Palmerston North Poverty Action Group

C/- Ian Ritchie

FEILDING R D 7

Ph/Fax 06 3289 618

24 March 2000

Mr D Hunn

Reviewer

Ministerial Inquiry into the Department of Work & Income

C/- Hon T Mallard

Office of the Minister of State Services

Parliament buildings

WELLINGTON

Submission to the Ministerial Inquiry into WINZ

The Poverty Action Group was formed from the organising group for the Hikoi of Hope in Palmerston North. It includes a wide selection of groups from four main sectors: the main churches, the trade unions, student bodies and community groups.

One of its main activities has been to meet with the Palmerston North Mayor every two months to update her on the concerns of the groups represented and to make submissions on matters considered of key importance.

One such issue was the treatment many people in the city were receiving at the hands of WINZ staff. This was the subject of several meetings and reports and resulted in the City Council undertaking its own enquiry.

I will summarise the main issues raised, particularly their relevance to the questions you include in your letter to the Palmerston North Community Services Council, dated 10 March. I enclose the papers they were included in.

The services our groups provide

Between the churches and their agencies, the trade unions, student bodies, and community groups, the services undertaken covers a very wide range of social services, including support and advocacy.

Level of satisfaction with WINZ services and the way it delivers them

With specific exceptions, the over-riding level of satisfaction is low to very low. All groups report ongoing serious difficulties, dissatisfaction and frustration despite public announcements of reviews of internal systems etc.

The exceptions are:

1. the support from the Regional Commissioner (finance) and staff (planning group) for the Employment Summit held in March 1999 was very good.

2. some front-line staff, particularly those from the supportive NZES culture, who treat claimants with respect and give them appropriate assistance.

Specific subsidiary concerns, both of which call into question the commitment of WINZ to its stated agenda and operations.

1. the removal of self-help facilities - ie job boards and computers for CV preparation. This denies job seekers the previously much used means of helping themselves and leaves these two areas for under-resourced and over-worked community groups to arrange alternative substitute services for the benefit of their clients.

2. Twice, during the lifetime of WINZ the Local Employment Co-ordinator has resigned. The non-WINZ members of the Local Employment Committee were not informed until the day the resignations were to take effect. The first time, it took two and a half months for the replacement to be appointed creating a major drop in impetus for the group and its activities. The Regional Commissioner only involved the members of the Committee when she effectively had little option but to do so, with consequent considerable time delays. The second time, a recent happening, Committee members have put forward a proposal to avoid this considerable delay in appointing but have had no response.

Specific activities and operations of WINZ staff that are of considerable concern

1. The department appears to be CEO focused and dominated by the desire for high throughput and getting people off income support rather than focused on implementing the legislation, in particular the purpose of it as expressed in the 1938 long title which the Court of Appeal has deemed still relevant. Similarly there is a marked reluctance to adopt an approach consistent with the concept of “administrative fairness” as spelled out by the High Court (1906/93) and the Appeal Authority (98/95).

2. The culture appears to be dominated by managerialism focussed on efficiency which means financial minimalisation. This applies at all levels: in the relationship between the Minister and the Chief Executive; within the department; and between the department and the agencies it has dealings with. This approach reduces the capability of the department to function effectively, deliver appropriate services to its clients, and reduces the ability of the agencies it involves to provide services to its clients to do this effectively. This approach forces the emphasis to be on cost cutting considerations rather than the effectiveness of service provision and the carrying out of statutory obligations.

3. The department operates under a phoney commercial culture rather than as a public service.

4. WINZ denies or avoids responsibility for the actions of its staff or the system it operates.

1. The standard reaction/approach is that no decision, including those by the Courts, has any relevance to any other decision. This denies any system connections or system failure.

2. Select Committee comments and recommendations are ignored.

3. Decisions by the Benefit Review Committee (BRC) invariably affirm the original decision yet are regularly reversed by the Social Security Appeal Authority (SSAA) suggesting that the membership of the BRC is neither neutral nor competent to deal with reviews.

4. One local decision was reversed after it hit the local newspaper and the Associate Minister intervened. This was not admitted in the media release telling of the settlement, it was explained that additional information had become available that was not available at the times the initial rulings were made and confirmed. As far as we are aware, the only additional information was that the Associate Minister had intervened to tell them to apply the rules correctly.

5. Decisions made by the CSO and confirmed by the BRC have been sent back without a hearing from the SSAA for the situation to be rectified and the claimant to be given their entitlements.

6. There have been considerable delays in WINZ implementing SSAA or Court decisions that differ from their own despite representations, suggesting deliberate stalling.

7. Instructions originating in Head Office either often do not reach regional/district or branch offices or are ignored. Claimants are supposed to be given a form letter outlining why their application for assistance has been declined and giving a breakdown of their income support. Our experience is that this does not occur. Many beneficiaries have no idea what their income support is made up of.

8. There are significant inconsistencies between case managers, between offices in the same town and between offices in different towns. The pattern of difficulties with claimants receiving their entitlements and or appropriate service indicates that these differences are at least in part a function of policy and practice within particular offices and have a relationship with particular staff training programmes.

9. Some organisations under contract to WINZ with numbers of referrals specified have considerable difficulties with WINZ in terms of their referral processes, particularly the lack of reliable processes. The systems for dealing with such difficulties also appears to be inadequate.

10.The bulk of the staffing and training for the Student Loans centre is contracted out - with staff hired on a daily basis, with training that is inappropriate and inadequate for the job to be done by the individuals concerned, with computer programmes for the data that do not follow the flow of the form they come from.

11.When the Poverty Action Group first raised the issues of difficulties many people were experiencing with WINZ in April last year, the Mayor met with the Regional Commissioner and the Public Relations spokesperson. The latter was quoted in the newspaper as promising a review of procedures at WINZ. To date there is no independent assurance that this review has taken place and there are no signs based on the number of difficulties people experience with WINZ as monitored by community groups to indicate that anything has changed if in fact any review took place.

5. The deliberate isolation of staff from the community at all levels and the way senior staff in

particular deny or do not want to hear about or discuss problem areas.

Some WINZ staff who have expressed concerns at staff meetings of issues raised by community groups have been threatened with the initiation of dismissal proceedings on the grounds of disloyalty.

Potential opportunities for difficulties community groups experience with WINZ staff to be discussed at community forums have been repeatedly avoided.

1. at a meeting with the Local Employment Committee, the Regional Commissioner effectively terminated the discussion following a briefing she had given on the organisational changes when members raised matters concerning difficulties they and their clients were experiencing.

2. At a subsequent meeting with the Community Services Council, she began by saying that the meeting would only deal with the restructuring and that she would not deal with problem agencies and their clients were experiencing.

3. When the City Council’s Community Affairs Committee was about to consider the report on the “Survey of Concerns about WINZ” (attached), WINZ staff ignored the report, which should have been the basis for their appearance, and did a presentation of the restructuring the department had undertaken. They said they would comment on the report when it had been right through the Council process. The report did pass right through the Council processes but WINZ have not responded appropriately to it, after 8 months.

This attitude of isolation and denial of the community presence reached what appears to be paranoid levels at the time of the Poverty Rally in the Square on the Wednesday of election week last year. I was the organiser of the rally which included several community leaders including the Mayor and Catholic Bishop as speakers.

The morning of the Rally I was phoned by the Mayor to ask me if I had heard the rumours that the rally was being organised by her as a direct protest at WINZ. She laughed at this but said that she had been given this story several times during the previous week. At the conclusion of the rally, during which none of the speeches had mentioned WINZ, I was informed that there were several WINZ staff with walkie-talkie radios in the audience and down the road to the nearest WINZ office. I later learnt that most appointments at that office had been cancelled for that morning, two people put on the reception desk instead of the normal one, and security guards were located at the entrance to the office. Earlier, the staff had been given “anti-terrorist” training.

The Rally was well publicised, its purpose well known as was the fact that I was the organiser, yet rumour mongering and a reallocation of staff and resources was undertaken in preference to contacting either the Mayor or myself direct to see whether such activities were justified or if an accommodation could be reached if their fears of what was anticipated were real.

Such behaviour seems bizarre to say the least.

6. While theoretically people in emergency situations are supposed to be seen that day, in practice this does not and virtually cannot happen with the requirement that appointments are booked and or that they cannot be seen until the following day and even up to many days later. This procedure and the treatment of emergency circumstances means that the category “emergency” has generally ceased to exist in practical terms.

7. Some claimants are put in a worse financial situation by their case manager than they were in when they went to WINZ seeking help. This is not supposed to happen. One example is when the beneficiary is unable to meet basic costs like electricity. They are “persuaded” / organised into going onto “pay-go” meters which involve higher unit costs and a substantial meter installation fee.

8. The allocation of claimants to a particular case manager and that that case manager is the only person who can deal with the claimant. Sometimes it has not been possible for the claimant to make contact with their case manager within a reasonable period of time - the case manager is busy, they are away, they do not respond to messages, no one else can help.

9. The reception desk and call centres act as gate-keepers. Many people are rebuffed at these points and the applicant is left with the impression that their application has been turned down. These enquiries are not recorded thus denying applicants that date as their effective application date.

10. The basic attitude appears to be - you don’t deserve it, you are not entitled to anything, you have had enough etc. These statements are often the initial reaction of the case manager to an approach by a claimant. Staff report that the non-helpful and often obstructive approach is essentially an instruction. Staff are reported as getting a “pink” slip on their personal file if they are caught informing claimants of their entitlements. They also reportedly get merit points for keeping people off special and supplementary benefits.

11. Misleading and or false information is given to claimants - many people are told there is no such thing as a Special Benefit. Similarly with respect to non-recoverable Special Needs Grants.

12. Staff are not particularly qualified when they are appointed and once on the job are often inadequately trained or untrained for the specific jobs they are given. They may be dealing with claimants for some time before they get any training in how to deal with requests for assistance.

13. Further, staff generally have a low level of people skills or life experience to give them the ability to deal with people under stress. Too often the ways of relating to such people are totally inappropriate with no recognition that the claimant is under severe stress.

14. Case managers are generally extremely reluctant to assist with special needs grants and supplementary allowances.

15. If a claimant goes into a WINZ office and makes a specific request they are often denied their request. If they are accompanied by an advocate, the same request is generally granted. Research carried out by Massey University students found that this occurred in at least 50% of cases. It should not be necessary for advocates to be needed on a routine basis.

16. We do not trust the customer satisfaction ratings - they are taken as a percentage of those who are contacted rather than the total number supposed to be contacted and they take no account of those whose enquiries are not recorded. They are as a minimum, an overstatement of customer satisfaction and may be a gross overstatement of this. There is an assumption underlying the survey that we consider false; that “satisfied claimants” have no problems or difficulties.

17. Claimants are often terrified of complaining, particularly about their case manager, for fear of victimisation.

18. That staff are rated / performance assessed on their throughput; the number of claimants they process rather than the effectiveness of their work.

19. The way the department handles debt recovery. Sufficient orders for repayment including those for five figure sums are reversed to suggest that the investigative procedures and practices followed are inadequate.

20. The way Benefit Fraud and Benefit Crime statistics are generated and used. Even the NZ Statistics Association, the Audit Office and the Select Committee have commented on the grossly misleading and factually incorrect basis for these. These data should be above question.

Specific Suggestions for improvements

Since the level of the basic benefit was reduced in 1990 to below that sufficient to cover essential basics such a food, many claimants have had to rely on supplementary assistance to meet their everyday living costs. This pressure on the supplementary system has generated a number of changes to it. The result is a very complex and often confusing array which even the department considers needs to be simplified.

The current efficiency, cost cutting culture, “commercial” management system and staff performance rating system effectively prevent such a complex income support system from being effectively administered. Even excellent staff would not be able to meet reasonable public expectations under these conditions.

The problems associated with administering such a system have been identified and reported on by the Social Services Select Committee, the Social Policy Agency and departmental briefing papers to the incoming Minister.

For this situation to be rectified some fundamental changes need to be made. Departmental goals need to be changed, staff appraisal/performance systems need to be based on something more appropriate than throughput of claimants and the focus of the department needs to be on implementing the legislation.

But over all of this, the framework the department operates in needs to be changed, with changes to the State Sector Act to re-establish an accountable, non-corrupt, politically neutral, career public service based on the ethic of “public service”.

The Fiscal Responsibility Act needs to be partnered with a Social Responsibility Act so that social goals are established and the rights and needs of citizens are re-asserted. Efficiency must be partnered by effectiveness with greater attention to outcomes and results.

There is also a need for greater policy co-ordination between different agencies and better co-ordination and integration between policy and implementation with particular emphasis on monitoring the effects of policy implementation.

At the other end of the spectrum, a more open and accountable attitude on behalf of staff to issues considered to be of concern by the community appears to be a necessary step to the rehabilitation of the department in the eyes of the public.

1. The introduction of a Social Responsibility Act to balance the Fiscal Responsibility Act and to complement changes to the State Sector Act.

2. Changes to the Government’s SRA’s and KRA’s to reflect the social goals.

3. The production of a more balanced set of results required of departments based on the social goals

4. That a regular monitoring programme be instituted to determine progress towards these goals.

5. That systems be introduced to ensure a better co-ordination and integration of policy across agencies.

6. That the results expected of all policies and practices be clearly specified and their effectiveness with regard to these evaluated, with systems introduced to ensure this.

7. The introduction of infrastructural investment goals to lie alongside those for financial efficiency so that the operational costs of the department are recognised along with the need to maintain and develop the ability of the department to meet the expectations of government both in its ownership role as well as the service delivery expectations.

8. Changes to the State Sector Act to re-establish an accountable, non-corrupt, politically neutral, career public service based on the ethic of “public service”.

9. Performance measures appropriate to the operation, organisation and management of a “public service” be developed and introduced to replace those of the “corporate, commercial management” culture including in contractual arrangements at all levels in the organisation.

10.That the use of inappropriate commercial terminology be discontinued, such as the use of the terms customer, business etc.

11.The principles of “administrative fairness” and other principles enunciated in the case law must be adhered to with any other systems put in place that are crucial to enabling staff to implement the Ministerial programmes as they are currently specified.

12.There is recurring evidence that the departmental policies vary significantly from the legislation and specifics of programmes and are not necessarily compatible with them. These inconsistencies must be rectified and a system put in place to monitor that the two remain completely consistent. The focus of attention must be the meeting the needs of citizens in the context of the legislation and especially the 1938 long title.

13.A system is needed that will ensure that case law is incorporated into departmental policies and practices as soon as practicable after decisions have been made and a monitoring system established to ensure that departmental policies and practices are consistent with the case law.

14.Changes need to be made that will ensure that Select Committee requests and recommendations are met and implemented.

15.It is suggested that the oversight of such systems as sought in 3, 4 and 5 above be included in specific job descriptions in addition to any other procedural changes that need to be made to implement them.

16.There is also evidence to indicate that departmental policies are not always adhered to, including national instructions. It is also essential that the departmental policies and practices are checked regularly to ensure that they are in alignment.

17. That systems be developed to ensure that SSAA and Court decisions be implemented as soon as practicable.

18.That suitably qualified, professional staff are appointed who are able to deal with the range and complexity of the information they are required to deal with and that better staff training programmes are implemented, including the ability to relate appropriately to people under stress.

19.That systems be introduced to ensure that all staff are at all times capable of carrying out the duties expected of them in whatever role they are placed in so that claimants at all time receive the level of service they have a right to expect, with consistency.

20. That the caseload for managers is reduced and maintained at a level which allows them to meet the needs of claimants on a basis of administrative fairness and the spirit of the legislation.

21.A reconstitution of the BRC so that it operates as a true “review committee”.

22.The re-instatement of job boards and computer terminals available to job seekers

23. Operations such as the staffing and training for programmes such as the processing of student loans not be contracted out. It is inefficient, involves greater costs and reduces accountability.

24. That the procedure for referrals to contracted training and support operations be improved.

25. The monitoring of the accuracy of income support performance be done in partnership with advocacy groups throughout the country under contract on a 3 - 6 monthly interval to check that beneficiaries are receiving their correct entitlements.

26. That the “satisfaction survey” be redesigned to include all users of WINZ services, not just those who get to fill in a form.

27. That a “dissatisfaction survey” be introduced to complement the information gathered in the satisfaction survey.

28. That the basis for determining Benefit Crime and Benefit Fraud be redetermined to take account of the concerns expressed by such bodies as: NZ Statistics Association, the Audit Office, Select Committee to ensure their meaningfulness.

29. That the department be required to follow the spirit of the Limitations Act in pursuing debts or overpayments.

30. That when changes take place in areas where the community is directly involved, eg the LEC, that they be informed immediately the department becomes aware of these changes and appropriate follow-up action is negotiated with them.

31. That all requests for assistance are recorded and responded to.

32. That a reliable way of issuing instruction to be implemented nationwide be introduced along with a system for monitoring its effectiveness.

33. That an evaluation of the effectiveness and limitations of the “paperless office” policy and practices be instituted and deficiencies remedied.

34. That a system for dealing with people in emergency situations the same day be instituted and its operation nationally be regularly monitored.

35. That all senior staff at district level be required to meet with community representatives on a two monthly basis to discuss problems experienced and ways to overcome them. (This to be included in job descriptions) WINZ representatives to include the Operations Manager and all branch managers in the area. Community representatives to include those from all groups which have an advocacy role. Such meetings could be facilitated by the local Mayor.

36. That a system be introduced so that a staff member is available at all times to claimants seeking assistance, particularly when their case manager is unavailable or unable to respond to their call, within the time needed to meet their immediate need.

37. That the income support and work readiness/job placement functions be separated but remain integrated through the common computer systems.

38. That the role of public relations spokesperson be abolished.

Representatives of our coalition would appreciate the opportunity to discuss the points made above with you if at all possible.

Yours sincerely

Ian Ritchie

Co-ordinator

Attachments - sent under separate cover.

1. Poverty in Palmerston North. Report from the Poverty Action Group to the Mayor, 26 November 1998.

2. Poverty in Palmerston North - the state of the Voluntary Welfare Agencies and their clients and the implications of this for the City Council. Report from the Poverty Action Group to the Mayor, 5 February 1999.

3. Poverty in Palmerston North - The problems people are having with WINZ - getting their entitlements and benefits that are not enough to survive on. Report from the Poverty Action Group to the Mayor, 8 April 1999.

4. Poverty in Palmerston North - Further to - Problems people are having with WINZ - getting their entitlements and benefits that are not enough to survive on. Report from the Poverty Action Group to the Mayor, 4 June 1999.

5. Poverty in Palmerston North - Further to - Problems people are having with WINZ - getting their entitlements and benefits that are not enough to survive on. Report from the Poverty Action Group to the Mayor, 11 August 1999.

6. Survey of Concerns about WINZ, Palmerston North City Council, 9 July 1999, and Sub-Committee, Committee and Council resolutions regarding this.

cc Hon S Maharey, MP for Palmerston North, Minister of Social Services.