern of reading the regulations as they are is that—if I am wrong, please do correct me—that, in theory, the chamber president could vary that to just have two members and we may lose a disability-component person format. Is that a possibility for maybe not now, because clearly it is not your intention, but for future administrations, or will the first-year tribunal always have three members where it is a PIP DLA or attendance allowance case? As I said in my early part of my opening remarks, I discussed what would happen for a disability assessment tribunal. Flexibility is around what would happen to top-up benefits, for example. The reason for that flexibility is that we do not have any top-up benefits at the moment to top-up to reserve benefits. Therefore, it is difficult to assess what exactly you would want. It would be important not to be too prescriptive about that at that point. That is where the flexibility lies, for those types of benefits that we do not have yet. I will be absolutely clear for the record. The tribunal knows that we have a moment. There was no flexibility to order the membership of those. They are, as you mentioned, in your opening statement. Are there any other questions from members? There are no other questions. We will move to the next item, which is agenda item 3 on the same topic, which is also important legislation, and I can invite Ms Somerville to move the motion S5M-14434 in your name. I have moved, convener. The question is that the Social Security Committee recommends that the first-year tribunal for Scotland social security chamber and upper tribunal for Scotland composition regulations 2018 be approved. Are we content to recommend this instrument for approval? We are. Thank you very much, and thank you for joining us, cabinet secretary and officials. We will just suspend briefly. Okay, welcome back everyone. I will now move to agenda item 4, which is an inquiry in relation to social security and work poverty. Agenda item 4 continues an inquiry into social security and work poverty, and is the fourth evidence session. The focus this week is back to universal credit and the particular role of the work coach. I welcome David Semple, PCS chair of the Scotland Committee of the PCS Union. Thank you for joining us, Mr Semple. With your permission, we will go straight to questions if that is all right. The PCS has a very clear position in relation to universal credit. Our inquiry is specific to work poverty. There are a lot of wider issues in relation to that. It might be helpful if I read the PCS general secretary's remarks. The work is comments on universal credit, which are particularly strong. Universal credit remains a disaster because it is driven by the Tory's political choice to cut public spending and to denigrate people who rely on social security support. The misery being inflicted by the Government's mishandling of the disaster programme must be stopped and the full roll-out should be suspended immediately. While I suspect Mr Semple, I might share a lot of those beliefs in relation to work poverty. I would ask for your comments in relation to those pretty strong words from your general secretary in relation to those in work poverty. Where is the disaster in relation to work poverty? Where is the mishandling in relation to work poverty that allows to better interrogate the issues with our inquiry? I would very strongly agree with the sentiments that the general secretary has given to work poverty. In relation to in-work poverty, we see day and daily in universal credit. The written submission that we have given to the committee includes evidence from members in Dundee and the three benefit centres in Glasgow, which show their experience of dealing with very upset people who are unhappy with the handling of universal credit. That includes all elements of universal credit, including people who are in work. The number of particular areas for those who do work include the cuts that are coming down the line. Once we see managed migration, whatever is being said about transitional protection, we still feel that people will lose money through the move to universal credit from other in-work benefits such as working tax credits. It is also in terms of the potential for a conditionality regime. I worked in a job centre whenever the stricter benefit regime was brought in. The kinds of sentiments and the ideology that was directed towards work coaches, what they were then called personal advisers, to force them to try and treat their claimants like they were the enemy is something that we could very easily foresee being reintroduced once we begin to down the road towards introducing in-work claimants into job centres on a much grander basis than currently happens presently. All of those are examples of ways in which people who are currently in work, who are currently in receipt of working tax credits or who might in the future be in receipt of universal credit, working tax credits components, would face detriments and would face problems as a result of how the system is currently set up. One of the things that our committee has explored in relation to the inquiry is what is coming down the line in relation to in-work conditionalities. People out there just now who do not consider themselves part of the benefits system, they give some additional supports to help them get by, families doing good jobs out there, who will at some point in the future start of conversations with their work coach about, well, couldn't you do some more hours, couldn't you get a higher hourly rate, don't you think you could take a second job? Those are very real questions that drop that work coaches could be asking families, and if the work coach doesn't get the answer they feel they need in relation to that, we're talking sanctions effectively for families who don't even think they're in a benefits system, never mind anyone else. How will a work coach know the local labour market to make a determination about whether there are ample jobs out there in the community? How would a work coach know transport links about whether it's reasonable for an individual to get to a second job? How would the work coach know childcare options in an area in order to have them make effectively what is a professional value judgment on whether someone who is in work is trying hard enough to get progression through their employment? How can work coaches realistically do that? The first thing I would say is that the current number of work coaches simply wouldn't be able to do that in any meaningful way. The number of claimants that you're talking about, the additional footfall into our job centres, which, as you'll be aware, have been cut in number over the past couple of years, wouldn't be sustainable for work coaches to have meaningful conversations with people who are in work to be able to raise the kind of questions that you talk about. I want to be absolutely clear that I trust the professionalism of my colleagues, my union members, that every single person that I know who works in the job centre desperately wants to help the people that they're talking to. It's about how the system is set up, it's about how those conversations are set up, it's about how those work coaches are trained, it's about what support is available in the local area, and we have to be very, very honest that there's not a huge amount of support that would be able to help a lot of these people. The randomised control trial, which I'm sure you have the results of, shows very clearly that there's no statistical, meaningful statistical difference in terms of dragging people in to subject them to conversations in a job centre versus not doing that. I think that the answer is that they simply couldn't, and it's not down to the want of trying on their part to support their claimant base, it's down to very basic things like staffing, but there's also a sort of a much more structural element to this as well, which is if you are telling someone that you should go and find another job, find a higher paying job, increase your hours and so on, you have to be aware obviously of the impact that that has to that person's life. I think that there's a very, very great worry on our part that if we were to try and treat people who are in work the way that the Government has in the past tried to treat people who are out of work, that that simply wouldn't happen. You say a little bit more in relation to the workload coming down the line for work coaches then, because I think we heard average caseload at the moment, well pre-universal credit roll-out anyway was well under 100, but anticipated it was about 343 per work coach. So there's going to be additional demands on the time of work coaches, but we're going to see a huge increase in the amount of clients that they have, so can you say a little bit more around that? Yeah, and what I would be clear about is that the actual number of claimants is less important than what you're actually doing with them. So if you take the legacy benefit caseloads, no matter how many people you had in your caseload, that wouldn't necessarily determine how often you were bringing them into the job centre. There would be the basic fortnightly regime signing on and things like that, things that many people will be familiar with, but we would also have had other regimes of bringing people in daily, bringing people in weekly, having additional ad hoc appointments and so on. So the final number at the end of the page is less important than what regime you're actually subjecting people to. 343 on anything like the kind of regimes that we subject the unemployed to and those who are on working-age benefit for sickness and disability, we simply wouldn't be able to cope with the resources that we currently have available. Okay, now 343 is a projected number, of course. I'm assuming—never assume, I suppose, but I'm assuming that those 343 people will have to use their online journal as a matter, of course—that would be nearly 350 separate online journal accounts for one individual work coach to monitor for any communications from their client base. Is that feasible? We don't think so and you touch on it there. The 343 applies to the work coach. The other side of things is the benefit processing side of things and our case managers for universal credit in service centres would also be looking at those journal entries that you refer to. Their caseload would be somewhere in excess of 900 and the kinds of concerns that they would be obliged to pick up would be in relation to payments, whether a payment was correct and so on and so forth. Again, that's simply not manageable. Okay, I have a question for myself then. I know my colleagues want to come in and explore this further. Earlier on, I was asking about—I said that it was a question of professionalism of work coaches. We have to look at what they've been asked to do, the numbers of people they've been asked to work with and the demands on their time. We also have to look at the training that we've put in place for them. I was giving the examples of having to know the local and regional labour market pretty well, having to know transport links pretty well, having to know the childcare environment pretty well. I could go on and list other things that would have to go pretty well. What training do work coaches get to allow them to be aware of this? All of our work coaches get training. To give you an example, since you mentioned transport links, you go into any job centre in Scotland and you'll be fairly confident that you'll find a fairly well annotated map of all the local transport links on the wall. Bear in mind that a lot of the support that you're talking about, we have to deliver to people who are out of work anyway. Knowledge of the local labour market isn't necessarily the problem, although I would say that there has been a process of de-skilling work coaches from what they used to be. It used to be the case that we would have had dedicated teams in the job centres to go out and liaise on a very regular basis with local employers to provide the job centre with a list of vacancies that they could sub to the people that we were dealing with. Lots of that has been reduced in scope or taken away entirely, and so that additional support isn't there. I'm confident that work coaches would have some knowledge of the local labour market and the definite knowledge of the local transport links, but there are things behind the scenes that we used to be able to do for the people who are out of work that we can no longer do. Those are the kinds of supports that we would obviously be looking at exactly the same for people who are currently in work, who might be looking for other jobs and so forth. The more difficult aspect to it is the kind of the personal conversations that you referenced whenever you talk about people who have families, people who have reasons that perhaps they have the situation they have, and wouldn't be guaranteed of finding a boss in any other job that would support them in the way that a particular boss has and so forth. Those kinds of questions are far too open to interpretation. The question of whether and when to use the discretion that would potentially be at the fingertips of a work coach is a very, very difficult one. We don't think that the training is sufficient for that, and I presume that everybody has seen the spice bulletin, which gives you a link to the actual training modules for people who are in work for our work coaches. I don't think that anybody would argue that that is the be-all and end-all of the type of training that we would need. Finally, on the matter of my local community, we lost Maryhill Job Centre. I have to make an apology because I should have been in that job centre more often than I was before it was threatened with closure. One of the things that I found from my constituents is that they built up a really positive relationship with work coaches, and there was a much more positive dynamic there than I anticipated there would be. However, that job centre closing in constituent is going to Springburn or Parchtych or whatever seems to break down a local skills and knowledge base and relationship base in a community when that job centre closed. Do job centre closures impact on the ability to have that positive relationship with those who are claiming benefits and work coaches in a community? To talk about the job centre closures is to open up a whole can of worms because we are talking about imposing additional costs on people to travel to and from job centres for appointments, which although they may be mandated by their work coach, they may or may not be told that they can get money back from. You are talking about people who are already low-waged, currently in work, being told that you must attend your job centre, potentially on a fortnightly basis and so on. Bear in mind that local job centres have been closed, the distances being travelled, the cost of that travel has now increased. However, you also touch on the other side of it, which is that local communities have built up relationships with those job centres. The staff from Maryhill moved from Maryhill to my job centre, which is Springburn. We obviously worked together very well and they will bring all their skills and so on to Springburn. Those skills most of the time will not be lost, although in some cases we have had staff obviously forced to leave over the closure programme across the country, so we have lost skills and things like that. It makes it more difficult to maintain relationships with local employers. For example, if you do not have a local job centre, that is a problem, because if your job is to liaise with those employers, if your job is to make a judgment call about whether and when somebody can look for additional work, look to increase their hours and so on, then you need those relationships. I want to ask you about two areas, just a quick one and a follow-on from Bob, which is about the work progression. Substantially, I want to ask you about the transfer of in-work benefits from HRC. I wonder if you would agree that not enough work has probably been done about the question of work progression. It is a phrase, but in reality, and I think that you have described some of it. A work coach, which I would accept, is out to help the person sitting for it, could not possibly know all the combinations involved in transferring from one employer to another in order to get progression. I just think that it is one of the areas of work that is completely underestimated by the designers of the scheme, but one area, I wonder if you might agree that I think that there is a lack of understanding of employment rights in relation to progression of employment rights. One of the reasons that you would not want to move from one employer to another, even though you might get a higher pay, is that you have to think that you will lose all your employment rights. Do you think that that is fair to say that? Yes, very much. As you rightly pointed out, it takes two years of employment for you to have the right to go to an employment tribunal if you are mistreated in certain circumstances, so you would lose that by having to change employer. There is a huge problem with understanding of employment rights in Scotland and the United Kingdom as a whole, where vast ways of the economy do not have trade unions that can speak up and represent and defend workers. That is a real problem. We are playing into a culture of attacking employment rights if we are telling people that, in order to get benefit, they have to give up those rights to move to a different employer. Yes, you are absolutely right. Would you expect to get some guidance in the DWP handbook, if you like, on what would happen if someone said, well, I do not want to go for that job, because we are concerned that they have a bad reputation as an employer or that I might lose my employment rights? Would you expect to get some advice about how to deal with that question? You phrased that quite interestingly. Would I expect them to get some guidance? I would want them to get some guidance. I would not be able to comment beyond that. I will ask about the transfer of in-work benefits from HMRC to DWP. That strikes me as, again, an underestimate of what we are about to do here, which is to transfer wholesale all of the child tax credit from any HMRC, which, let us face it, has had its problems, if our constituents would bear that out. However, that seems to me to be going to be overloading already creaking system. I wonder if you could outline to the committee firstly anything you can tell us about the impact of the workload and the ability to try and make universal credit actually work. Secondly, do you think that people who receive these benefits are aware that they will now be accountable, if you like, or that their relationship is going to change from the HMRC to the DWP? The people who claim tax credits, I cannot imagine—let me draw attention to their remarks. I think it was Neil Cullin or Alex Sharma. I cannot for life remember which, on 18 October, when they appeared before the Work and Pensions Select Committee in the UK House of Commons, they talked about how people who claim tax credits do not even know that they are on a benefit. I would say that that is absolutely true. The scale of work that we are talking about, you are not just talking about moving work almost head-for-head from HMRC to DWP, you are actually talking about fundamental changes that vastly increase the amount of work per claimant to the new system to universal credit. For example, whereas HMRC would have looked at earnings on an annual basis, we are now having to look at them on a monthly basis, the volume of work has gone up dramatically, and that is before we get to the question of conditionality. It is before we get to the question of whether we are bringing these people into job centres, whether we are having to phone them from the service centres on a regular basis, and then on top of that, as Mr Doris pointed out, you have also got the journals. You have got people who have to check what they are putting on their journals on a regular basis and whether they are using those. I do not know if you would have a view, but given all the problems that we have with universal credit and trying to make it work and the underfunding, what you could do is try to get on with the job to leave those benefits where they are, which is with HMRC, because it is working perfectly well. Well, look, I mean— It is working perfectly, but it is working well. That is essentially what I was going to say. The managed migration presents all kinds of problems, and we at this stage are not in favour of managed migration. We think that the universal credit roll-out should be halted in all of its forms, because there are too many problems now to continue putting additional burden on, as you defined, an already creaking system. We would say that that should be at the very least paused, if not halted altogether. I wonder if you could comment on some of what has been prepared around the digital first approach. I will say this carefully. I am not making a luddite point here, but I would be interested to know how realistic you think some of that is in terms of the way you are going to have to interact sometimes with people who either do not have the facilities or the confidence or perhaps even the internet connection to do some of that. How realistic is this roll-out? Is it going to work? In short, no, to be really blunt about it. First, let me try to explain it to you from the perspective of somebody who has been trying to negotiate with DWP as one of the lead negotiators for universal credit within the PCS and DWP. The constant problem that we have are too many phone calls to the service centres. People rely on the contact via the telephone with the service centres. The reason that they rely on that is because the digital service is not really fit for purpose and is not fit for everyone, certainly. It is not fit for people who have problems accessing the internet. It is not fit for people who have literacy difficulties and so forth. Those people obviously call the service centres. The service centres are not actually staffed for that because the system has been designed as a digital first system. It has been designed that people go online and make claims online and use the journal online and so forth. It has not been designed for the actual real needs of the claimants. The digital model breaks down, if you like, at the first hurdle where we find that, because there is not enough staff and phone calls are going unanswered, we are talking a huge volume of phone calls that are missed by the department because of the lack of staffing. Things are let sit for long periods of time and therefore drive more phone calls as people call in to check up rather than use their journals because they have no confidence that the journals are being used. It means that the staff that we do have can't then use the digital channels to communicate with claimants, which again forces things back to the analogue model. If we do not have the staff regularly checking the journal entries—which we do not—then the people who are putting those things online are then thinking, well, I need to make contact via the phone, I need to walk into a job centre. The digital model is currently very dysfunctional and it is on the basis of how few staff we have to implement it. It is also on the basis that we have not fully taken into account the needs of claimants. In my last appearance before the committee, I spoke about a paper that DWP had produced in 2011 where they identified that claimants actually want to be able to communicate with DWP through all of the available channels. They want to be able to have a face-to-face conversation with someone. They want to be able to have a conversation over the phone. Yes, there are a proportion of them who want to communicate digitally. That is why, whenever we were working with the ministers to try and build the new Scottish Social Security system, that multiplicity of channels was really central to what we were trying to do. However, the digital system is not fit for purpose. It is dysfunctional very much. That is it. I am very concerned to hear that. You mentioned examples of situations where you feel people who do not go through the digital route and people who phone in can have their calls unanswered. You mentioned a situation where there are not enough people there to deal with them. What is typically happening to those cases? How long are people waiting to get a meaningful response? The answer is as long as a piece of string. You can get responses relatively quickly. You can be waiting for a very long period of time. The problem is that I do not think that DWP accurately calculates what we would call failure demand, which is the calls that claimants would make whenever we do not do something that we should have done within the timescale that we should have done it in. I cannot give you a figure that would conclusively prove that this is how long people are having to wait. What I can tell you is the experience of my members who take those calls. I have been conducting car park meetings in Walsall and Wolverhampton service centre last week. For anybody who has a trade union background, car park meetings are really the first step towards industrial action. Members unanimously voted for industrial action because of the pressure that they are under with regard to the workloads. A significant part of that pressure is the number of people who are phoning in who are bitterly unhappy with the service that they have received from DWP. Thank you very much for the evidence that you are sharing with us this morning. I think that, to be honest, the more I hear, the more concerned I become. In work, conditionality has never been tried anywhere in the world before, so it must be a major challenge to find out what works, if indeed it does at all. In your submission, you say that one estimate suggests that, to support in-work claimants through job-centre networks, footfall across job centres would have to increase by £325,000 a week. That is at a time when we are losing staff and losing job centres. I just wondered if you could give us a view on the level of investment, additional training and other changes that would be required to properly support people. To properly support people, I think that the current staff in demand from the PCS is for 20,000 additional staff. We have literally just last week submitted an additional demand for 5,000 universal credit staff, not just in the job centres but in the service centres alone, bearing in mind that the current staff in on UC service centres is about 12,000. That is the scale of the increase that you are talking about to make the system workable. On top of that, there is any number of things that we could suggest that would improve the system. The figures show that DWP has lost somewhere in the region of 40,000 staff since 2010. That is a massive, massive cut to the number of people who are there to support claimants. For that reason, the amount of unclaimed benefit, for example, has gone through the roof. There are all kinds of additional ways that we can and should be supporting people if we had the staff to do it, but that 5,000 additional staff on 12,000 existing gives you an example of the scale of the increase that we would be talking about. In terms of job centres, the view of the union and the view of our members is very clear that there should be a job centre in every locality in the country. For years, we have had a process of closing down job centres and treating from communities that is not, we feel, sustainable. If we are going to be having really meaningful conversations about supporting people back into work and supporting people whilst they are in work, then we need to rebuild that job centre network. We need people to see the job centre as a face that they can turn to when they need to to come and take some advice to come and get the support that they need. That also means that we would be talking about a system that does not involve any kind of sanctions because the greatest barrier to trust between the people who access the benefit system and the people who deliver it is the fact that the people who access the benefit system are forever fearful that the people that they are talking to are going to recommend that their benefit be taken off them. You are trying to develop a relationship and you have got this undercurrent of concern, if not fear. The other thing is that sanctions and conditionality so far has been associated with not being in work. That is quite a shift for people who are receiving the benefits, but it is also quite a challenge for your staff. What extent do you feel that management and ministers are listening? There seems to be such a huge gap in the number of staff and the number of job centres that are required. It is obvious that that will increase people not claiming that they are listening. We do not feel that they are. If you want evidence of that, it would exist in the transcript from Hansard of the 18 October committee meeting that I referred to earlier, where it was put to Neil Cullin, the director general of universal credit, that the position that I outlined about the problem with phone calls was really driving some service difficulties. Neil's answer was to provide statistics that showed that the average length of a phone call to DWP is around seven minutes. The last figure that I had as a T-negotiator was seven minutes 43 seconds. On average, the number of calls that individual members of staff are taking is somewhere in the region of the highest estimate that I have seen is about 60 a week, but we do not feel that those figures are accurate. Whenever we reported those figures directly to our members in service centres, members openly laughed. That is how the derision with which they treated the statistics reported there. The pressure going on is just beyond belief and nobody is listening. The director general, we do not feel, was listening and the ministers certainly do not seem to be listening. Although what I would say is that, despite the fact that they are not listening and they are not cooperating in terms of getting us to the situation where we think the union and the members of the union, the staff of DWP, think that we need to be, they have also paused or delayed at least managed migration. So they obviously recognise that something is going wrong somewhere. Okay, thank you. Can I just ask a question on that managed migration? What sort of level of preparation has been put in place for that managed migration? I think that the silence there really says it all. Not a great deal. The types of claimants that will be dealt with under managed migration, we are already dealing with small numbers of them, so things like some of the training for work coaches has begun to be put in place. I think that the reality is that until they know what they are going to do with a lot of these people who will be transferred across, they cannot really make the kind of preparations that would be necessary. The biggest debate at the minute is will people be subject to light touch voluntary approaches or will they be subject to a conditionality regime that very much puts sanctions at the centre of it? That will determine what kind of preparations would be necessary, but the answer, I think, if I was to give it honestly on behalf of the members of my union, is not a great deal of preparation. Can I ask one very quick question, convener? Who is going to decide whether it is a light touch voluntary approach or a more robust approach? I presume that will be the Secretary of State. Happy for people to ask more questions. I have a lot of members wanting in. We are doing very well for the time being. People have been quite constrained on their questions. Just ask them to show a bit of patience before they get into Michelle Ballantyne. I want to follow up on a number of things that you have talked about so far. We will pick up on that first one that Alison Johnstone has just asked you around who makes the decisions. How much autonomy do you believe a work coach has in terms of their relationship with the claimant and the decision making on how often they need to see them, what kind of regime they have put in place? When you say that the Secretary of State makes that decision clearly on the ground operationally, there are different things going on in different job centres. How much autonomy do your members have when they are dealing with the claimant? I think that the answer is that it very much changes from place to place and from situation to situation. You seem to reject the idea that the Secretary of State would make such a wide-ranging decision as would impact how many times in a given week that the claimants would come into the job centres. I am not rejecting it. I am asking the question, how much autonomy do people have on the ground? The decisions are made at a national level, at the governmental level, that do determine whether or not people have to come in weekly, for example. That takes away flexibility when it comes to the work coaches but, yes, they have some flexibility at the minute in some circumstances, not in all circumstances. For example, there was a while when, somewhere in the region of a third of all, the claimant caseloads were being brought in every single day. That was the aspiration. That was on the basis that, at a central level, they had decided that this would be the best way to support people, to give them that extra oomph to get back into work. That very much removes any kind of flexibility that work coaches would have. It removes their ability to make a judgment about whether or not the barriers that people face to getting back into work. At the minute, because the in-work side of things is so new and there are so few people prior to managed migration kicking off, most of the evidence that we are working with is on the basis of the people who were out of work who would have been claimants to JSA, ESI or the UC versions of those two benefits. Flexibility exists sometimes, but it can and has been taken away on other occasions. Obviously, I cannot tell you in advance what will be the case for the people coming in from working tax credits. You talked about caseloads in the size of the caseloads. What percentage of somebody's caseload do you think they will have routine contact with? The vast majority of people, for example, on working tax credits or child credits, have no contact other than the actual application. Do you foresee that that is going to change? What percentage do you believe the actual contact is with the caseload? Again, that is a question that I am not necessarily sure I can give you a clear and definitive answer to. I would say that the intention seems to be from the ground level that there will be much more contact with those people and the evidence base that was begun to be gathered with the randomized control trial that DWP ran for 15,000 claimants. Obviously, that involved bringing people in to job centres on occasion. It did involve some people coming in fortnightly. It did involve some people coming in on an eight-weekly basis and so on. Depending on the decisions that are made nationally, that will have an impact on how often people are seen. Potentially, that will impact every single person who is being moved across to universal credit, and it will almost certainly impact every single person who makes a new claim to the UC versions of WTC and CTC. Final question at this time, hopefully I can come in again if other things arise. You talked about the changes and people's expectations and their perhaps fear of going in. Do you think then that actually from the legacy benefits as they were, because you talked about the digital platform and how restrictive it was, but my experience from working with my own clients before I became a politician, was that job centres were pretty unapproachable. You were met by a security guard at the door, and they were pretty horrific places. I've seen a massive change over the last year where, actually, that has gone. There is not a security guard standing at the door, and you can get to speak to somebody, whereas previously it was almost impossible to actually get somebody to talk to. Talking to your members, they've told me that it is much better and much more welcoming. Do you recognise that as a description, or do you feel that that's not the case? I would say that if there's a job centre that you're aware of that you can walk into without a security guard being at the front door, I would like the name of it, please, because that would be in breach of the department's risk assessments with regard to this sort of thing. Don't get me wrong, right? There are many, many changes that we would like to make to job centres and to how even legacy benefits were managed, but I would say that if there have been overall changes to how the job centres have been run, have been negative, they have been deprived of the abilities that they had and the resources that they had to try and support people. To give a very, very basic example, the phones that we used to have for claimants to come in and use when they needed to, to come in and make calls to employers, to come in and make calls occasionally to our own benefit side because they had queries about their payments and things like that. The removal of that resource has, if you like, driven the problem underground. It moved the problem around, so people aren't coming to the job centre for that anymore. They're either not getting the help that they need or they're going to third sector organisations to ask for that kind of help. So don't get me wrong. I think that your characterisation there of perhaps job centres have changed the atmosphere. It's not necessarily wrong, but I'm not sure that's for the best reasons. Okay, that's interesting. Thank you. Mark Griffin. I wanted to come back to the role of work coaches and I wanted to put a quote to you from the Office of Budget Responsibility. It said that the DDoIP expects a lot of the modestly paid work coaches that's recruiting in terms of tailing the interventions to the needs of individuals and families in the context of local labour markets, setting conditions and monitoring compliance with them. If the Office of Budget Responsibility is saying that the DDoIP are expecting a lot of work coaches, my view is probably that the DDoIP are expecting too much of the work coaches. Would you agree with that? If you do, what would you say is the impact on claimants of the DDoIP expecting far too much of the work coaches? I would absolutely agree with the statement from the OBR that the DDoIP expects too much or expects an awful lot from modestly paid. I'd underline the modestly paid part of that sentence as well, because, as you'll all be aware, the civil service as a whole has faced the most stringent pay freeze and pay restraint of any area in the public sector. However, in terms of the impact on work coaches, yes, you look at other parts of the world and the way that they approach the job that our work coaches do. The job that you're talking about in other social security systems is a degree-qualified job that is exceptionally well-paid and which is about tailoring very, very individual support with access to a whole battery of additional training and learning for the claimants. That's simply not the case with regard to our work coaches. They have a very, very limited toolbox of things that they can do when it comes to supporting claimants. I obviously speak from things that have happened currently. I suspect that the things that have happened currently are a good marker of how things will happen in the future, but the emphasis has always been that, when that limited toolbox falls short, then the problem isn't with the lack of provision from DWP, so DWP would say, but is with the claimants themselves and therefore they must be appropriately referred to sanctions. I would absolutely agree with that statement. Okay, so your view is then that because the DWP are expecting too much of the work coaches that then that is leading to claimants being sanctioned unnecessarily, payments being missed, payments being incorrectly made, people being pushed into real hardship because the DWP are putting too much on to their work coaches? Yes, and it's not just the work coaches either. I mean the hardship payments, the legacy benefits actually have a better response rate within 24 hours than universal credit. That's how much extra pressure is being put on for people who come in for things since you mentioned hardship for things like hardship payments. So yes, the pressure is terrible. It's about workload to begin with, but it's also about to what level are we expecting our work coaches to intervene in the lives of their claimants? To what degree can we or are we being prepared to trust claimants to manage their own affairs? It seems very much like the tendency is towards increased and more intrusive intervention than not, and that's a massive burden to put on work coaches who are not. They're given, if you like, departmental training, and I think if you speak to any member of DWP staff, they'd tell you what they think of departmental training, but you're not talking about people who are professionally qualified the way that social workers are, for example, to intervene in the lives of their claimants, and we would absolutely want to see if they're going to persist with this much, much better training—accredited training, for example. We don't mean by accredited training the kind of cut-price apprenticeships which they do occasionally try and roll out in DWP, but serious things that will help people to be able to support their claimants. I had a question about the level of qualification, training and pay of work coaches, but I think that you've covered that well already. I wanted to move on to the level of discretion that work coaches have, and whether you think that the discretion that they have has been applied consistently in my own local unemployed workers centre has come to me with concerns that they have claimants turning up at their door, giving different stories of different information and different conditions being put on seemingly very similar situations. I don't know what your view is on how consistently work coaches are applying that discretion. I hear the same stories that you do. The union works very closely with the disabled people against cuts and other organisations that represent our claimants. They would be very upfront in telling the same kind of stories of inconsistency and about things depending very much on which work coach you talk to. I would say that the only ever hear maybe one side of any individual story. You'll hear perhaps the work coach saying, this is why I did that, or you'll hear the claimant saying, well that's why it was unfair, but you never ever hear both. I don't tend to make judgments about cases like that. What I would say is that if we are serious about a system that supports people, the discretion should be in relation to what support to provide, not in relation to how we can take people's benefits off them. It's not about whether certain types of discretion are applied consistently. It's about what power do we really want work coaches to have and what powers will enable them to do what they're actually there to do, which is to support claimants. That is what they want to be there to do. That means giving them the power to, for example, since you mentioned discretion, vary the appointment times that they have to have half an hour with the claimant instead of 10 minutes with the claimant, means additional work that they can do to overcome barriers to work, to overcome barriers to in-work progression, but it also means, then, that somewhere else you need to find the resource to deal with the people who aren't being seen by that work coach because they've not done three 10-minute appointments with three different people, they've done one half an hour appointment with somebody who really needed it. Questions of how we prioritise resource, how we allocate resource and do we have enough resource have a huge impact on how and when that discretion is used and on the final experience of the people who are actually coming in to use that service? The last question that I had was, on your comments earlier, about the switch from annual income assessment to monthly. That's causing real problems for people who are paid for weekly and are getting two payments in the month of December and are essentially losing all universal credit entitlement at Christmas time, basically. I wonder what your view is on that and if there are any solutions that you would suggest the DWP on that? Well, the view is obviously that it's terrible that people would lose benefit to which they should be entitled if you were to take an average view of their earnings rather than, as you say, the four-weekly period, which can potentially mean that two-wage earning days fall within the same month that we use to calculate UC eligibility. It seems to me that there will be a very easy fix to that to change the system of regarding those two as being within the same eligibility month and to smooth out the process, to smooth out the earnings. To be fair, there's plenty of precedent for that as well. In legacy benefits, decision makers on JSA and ESA are benefit processing staff. They're not front-line work coaches. They deal with decisions in the back-of-house areas. Some of their job would have been to look at earnings over a broader period and then to make a decision about is that commensurate with continuing entitlement to benefit. We have done it before where we have not taken such a short view in terms of eligibility requirements, so why shouldn't we be able to do that with universal credit? I want to go back to a couple of things that you mentioned. You talked about a bit of a recognition of the complexity of the managed migration of those on work benefits and the delays. What's your understanding of the timeframe? Have you been in discussions about the revised timeframe? What's your understanding of it? The first that the union was—I want to put this in air quotes—consulted about the timeframe was whenever it was leaked to the press that the timeframe was being kicked back from the beginning of 2019 to the middle of 2019 and that the end date was being pushed back to the end of 2023. There have been no serious discussions with the representatives of staff over that process whatsoever. Essentially, you have found out through the public domain that it might be six months, because it was originally supposed to be December, wasn't it? The other thing that I wanted to ask you about—I accept that this is a policy decision—the issue of transitional protection. As I understand, there are regulations being drafted at the moment. I guess that the first question is, have PCS been involved at all and consulted around what those transitional protections should look like in order? Obviously, the principle being that people who are migrating across their income would be protected. Have PCS been consulted? No, not at all. I think that the stark contrast is with the approach of the Scottish ministers to the regulations that are laid on the new social security agency, where they have been very open and offering a consultation at a policy level about what we think those regulations should and should not contain compared to the approach of the Westminster Government when it comes to this very question. There has been no consultation on that whatsoever. There have been a couple of concerns raised in evidence so far. I am particularly concerned what those transitional protection regulations might look like. For example, if you think about a woman who may be in an abusive relationship and is concerned with a change of circumstances to those transitional protections, she may lose the transitional protection if she leaves that abusive relationship. Does PCS share concerns about that type of scenario? Would you be making representations around that in terms of trying to influence the regulations? It is fair to say that the union does not want a single person to lose a single penny of their benefit as a result of being forced to move from working tax credits to universal credit. We do not think that in situations like that it would necessarily be helpful for any change of circumstances to involve such a major change to somebody's benefit. We share all the concerns that have been raised in relation to a lot of those transitional protections and how far they apply and the kinds of changes and circumstances that will result in the end of the transitional protections. We have put stuff in the public domain on that one. We are working to prepare additional submissions to UC management but also to the Secretary of State. I know that we have been working as well with the shadow secretary of state in relation to their concerns about universal credit. It would be really helpful if any of those are for public consumption that could be shared with the committee as we go forward. More than happy to do that. The advance has gone almost last, I suspect, as most of the questions have been dealt with. I do want to come back to just one issue. I have, because of the controversy around it, gone out my way to visit a number of job centres in my region and had really helpful discussions both with DWP but also with a lot of your members. I have to say that I got the opportunity on three or four occasions at different places to walk and to speak to your members without anyone else listening. What they have reported to me is very different from what you have said to me this morning. They have been a lot more positive. They have been welcoming many of the discussions that they have been given. They feel that they have had the training. They feel that they have got the support. Clearly, you are trying to figure out what your members are saying. Of course, mine is only a small cross-section of that. However, how am I getting such a much more different take from your members on the ground than what you are saying today? I honestly would not like to hazard a guess at why it is that people have said different things to you than what they have said to our reps up and down the country. The thing that you have to remember is that it is not just me coming here having spoken to members at one job centre or even members at half a dozen job centres. The view of the union is shaped by the reps who are elected by the members of every single job centre in the country and the reports that they deliver on a regular basis to the elected executive of the union and the policy that has passed as a result of their views at the union's annual conference. It may be that the individuals that you have spoken to had the views that you describe. It may be that this is a conversation that I do occasionally have with management in DWP where a manager will say, well, I spoke to staff just the other day and they said everything is fine and the same staff were out in the car park the following week protesting about the state of affairs. I think that is just one of those things. In regard to the reports that you are getting back from your local representation, is anything positive coming back? Clearly, are they giving any comments from the members who maybe do have positive comments? Is that reflected in any of the reports or is it simply negativity that is coming back? I do not think that it would be fair to say that everything that we ever receive is negative. The last time that we did a big survey of members in DWP resulted in about 500 people commenting in the survey and voting in the different options in the survey. The vast majority were negative, but yes, there were people who thought positive things were happening as a result of UC and the kinds of things that you mentioned about discretion and so forth. I am sure that there are people who have those views, but I think that they are very much the minority. I was checking a couple of things, Mr Simpson. Is the PCS position or your position that tax credits should not be part of universal credit and should remain a stand-alone benefit or entitlement rather than benefit as a postman part of universal credit? Would that be the position? I do not think that it would be fair to say that we have a particular position as you have laid it out. You have to remember that the amounts being allocated for different people who move across universal credit are in some cases better. Some people get more money under universal credit than they will get under the legacy benefit or tax credits. Obviously, we want people to have as much money as possible, so it is not a straightforward question to say, do you think that tax credit should just exist as it is or do you think that thing should move to universal credit? In a sense, we want elements of both. We do want people to have the increased allowances where those are applicable, but we do not want people to be submitted to the kind of cuts that are going to be implemented for a lot of people under universal credit. We want elements of both systems. We want the roll-out currently halted to allow time to sit down and puzzle through who is going to be better off, who is not going to be better off, how do we make sure that they are not losing anything, how do we make sure that nobody loses a single penny? Regardless of what a benefit is called, it is about what purpose it serves and about how much money people who need it are getting, and we want to maximise that regardless of what we call a system. I think that that is very clear. I also ask for clarity in terms of those who will be in universal credit in work conditionality or potential sanctions. That conversation that we are having about can increase your hours, can get a higher hourly rate and if you do not do that, potentially we can be taking money off you. I think that you were very clear that if the PCS staff, if the workforce gets the right support and there is enough of them, then you can give good quality support to individuals. Do you believe that sanctioning should exist at all in relation to in-work claimants? Do you think that the fact that sanctions sit there at all potentially puts an area of conflict into the support that your members can offer those who want work progression support? What is the PCS position in relation to sanctions specific to in-work entitlements under universal credit? Our view of sanctions and I don't limit it to just in-work sanctions is that sanctions are ineffective and should be abolished, and that applies equally to in-work potential for conditionality for sanctions. We are very clear that sanctions are a very blunt instrument that do not have the effect that the Government believes that they do of encouraging people to apply for jobs and so forth. All they do is cause additional barriers to finding work for the unemployed, and all they will do if they are applied to those people who are in-work who have a job is create additional barriers for them in terms of the kind of progression that we actually want. It will destroy relationships if he approaches. Alison George will take in a little second. I just want to acknowledge that I have spotted you there. You mentioned the halting the roll-out of universal credit and you said until we work out how this can be done effectively. Are we trying to work it out currently? In other words, is the UK Government a DWP putting back full roll-out of this and still not really sure how to make it work? By we, do you mean that the PCS could assist the DWP in finding solutions to all the issues thrown up by universal credit and have you been afforded that opportunity? Whenever I say we just for absolute clarity, I am always referring to the PCS and the workers in DWP as represented by my union, I would not presume to speak for the department. We have not been afforded any kind of opportunity to be involved in what would be called up here, the co-production of universal credit. We would like to be, obviously, but we are ourselves going to be working on proposals to really iron out a lot of the problems that people are facing. Is that a very clear offer to the DWP then? How all of this now and PCS will sit down with the UK Government and find a way of making this work that does not put undue pressure on staff and have detriment to the public that you serve? That is pretty clear. Alison Johnstone? Can I just add a bit of clarity on managed migration? You have expressed concerns about the so-called managed migration and the key among those is that the transition may not proceed automatically, that claimants will be written to and then they will have to get in touch with the DWP. What would happen if a letter gets lost or a claimant simply can't understand for whatever reason what is being asked? They will just end up with no money whatsoever. Those are things that we do not have an answer to and obviously we are very concerned about, but not only that, we are also concerned about if we are writing to people to tell them they have to apply for the new benefit and during the application process they have changed address or something like that, that kind of changes circumstances that removes their transitional protections. Alex Sharma at the Work and Pensions Committee who said that, well, we are not just talking about the period of a month, we will run it over a longer period of time. Well, how long is a longer period of time and what are you doing to get in contact with these people? It used to be the case that we would have had, what would have been called pensions local services and IDWP visiting, that we could have actually sent out to meet with people to really chase this up to make sure that people were making that transition. The resources available to those teams have been cut to the bone so we don't have that kind of availability to do that any more, but what resources are being put in to make sure no one falls through the cracks somewhere in the programme responsible for universal credit, they will have worked out what percentage of people they think will not make the transition. That information has not been shared with us, but I have seen it for other changes to legacy benefits from back in the day. Whenever we have had consultations in the past, I cannot imagine that it does not exist for universal credit and I would be very interested to see what percentage of people they already estimate will fall through the cracks. That is on the same subject. I think that it is going to be a real shock. I only realised a few days ago that those who have been in receipt of tax credits will have to make a fresh application. That is utterly shocking. You can have someone who has been working full out 35 hours with three children, getting tax credits, doing their doing what they are supposed to do, working hard and having a better stand of living because of the tax credits. I would say that figure is going to be pretty high because if I am unaware, then almost certainly people out there are unaware that they will not understand why they are getting a letter saying, because, arguably, someone might have been in receipt of tax credits for 10 years easily. No, Ashley, that is not true. Whenever they were introduced, we would have been 2011 or something like that. That is a long time to have been in receipt of those, and a letter comes through the post. By the way, you now have to make a fresh claim to the DWP, which you have had no relationship with up to that point. This is a disaster, a total disaster for those people. I would expect you to agree with that. I absolutely would. Then you get into questions about what phone number are we putting on that letter to deal with the millions of phone calls that we are going to get as a result of panicked people facing the end of their tax credits claim. I want to explore that a little bit further, because what we have not spoken about is the more generic fact that Universal Credit is designed to have at least a five-week timelag before anyone receives any cash at all that they are entitled to, one-week processing, four-week lying time, and that is if everything goes to schedule. We know examples of eight or nine weeks that some individuals have been waiting for. Will that five-week gap, without funds, also exist for those transferring or those having to reapply from the tax credit system into Universal Credit? Will they be part of that five-week gap also, do you know, Mr Simpson? I cannot answer that question, because the draft regulations I do not think are being laid until next week, and then we will really get to see what the process is that they are planning for a lot of this. If you were asking for me to make a best guess, I cannot imagine that there would be a five-week lag before eligibility kicks in for the new system. I imagine that what they would try to do is make sure that it runs one into the other. That might be expressing an awful lot of confidence, indeed, if you pay bearing in mind. Where we can get clarity is that the PCS position should be that this should not happen at all and that it can happen seamlessly and there should be no gap at all. That is absolutely right. That is pretty clear. We will get a bit of time left, and I can ask questions all day, but look at lots of members of this committee. Just further on, again you might not be able to answer this because of the lack of site of the regulations, but I am just wondering if, first of all, whether—this is something that we should probably ask the DWP—is around whether or not they have built in that percentage of people who were safe to fall through the cracks but that they assume will not apply, and whether that is built into their budgets, which will be interesting to know. However, if someone does fall through the cracks and eventually makes a retrospective application, would your understanding be that it would be backdated to the point at which they leave tax credits? Or is there the potential—I do not know what common practice has been—nothing completely identical to this, so it might be new territory? What would your expectation be if someone six months down the line realises that they are going to have to make an application? What would your understanding be? My understanding is the same as yours, which is that I do not know the answer to the question just yet, but what I would say is that we would want to make sure that as many people could make retrospective claims as possible, if that becomes necessary. Standard practice, since you asked about that, for legacy benefits, for example, is that you generally have up to three months wherein you can back data claim from the date that you claimed it. That seemed reasonable for legacy benefits, but with a change of this magnitude, with a lot of the concerns that people will have around universal credit, it would probably be reasonable to go in excess of that. Do you know whether there is going to be a dedicated unit established to deal with all the inquiries that people will make? You are talking about the volume of phone calls that people realise when they get those letters that Pauline McNeill is referring to. Is PCS understanding that there will be a dedicated team to deal with that, or what is your understanding? At the minute, UC Telephony is managed through something called integrated telephony, and that involves geographical call routing. Whenever you make a claim and give us your telephone number, we are able to allocate you to a case manager within the processing side of DWP. Whenever you make a call from that number, the phones automatically allocate you to the phone of your designated case manager, so you are meant to be having a personal relationship with someone who regularly picks up your calls. It does not work perfectly, or at all at the minute, really. What happens after that is that if you cannot reach a case manager, you wind up taking the calls out to their team. If you cannot reach their team, it goes out to the whole service centre. If it cannot go to the whole service centre because they are all on phone calls, it goes to a national telephony hub. The impact of the kind of calls that you are talking about is unquantified at this stage. They have not given us figures for how many calls that they actually estimate will be taking. I imagine that the discussion that has been had so far is that the roll-out will be very limited up until 2020, and then we will move at pace. That was the same kind of conversation that we had whenever UC full service began to roll out and took over from what was the predecessor UC live service. However, the roll-out at pace for universal credit full service was a catastrophe. It resulted in any number—the kinds of delays to claims and so on that Mr Doris outlined there was the common experience during the UC full service roll-out. The genuine anger of the staff that they did not have the wherewithal of the time to help the people who were calling in in such desperate state of affairs was a sight to see. We have no reason to believe that the impact of managed migration would be anything shy of exactly the same kind of thing that happened during the roll-out of UC full service. As far as you are aware, do you know if any recipients of tax credits have been contacted in any way to alert them to what was going to be happening in December until the delay? Are you aware of any contact being made? I am not aware of any, no. Am I correct in saying that you represent two thirds of DWP staff approximately? Is that correct? That is roundabout, right? Of the £12,000 that are currently servicing universal credit, would that percentage be about the same? Probably a bit higher. We tend to have higher density in sites like universal credit service centres. When you talked about your last survey, you said that you had 500 responses. Would that be a normal level of response that you would get from your surveys? We would do a survey among different groups of members on a relatively regular basis, and we would have a substantial number, usually middle to high three figures responding to those. You talked about the level of concern and the outcry. I am wondering why, if it is so high that you are not getting a much higher response to a survey, why they do not want you to know that? I do not think that they want us to know that people are already very busy, so to be using their 15-minute break to respond to a union survey, as opposed to having an actual break, it does not occur to everybody to do that. What I can tell you is that whenever we held the car park meetings at Walsall and Wolverhampton, well in excess, 50 per cent of the staff at both of those sites turned out to the car park meeting and took a unanimous vote in favour of industrial action on the basis of the concerns that I have outlined to you today, so I am in no doubt whatsoever about the mandate that I have from members to speak up for the concerns that we have been talking about. So do you expect to be going on strike in the near future? I honestly cannot comment that DWP have agreed to urgent negotiations on Monday and will go from there. I certainly hope that those negotiations will be real, relevant and productive and that the threat of industrial action is lifted, but I appreciate the frustration that your members must be feeling. You have been clear today that there has been around 30,000 less jobs over the past decade or so in the service at a time when staff have been asked to do much more. You have put those concerns pretty clearly on the record today. You have also said that you believe that the service—in paraphrasing, if I am capturing this accurately—has to be more public facing in the communities and you compared that to the roll-out of the new Scottish Social Security Agency, where we are trying to get a mix of communication with claimants for some of the telephone or for some of the face-to-face and some will be digital. I was just having a look at some of the information in relation to the Scottish Social Security Agency and they have a pledge to hopefully have a hub in every community making use of existing public buildings. I suppose that this is the nub of my question if there was to be more staff and DWP to support universal credit and to support workload. Would you want to see them go into the job centres that are left and just do more of the same in ease at workload? Or do you think that there is a need for a significant service redesign? We are talking about digital by default for claimants. Laptops exist, broadband exists and the idea of co-located hubs at the heart of communities where work coach teams can go in for parts of the week and support constructively some of those claimants might be a service—there is one version of a service redesign model, which might mirror some of the work that the Scottish Social Security Agency is going to do. So PCS, you do not like what is happening quite clearly. You think that staff are overworked, they need better support, it is impacting on claimants but it is giving more people to do the same rule of the answer? Or do you think that there might be a need for a more significant service redesign? Members at our conference have repeatedly expressed concerns about concepts that you outline there like co-location and the impact to the kinds of services that we deliver. The job centres that we have are a process of battles over many years to ensure that we have, for example, spaces to be able to deal with what are fairly confidential conversations sometimes with people without the person next to them overhearing them and things like that. So they are built to a certain specification. Are they perfect? No, but I think that as the first step we want the staff in them to be able to deliver the support that we feel is necessary and that means having many, many additional staff. So as a first step, I think that as the additional staff are the key thing and from there we can begin to design what we actually want a wholly revised social security system to look like. I think that it would also be fair to say that members in DWP up and down the country do believe that the social security system needs to be overhauled in a big way. I do not think that we would impose too many preconditions on that but the basic preconditions would be that you defend the terms and conditions of the staff that you defend the things that the claimants find to be beneficial. You defend a quality service, a quality public service, I would add. One of the problems with co-locations that you are often talking about is co-locating with private sector organisations who are not to put a bluntly or anything but wind up bidding for work from DWP, work that is then taken away from existing DWP staff and work that private companies do not deliver to the same standard as the civil servants in DWP do. I certainly take on those concerns. I have to say just for the record in case I sit here running with that question. I was thinking about Skills Development Scotland, Citizens Advice, those kinds of public sector and third sector organisations but I think that you have been pretty clear about the terms and conditions of the people that you represent and that any overhaul of a service would have to protect those, that is pretty clear. Are there any other questions from MSPs? Before I thank you very much and I will do that, is there anything that you would like to put on the record today before we move on to the next item on the agenda that you do not feel you have the chance to express here this morning? Well, thank you very much for the opportunity to make a final comment, convener. I think that we have covered most of the points that I came here to make. The key themes being the undervaluation of the work coaches, the key themes being the potential for the inflicting of sanctions upon those people who are going to be in receipt of in-work universal credit, the impact of anything other than a light touch regime, but I think that the thing that I really want to underscore for the committee is the problems with staffing. At the root of all the conversations that we are having as well as being poorly prepared with bad policies implemented from above, we do not have the staff that we need to deliver the quality service that every single member of staff of DWP desperately wants to be able to deliver. If we were given that staff, you would begin to see a significant and substantial change to the public perception of the benefit system, particularly if that was allied to the elimination of the sanctions regime. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr Sempo, and thank you for your time. That concludes agenda item four. We now move to agenda item five, the Scottish Government consultation on the Investigation of Offences Regulations and Code of Practice for Investigations. I refer to paper three, which is a note by the clerk. The committee sought written views to inform any response that it might make to the Scottish Government's consultation on the Investigation of Offences Regulations and Code of Practice for Investigations. The committee's only response was from Inclusion Scotland, who will be responded directly to the Scottish Government's consultation. Is the committee content to note the points raised by Inclusion Scotland? Inclusion Scotland has said that we believe that that would make it impossible for third sector agencies and their employees to provide services to their clients on a confidential basis to continue to offer such services on that basis in the future. I appreciate that Inclusion Scotland will be responding directly to the Scottish Government's consultation, but I would probably be grateful if the committee would consider writing to the minister to note that that is a response that they should be expecting, because I think that Inclusion Scotland represents a great many people, and it clearly has some concern about that. That would appear to be a fairly reasonable suggestion. I think that most of the members don't see anyone disagreeing to that. On that basis, are we content with the approaches outlined? We now move to agenda item six, with the petition PE1677, calling on the Scottish Government to make more money available to mitigate the welfare cuts. I refer members to paper 5 and the petition by Dr Sarah Glyn. The petition calls on the Scottish Government to make more money available to mitigate the impact of UK Government welfare cuts through reassessing spending priorities and bringing in more progressive taxation. In light of the evidence taken by the committee previously, the correspondence from the Scottish Government in response to the Public Petitions Committee and the Scottish Social Security Scotland 2018 makes provision for new forms of assistance and operating. The committee is invited to close the petition, but before we make that decision, if we did close the petition in doing so, we may wish to acknowledge that. Firstly, policy and expenditure considerations such as those raised in the petition are embedded in the work of this committee. In other words, I suppose that that is to give confidence to the petitioner that this is the day-to-day work of scrutiny of this committee anyway. Secondly, the committee will shortly consider a pre-budget letter to the cabinet secretary. That provides an opportunity, should we wish to, for the committees to raise any of the petitioner's concerns in the context of the forthcoming Scottish budget 2019-2020. With those assurances, I suppose, to the petitioner, I will take any comments before I invite you to agree to close the petitioner. Are there any comments? We are slightly premature in proposing to close the petition, particularly given the points that you have just made that were yet to consider and agree the letter that we then sent to the cabinet secretary. It will be worthwhile waiting at the very least until we have agreed what the contents of that letter would be. Ideally, we will wait until we hear from the cabinet secretary in giving oral evidence as we go through the budget process. Are there any other views? Dr Glynne has spoken to me on a number of occasions about those issues and other issues. I have some sympathy for the process issue and the timing issue here. If it was helpful to come back to looking at the petition in the light of the discussions about the budget, there might be a logical order. I do not have strong views, particularly in either way. Dr Glynne appears to be asking for, and certainly did in our meeting with me, was for particularly the welfare fund to be expanded. Obviously, that is a matter that we are going to come on to discuss in the budget letter. As the lead committee on the issue, it would be, in my view, an issue of timing here. Obviously, Dr Glynne represents a strong coalition of those who want to ensure that we are doing all we can as a Parliament to make sure that people's lives are worth living. I would like us to wait until we have discussed the letter, perhaps heard from the cabinet secretary and that matters have progressed so that the petitioners feel that the Scottish Parliament has urged the Scottish Government to do all that it can. I do not see anyone particularly saying that they would disagree with that approach. I think that we will hold it open until we have progressed our own budget scrutiny approach a bit further. It might be worth putting on the record that I would think that this committee, one of the things that we will look at in their business day-to-day, week-to-week, will be that connectivity between the UK social security system, the Scottish social security system, protection that is in place and how it impacts people on the ground. The reassurance whenever we do finally close this petition that I think we want to give the petitioner is that the point has been clearly made. It's not lost on us and it will be part of our week-to-week work and it won't take the petition in the future to have that embedded into the working practices of the committee. If the issue is in relation to timing of when we close the petition, let's just carry it on a bit further if we're all agreed to do that, so we'll keep it open at the moment. Okay, so we now move to agenda item 7, social security and, yep, absolutely, as I was about to say, and we've previously agreed to take that item in private when we move into private session.