Staff reveal failings of Jobcentre Plus system

'Badly-designed' CMS2 system delays the processing of claims at every stage

The Jobcentre Plus (JC+) customer management system has suffered problems since the rollout of the second-generation version, CMS2, which started at the end of last year.

Employees at every link in the chain – including contact centres, local JC+ offices, benefits processing centres and local authorities – say the business process is overly-complex, the IT system badly designed, and employee training inadequate.

Staff are stressed and unhappy: absence levels at one CMS2-enabled call centre reached 20 per cent in August, according to figures seen by Computing.

‘Sickness levels are astronomical and staff morale is on the floor,’ said a trainer at another call centre.

CMS2 replaces a face-to-face paper-based process with a telephone-based electronic system. New benefits claimants now ring their regional contact centre to register a claim. They are then called back so that a call centre operator can take the claimant’s details and book a face-to-face interview at the local JC+ office.

Details from the telephone interview are input into CMS2 and automatically forwarded to the local JC+ office and regional benefits processing centres, and also to the relevant local authority so it can activate related claims such as housing benefit.

But CMS2 is giving staff such problems that calls are taking much longer than anticipated and causing huge backlogs (see below).

The majority of callers cannot get through at all, and when they do, they may wait days to be called back and even longer for an interview.

The result is that many benefits claimants, already potentially facing financial difficulties, are waiting weeks for benefits payments to start.

Under a bronze/silver/gold grading system developed by the national JC+ board to establish the extent of the problems, only two of 23 CMS-enabled contact centres rated gold.

The 14 bronze-rated centres have been asked to produce action plans to progress to silver by November – which means answering just 74 per cent of incoming calls.

‘Bronze sites have been offered a range of easements to help them recover their inbound call performance position over a maximum of 13 weeks,’ says a letter, seen by Computing, from a regional deputy field director.

Plans to revert to the clerical process of sending paper forms to callers are yet to be signed off, but could be in place as early as the end of this week.

‘Our recovery plan has been put on hold for a few days so the clerical process can be risk-assessed, but I expect to be posting out paper forms by the end of the week,’ said a source in another bronze-rated contact centre.

JC+ staff working with CMS2 say the system is badly designed and not up to the job.

‘The IT system was put out before it was fit for purpose,’ said one call centre operator.

A particular issue is that not all the data required for a claim can be input to the system, so staff are still required to fill out paper forms alongside the electronic data input.

‘One of the main problems is that there are things that you can’t do electronically, so there are a large number of “workarounds” that we have to remember,’ another contact centre worker told Computing.

‘For example, if you try to input certain information, either the computer won’t take it or it will have an adverse effect on the claim. So we have to circumvent the IT system or input the information in a different way.

‘The IT system has not been designed properly, which means a large number of claims are rejected and have to be taken off and then put back on again,’ said the operator.

The Department for Work and Pensions says it is addressing the problems. The new system is a significant change and additional staff are being hired where necessary, says a spokesman.

‘CMS2 is designed to make the best use of resources,’ he said.

‘It is a significant change programme which requires our people to learn new procedures and adjust to different ways of working,’ added the spokesman.

What are the problems with CMS2?

Since the start of August, Computing has revealed a number of issues with CMS2, including:

* Crisis loan applications doubled in one badly-performing region as claimants struggled to make ends meet in the face of delayed payments

* Sheffield Law Centre and Citizens’ Advice Bureau wrote to work and pensions secretary David Blunkett describing claimants waiting four weeks for their money, people forced to request interim payments, and increasing sickness absence among staff

* Housing benefits claims, supposedly started automatically with local authorities when other benefits applications are made, are being affected and could be delayed for up to three months

* Fewer than one in four calls made to the Sheffield call centre were answered in July

* Problems with transferring information from CMS2 to JC+ and benefits processing systems. For example, during one week in July, only 1,303 out of 4,333 attempted transfers were completed successfully.