The DWP now assesses 95% of new child maintenance cases accurately, the NAO has found
Well-publicised problems with IT systems plagued the Child Support Agency from its creation in 1993, leading to poor customer service and problems in calculating the amount owed to parents. By 2004-05, the agency was missing its targets for accurate assessment of payments by 15 percentage points.
In 2012 the agency was reformed under the Child Maintenance Service banner, and its IT was overhauled. Susan Park, Child Maintenance Group corporate affairs director at the Department for Work and Pensions, says that the reforms had begun back in 2009. “We started by looking at what had gone wrong in the previous attempts to solve the issues and spoke to colleagues, case workers and clients,” she says. “We wanted to put the client rather than technology at the heart of everything.”
That consultation led to the creation of a new, more automated IT system, with people’s income details automatically checked each year against HMRC data. There are two new self-service portals – one for clients, and one for employers. And guidance and legislation has been made much more accessible to staff. Tom McCormack, Child Maintenance Group change director (pictured), says: “The whole design concept was about transparency and simplification, to ensure users understand the rules and what information they should provide.”
In addition, the technology has been rolled out gradually, in contrast to previous ‘Big Bang’ launches. “After an overhaul in 2003, chaos reigned because nobody had time to stop and reflect on what was going wrong,” remembers McCormack. “This time we started with small numbers of clients and followed their user journey. We then amended the system based on their feedback.”
The new system assesses 95% of new claims accurately. The target is 97%, but they’re nearly there – and as McCormack says: “We are still testing and learning, and that figure represents some areas which have been operating the new system for 18 months, and others for only 18 weeks.”