There are a couple of days left to comment on the draft Scottish Social Security Charter, but I’m not going to do that, for a simple reason: it’s excellent, and I have no criticism to make. I’m going to pick out just five points:
- the Charter promises that the agency will listen to people and to trust them. There is long-standing evidence that threatening people with prosecution during the process of claiming is simply destructive.
- the Charter promises that the agency will learn from its mistakes. I commented during the passage of the Bill that while the UK system treats complaints, rectification and review as a quasi-judicial, adversarial process, “other public services attempt to learn from complaints and use them as feedback to improve their processes.” They’re on it.
- Payments will continue while people are appealing a decision. In the UK system, penalties are routinely imposed without a hearing.
- People will be told about their entitlements, including services delivered by other agencies.
- People will not have their time wasted. They promise to “recognise that your time is precious and handle your application and enquiries as quickly as we can.”
This may be a challenge, but can anyone spot the difference between this and the DWP?
It is an excellent statement of intention. It will be some time before we can assess how effectively it is implemented. It would be great if the charter & oversight arrangements also extended to existing benefits administered by local authorities on behalf of the Scottish Government, e.g SWF, CTR, school clothing grants etc?