It’s win-win for everyone (maybe even the bailiff)

(Back in September 2011, we asked readers of this blog to give us their examples of waste or failure - and how to tackle it by early action and/or collaboration. So we're very happy to welcome our first guest blogger, Tamra from Bristol Debt Advice Centre (BDAC), where she currently works as a Money Advice Caseworker). Here's what she told us).

As a debt adviser, there are certain situations where you feel that everyone is following a script. Here’s one that I often encountered at BDAC when I started working there. Client comes into the office, worried sick about a council debt that has been passed to the bailiffs to collect. I have to phone the bailiff on his mobile out on his rounds. You can imagine how the conversation went…

Advisor (me) - “Mrs Band is in receipt of Income Support, and can only afford to offer you £3.50 per week”

Bailiff - “Oh no, I can’t accept that. I need at least £100 up front, and then £50 per month after that.”

Advisor (me) - “But Mrs Band can’t afford to pay that, and she is suffering from depression and anxiety, and this is all making it worse.”

Bailiff - “Well, I really can’t do anything about that. She will have to pay me my money, or I’ll be going in to take her goods”

If we tried negotiating with the council we were told that “once it’s with the bailiffs, there’s nothing that we can do, sorry”. In short, refusal to intervene. I would then try to reassure my client that the bailiff wasn’t genuinely interested in removing her second-hand furniture and microwave – he was using the threat of removing them to apply pressure, so that she would go and borrow money from her granny to pay them off. A poor result all round (except maybe for the bailiff).

Regular re-runs of this script, along with all the complaints we got from our clients about bailiff behaviour, led us to undertake some social policy work to improve the cumbersome, slow, and unsuccessful process for dealing with council debt.

If you are struggling to get your council to talk, you may need to present them with hard and fast figures alongside the anecdotal evidence that agencies are used to collecting. In Bristol, we carried out a survey of local residents who had been visited by bailiffs acting on behalf of the council. Once presented with these results, the council starting thinking seriously about the problems that residents encountered.

Increasingly, both advice agencies and local authorities are beginning to understand the benefits of quicker processing of payment arrangements and conflict resolution. This means there needs to be a move towards increased use of telephone and e-mail rather than paper letters which are both time-consuming to produce and expensive to send. If you don’t already have a direct telephone line to the council, try and get this set up – good communication channels are vital.

When you have been through the script so many times, it can be easy to rant and rave. Advice agencies also have a responsibility to make a constructive approach to their council – for the sake of their clients – and improve the relationships between advice agency, local authority and bailiff. Councils are looking at ways to save money, and it is up to advice agencies to demonstrate how more joined-up relationships and a holistic approach to people’s problems can save money and recover debt, whilst at the same time helping local people to sort out financial problems and stop them happening again.

Even bailiff companies may be more likely to win contracts with local councils if it can be shown they are working collaboratively with advice agencies...

Last month I was invited up to Newcastle by the local Citizens Advice Bureau to facilitate a meeting of advisers, council officers and bailiffs. The CAB had carried out a bailiff survey after hearing me talk at the Institute of Money Advisers conference, and the meeting was the first time that most of people involved had met face-to-face. It was a good opportunity to build trust and have constructive discussions on how to do things better, and I was delighted to see that everyone participated with an open and constructive attitude. They now report that the new direct telephone line is working exceptionally well.

If you are looking to back up your arguments for the benefits of a more joined up approach, you should direct your local authority to the research carried out by Community Finance Solutions at University of Salford on behalf of Leeds City Council, Economic Impact and Regeneration in City Economies. One noteworthy statistic is that “for every £1 invested in financial capability, affordable credit and an integrated service between local authorities and advice agencies, a total of £8.40 is generated for the local region”.

Perhaps the most surprising element to the work we undertook in Bristol is the shared goals identified by what have traditionally been seen as opposing sides. By making the case for collaboration, we have been able to help increased numbers of clients and provide them with a quicker, less stressful experience when dealing with their council debts.

Zero Tolerance of Failure

Let’s not be Blockheads!

The Government’s consultation on Open Public Services ended last month. In our response we noted the commitment in the White Paper to ‘consult on the potential ways to establish zero tolerance of failure on a service-by-service basis.’ [1]

We pointed out that advice services deal with preventable systemic failure in public services on a daily basis [2].(We expanded on this point in Waste Studies - an earlier blog.) Community advice services may not have the desire, capacity or constitution to take over the running of public services, but if they are more intrinsically involved in design and delivery they can help to produce significant cost savings and service improvements.

This potential will not be realised simply by opening up public service contracts to competitive tenders. Without a real method for continual, systemic improvement we could simply see public services run by different bodies but continuing to fail and waste resources.

What we have learned is that service improvement is based on a thorough, end to end knowledge of the system, an understanding of purpose and collaboration between the public service provider and local agencies. Acting on preventable failure and working together to intervene earlier produces better services and outcomes for people and saves us all money.

We were present at an advice providers’ forum last week where the local Housing Benefit (HB) service and Job Centre Plus (JCP) both came to update advice agencies on their services. Big back-logs in processing HB claims were reported, with enquiries from claimants and their advisers about what is happening with claims contributing to further delays. Advisers reported poor and rude treatment of people by JCP staff and problems with lost documents. The Job Centre Plus representative stated that ‘we won’t have these problems when it’s all done on line’. Yeah, right. See Professor John Seddon’s article Universal Credit: a brilliant idea guaranteed to fail for more on this.

Sadly, there wasn’t time to explore these failings in any detail at the meeting. Three months or more could pass before advisers and local public service providers meet again. Meanwhile, the Welfare Reform Bill passes through parliament, bringing Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payments, Housing Benefit and other welfare changes closer. AdviceUK is working with others in the field such as Lasa and Oxfam to monitor the impact on people of welfare changes. They will bring new demand for independent advice and unless learning is built into the new system, more failure. As Ian Dury and the Blockheads sang, what a waste!

We have been struck by two blogs by AdviceUK member Community Links during the past week on a similar theme. In The Duty to Collaborate, David Robinson suggested

‘….it’s time to stop offering pilots and pathfinders. What if the offer was replaced with a duty – the Duty to Collaborate? What might that look like? And what if it was accompanied by a right for others – the right of any other local service provider to lead such a collaboration and require the cooperation of the local authority if the council fails to step up?’

David went on to ‘re-imagine prevention’ in a subsequent blog:

‘Early action is the shorthand I have used for the enabling services and the prompt interventions at, or close to, the top of the cliff. These are about being the best that we can be. Late action kicks in once the problem has tipped over, essential but, in every sense, a last resort.’

David is right on both counts, in our experience. Advice services typically intervene at crisis point with an adversarial approach to public bodies. It could be so different. We could help people in need to solve their welfare problems in a far more proactive way, if allowed.

What do you think?

If you have a view or an example of waste or failure and how it has been or could be tackled by early action and/or collaboration, let us know. Submit a comment below or send us your example using http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BGP8Q7S.

Let others know: Share the link to this blog using e-mail, the Twitter and Facebook buttons in the right hand column or other means that work for you. Suggested Tweet: Zero Tolerance of Failure – Let’s not be Blockheads! #TATL Transforming Advice, Transforming Lives http://bit.ly/oLq5Mw

Come to the AdviceUK Conference, 13 October, Birmingham: Redefining advice - achieving real change for people

Post a comment: see the button below

Find out more: www.adviceuk.org.uk/bold

Download our latest 'thinkpiece': Advice Services: What Next?

[1] Paragraph 3.24, Page 22 of the White Paper

[2] It’s the System Stupid! Radically Rethinking Advice, AdviceUK, 2008; Radically Re-thinking Advice Services in Nottingham, Interim Report of the Nottingham Systems Thinking Pilot, AdviceUK 2009

---

Waste Studies

During the summer, AdviceUK has been talking to people around the country, challenging commissioners and funders to change their thinking about advice. Our concept is quite simple: understand why people come for advice and act on what you see. If you do this, you will make people’s lives better and improve public services.

Waste: Our  work consistently shows that advice services deal with lots of it – the failure of various parts of our public services and welfare provision. Failure that could be prevented. That’s not news to people at the sharp end of this failure – they see the effect it has on their lives. It’s not news to those doing the advising – they are frustrated that the lessons of this failure never seem to be learned, that so often their intervention only comes at crisis point. Cost and waste are locked into a system that doesn’t learn from its mistakes.

Here’s a story related to us recently by a colleague in Wales, who was advising a client suffering from poor mental health. This client was living alone in his own home and had been receiving Incapacity Benefit.

It all started with a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) stating that Employment Support Allowance (ESA) had been stopped in April this year because the client had failed to attend a medical. The client was adamant that he had never received this letter, but DWP policy is to stop paying the benefit until an appeal is heard and determined. As someone living on a low income, the client immediately began to have big difficulties paying his mortgage, which led to a threat from the lender to repossess his home. DWP advised the client to claim Jobseekers Allowance (JSA). The client duly went to the Jobcentre to claim. However, on seeing a note from the client’s doctor, the Jobcentre said that he was too ill to claim JSA – he would not be able to take up a job if one was offered to him. In the meantime, the client received no ESA, apart from one payment of £260. The adviser managed to find out that this payment had been made in error and on the client’s, behalf appealed the decision to stop the benefit. Because the client had no other income, the adviser explained that they would need to make a new claim for ESA. Why? Because the appeal process would take a long time and there was a big backlog of appeals that had not been dealt with. DWP policy means that in this situation, benefit cannot be paid to the claimant until a new medical assessment is carried out. This medical assessment finally happened in July, since when ESA has been paid at the basic rate. The client didn’t get sufficient points on the medical, so that decision is also being appealed. Unsurprisingly, the client’s mental health worsened.

All this comes against the background of overwhelming evidence that something is seriously wrong with the system. Almost 40% of decisions made by the DWP on ESA are being overturned on appeal - for the 36% who have had an appeal heard by the Tribunals Service to date (see official ESA and WCA statistics).

Now here’s the thing. We could do something about this, with a bit of imagination, collaboration and intelligent investment. We could act on what we see.

In fact we already have. In Nottingham, local independent advice services and council officers cut benefit processing times from 100 to just 5 days. How? By working together with a common purpose and learning how systems can be improved. The result: people are less likely to get into debt and suffer hardship, cost and waste is cut from public services. It’s simple but effective. The approach could be replicated at local and national level.

On our travels we get interest and support for our proposed transformation. We hear more stories about the waste advisers deal with: the failures of the UK Borders Agency, Department for Work and Pensions, local housing benefit offices etc. The appetite for change is greater than ever. Instead of cutting advice services, which change lives, save public money and improve services, invest in them wisely.

The call is for local and national policy makers to listen and think again. But many fingers are in ears in this time of austerity. We need to shout loud and tweet shrilly!

If you agree, here are a few things you can do:

Let others know: Share the link to this blog using e-mail, the Twitter and Facebook buttons in the right hand column or other means that work for you. Suggested Tweet: How to cut waste and improve public services:  #TATL Transforming Advice, Transforming Lives http://bit.ly/oLq5Mw

Send us examples of the waste you see: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BGP8Q7S

Hear Steve Johnson, AdviceUK CEO, talk on this subject at Civil Society Forum on 6th October (1.30-5.30pm, Initiatives of Change, 24 Greencoat Place, London SW1P 1RD http://civilsocietyforum.net/site/events/

Come to the AdviceUK Conference, 13 October, Birmingham: Redefining advice - achieving real change for people

Post a comment: see the button below

Find out more: www.adviceuk.org.uk/bold

Download our latest 'thinkpiece': Advice Services: What Next?