Foreword
This report covers Housing Benefit (HB) and Council Tax Benefit (CTB) administration and security in the London Borough of Lambeth (Lambeth).
In 1999/2000, Lambeth paid out nearly £146 million in HB and CTB. Overall, we conclude that Lambeth's administration of these benefits is deeply inadequate, and that radical improvements are needed in all but a few areas.
Lambeth contracted out its benefit service in 1997 to Capita Business Services PLC. We found that the terms of the contract are acceptable, but that Lambeth's management of it has been poor because of lapses in monitoring, an under-resourced client-side team and a failure to assign accountability.
As a result of these weaknesses, Lambeth's use of a contractor to handle its benefit operation failed to eradicate its longstanding, and now substantial, backlog of work. This failure underlies many of the problems that Lambeth now faces, because its activity has been focused on clearing new work and in defraying the backlog at the expense of planning, accuracy and security.
At a strategic level, we were pleased to find that Lambeth had sound business plans for 1999/2000 and 2000/01 (including Best Value performance indicators and targets) and a corporate counter fraud strategy. However, our findings show that Lambeth has not met its strategic aims to any significant extent.
We found that Lambeth compounds its problems by failing to monitor the quality and speed of its work effectively, thus depriving itself of the management information that it urgently needs to correct its course. Unless Lambeth puts this right, it will not be in a position to tackle its many problems in a coherent way.
We also found that Lambeth does not have clear lines of communication, either internal or external, leaving it vulnerable to error and delay, and is poor at even the most basic management functions. For example, its filing systems are ineffective, leading to confusion, delay and lapses in security.
Lambeth's failure to manage its work and to focus clearly on achieving its aims, has had an impact on the key aspects of its benefit operations. We noted in particular that it has failed to adopt the Verification Framework (VF) and that its verification work is very weak, falling well below the VF standard.
This weakness contributes to a wider failure to defend the gateways to benefit, but is only one of many defects. In summary, Lambeth:
· provides a very poor service at the customer interface
· routinely assesses benefit entitlement on the basis of very weak evidence
· fails to adequately protect its IT security
· is very slow in putting benefit into payment
· does not handle fraud investigations effectively
· has a low recovery rate for overpayments.
We note that Lambeth formed a Partnership Board in March 2000, attended by the Leader and Members of the council, senior council staff, including the Chief Executive, and representatives from Capita. Its principal aims are to reduce the size of the backlog, to reduce the number of complaints to the Local Government Ombudsman and to improve Lambeth's service to its customers.
These aims are commendable, but on the evidence of our inspection, Lambeth has a long way to go in achieving them. However, we believe that the recently appointed Chief Executive’s willingness to accept and implement our recommendations for change demonstrates a commitment to securing improvements in the administration of HB and CTB. More recently Lambeth has requested assistance to address its problems from the Department of Social Security (DSS) funded expert help team. The team, made up of representatives from Local Authority (LA) benefit managers, DSS staff and consultants with expertise in performance management, will work in partnership with Lambeth to improve the delivery of HB and CTB.
We offer the findings and recommendations in the report below in support of the Partnership Board's work and the commitment demonstrated by the Chief Executive.
On behalf of my inspection team, I wish to thank the Chief Executive, managers and staff of Lambeth for their support and co-operation during this inspection.
Susan Lingwood
Programme Manager