Telephone claims not fit for purpose

I have been getting increasingly frustrated and unhappy about UC telephone claims. We (on HTC) have experienced a lot of problems with assisting clients to submit and maintain them. Things came to a head for me this week because it has been nearly impossible to get through to submit telephone claim.
Telephone claims SHOULD be a reasonable adjustment but they are not, because (a) difficult to submit, (b) difficult to get through for purposes of ongoing maintenance (waiting times are quite bad), (c) payment statements routinely not sent by post to clients, so its difficult to gauge if client is getting correct amount, (d) messages for case managers are taken down by poorly trained staff so there is limited scope to leave a message of complex nature- unlike if you have a Journal.
So if your vulnerability, disability or other barriers mean that you have to have a phone claim, you are worse off than those without such barriers, pure and simple.

Unfortunately I can only agree with you Jo.  To add to all your points is the difficulty / impossibility of getting a callback as arranged - and that affects both pure phone claims and claims with journals when you’re unable to resolve things via notes on the journal.

An absolute classic this week with a journal claim - note put on the journal by claimant that an arranged callback about an issue didn’t take place - please phone to escalate was the reply!!  I’d certainly have expected that to have been escalated internally without the need for the claimant to do anything else.

I strongly believe that as well as the option of ‘if you have already accessed your online journal’ there should be an option purely for those with phone claims.  That would at least lessen (maybe) the wait time and could be staffed by those people who would be making the callback or by people trained to do more than just take a message

Mairi - 12 June 2021 01:57 AM

  To add to all your points is the difficulty / impossibility of getting a callback as arranged - and that affects both pure phone claims and claims with journals when you’re unable to resolve things via notes on the journal.

And God help you if you miss a call from UC. You are marked as “failed to attend”, you call asking for a callback, which you may or may not get, at unknown time.
This cycle can go on and on.

And none of it is about UC itself, interpretation of the law, or complex scenarios. It is simply about not employing and training (properly) enough people. Therefore it is a political decision which causes misery for most vulnerable claimants.
Again.

Have you tried to raise as an issue through Citizens Advice national social policy Jo? Given that CA are being paid quite a lot of money by DWP for the HTC service and therefore you can’t really be said to be one of the “scaremongers” that others are accused of being when we try to highlight these kind of problems, you might hope that DWP would actually listen and act if senior bods from CA did push on this issue?

Paul_Treloar_AgeUK - 14 June 2021 08:56 AM

Have you tried to raise as an issue through Citizens Advice national social policy Jo?

Oh absolutely. But CitA is not the only one with a clout. So this is why I came here :)

I can certainly pass it on via stakeholders Jo…

Yes please. I can give real examples if needed.

Hi Jo - they’ve come back to me and would like examples so if you could email or direct message me some that would be great and I’ll pass them on.

Thanks

Daphne - 16 June 2021 09:32 AM

Hi Jo - they’ve come back to me and would like examples so if you could email or direct message me some that would be great and I’ll pass them on.

Thanks

Daphne I’ve messaged you something specific on this theme.

But for wider audience consumption. there is anecdotal evidence (from DWP sources) of claimants who have made telephone claims (challenging enough), being persuaded to convert to digital claims, for what appears to be DWP administrative convenience.

One of the issues here is that they are seeking views on their web page about reasonable adjustments and benefits and that page links to precisely zero benefit pages. See https://www.gov.uk/guidance/get-help-with-benefits-and-pensions-if-you-have-accessibility-needs

So, if you go to the UC pages you would have zero idea that telephone claims were an option let alone an option as a reasonable adjustment.

I am back after more than a year to resurrect this post.
Things are seemingly getting worse.
There are major infuriating inconsistencies amongst call handlers.
Firstly, it seems harder to persuade them to take the phone claim. The distrust is seething.
Secondly, God help you if you are calling with an interpreter! You will never know if the interpreter you arranged will be accepted; some call handlers would accept, and some not. We never know why. If your interpreter is not accepted and you are put on hold to wait for the BigWord interpreter, 75% of the time they drop the line and you have to call again. The inconsistencies veer even further; some call handlers are happy for ME to interpret, if the client is Polish.
Thirdly, if you have a couple claim, get ready for the battle. Some call handlers would deal with first member of the couple, give you a linking code, and tell you to call again with the second member of the couple.

These are not just my own experiences, but I am in a team 5 who regularly vent about the trauma of such calls. And we must not forget- when we do ask for telephone claims, it is for clients who are already vulnerable.

I normally politely terminate the call and try again. This is a ridiculous way of conducting a business.

Daphne, I know you have tried before but could you approach DWP again to ask for training guidance for call handlers, so when they refuse to deal with our interpreters, or take the full couple claim, we at least can know if it is worth challenging them.
Thank you

Making telephone claims for those of us who are not part of H2C is impossible, so we are having to ring you to get telephone claims through as we have no other way to do this. One of my colleagues recently went out on a home visit for an extremely vulnerable client, whilst there she attempted to make a telephone claim for UC, and this is what she reported:

I was on visit this morning and the only number online is the UC helpline number which directs you back to the website for new claims (no option to chose to do new UC claim over the phone).. I tried all 3 options and was told no one could help me as they were not for new UC claims and to go back to the website!! Anyways - I ended up using the help to claim number so managed to get the claim done but was a lot of interference due to the 3 lines. I asked the lady on the H2C line if she could confirm the number she uses to call the DWP but she couldn’t give me it because they have their own specific number to use.

When ringing the UC helpline the first thing you hear is a message re cost of living payments and if calling about this to press 1 then it says ‘if you’re calling about a new claim for UC please go to the website’. It says for anything else press 2 so I did. Then the options are press 1 for UC appt, 2 for UC query and 3 for advance payment. I pressed 2 and got another 2 options (1 for advance payment and 2 for query) so I did 2 again and then held for ages to get through. Once through I was told that line was only for people who have a live claim already. Explained my issue and was told to go to the website or listen to options again! I phoned again in case I misheard and tried option 1 and 2 again only to be told to go to website again.. I was livid. Seems we will have to use Help to Claim in order to do a new claim over the phone.. bloody nightmare. Even when through and client had gave permission for me to talk on his behalf, the DWP adviser made me put him on speaker phone so he could ask the client all the questions which I had to keep jumping in on as client didn’t have a clue!