electronic communications

An initial thought - UC/PIP etc draft claims & payments [Reg 5 & Sch.2] and decisions & appeals [Reg 4] regs. make provision for communication, including decisions, by electronic means.

Presumably for UC (and other benefits in due course) this means that in the majority of cases claimants will no longer get a paper decision but only notification through their ‘on line claim account’.

Imagine the senario, X visits an advice centre:
X - “I’ve had a decsion stoping my benefit”.
AC - “what does it say?”
X - “i can’t remember exactly”
AC - “have you brought a copy?”
X - “no its on my account”
AC - “we will have to look at your account, do we have your permission? OK please use our PC to log onto your account”
X “no I haven’t brought my log on details with me”
AC telephone to contact centre - “No we can’t give that information over the phone to the claimant or you any more, this helpline is now only to help claimants set up their account online”.

OK so clients often attend without bringing copies of decision letters etc. and it is often difficult to get any useful information from DWP through the contact centres even if one passes the security questions etc.

But will the emphasis on electronic communication in future make life even harder for advisers?
How will advice agencies deal with the new situation, what are the implications for keeping clients claim account access details on record, how will we progress enquiries if we can’t access the clients account details when they are not present?
Will DWP provide a dedicated route of contact for advice centres (given that parts of JCP etc don’t provide this now)?

Or will electronic communication make everything simpler and easier to access?

Good questions.  The converse is that clients and department won’t be able to lose correspondence any more.

They often deny receipt of emails & faxes!

This is one of the specific areas that SSAC have raised in their papers related to UC regs, so its probably well worth knocking your o/p into a query and sending it to them Peter.

Is it actually confirmed that decisions won’t be issued by letter? If they are being done purely electronically, I can see a common scenario being people not monitoring their online account, or not monitoring the linked email account, and entirely missing decisions until after the money dries up. This happens now, but I think emails are a bit easier to miss than brown envelopes.

Would a claimant really be required to log in and check their UC account every month for the rest of their lives? Or else link it to a reliable email account? Would “your email landed in my hotmail spam folder” be good grounds for a late challenge to a benefit decision?

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