Recently, a constituent — who will, of course, remain nameless — wrote to me to ask what could be done about the delay in receiving her pension payment.
Luckily, the problem itself is now resolved.
But, in an effort to help make sure that other constituents did not find themselves in a similar position, I put down a Parliamentary Question, to ask how many people were waiting more than a certain time for their pension payments.
When I put in this question, I had no idea what the answer would be — but I rather assumed that the Department would produce a little table, showing how many people were waiting how long, together with some comforting words. You know the sort of thing: “it is, of course, our aim to ensure that all pensioners receive their payments on the due date; however, with N million pensions in payment, a figure of only X per cent of payments delayed by more than P days represents a considerable achievement; it remains our aim to improve on this figure in coming years….”
I was, however, completely wrong.
The answer was nothing like this at all. Not even remotely.
No little table.
No comforting words.
In fact, no information at all.
Just a response from the Minister to say that this information was (a) unavailable and (b) impossible to collect without disproportionate cost.
This, I have to admit, did rather surprise me.
I am neither cynical nor naively optimistic about the operation of our dearly beloved bureaucracies. I fully recognise that, by and large, the people working in them at all levels are trying to do their best under often difficult circumstances; and I also recognise that it is mind-numbingly difficult to make them operate with clockwork precision.
But you would have thought, wouldn’t you, that if you were running a vast pension system in which things are bound to go wrong from time to time, one of the first things you would want to know is just how often things do go wrong. And, since one of the things that is most likely to go wrong is the timing of payments, you’d have thought that the computer system would be organised to alert Ministers and senior officials to the quantities and durations of delays in payment.
But no. The Minister’s reply on the contrary makes clear that (a) these statistics are not collected and (b) the computer obviously isn’t set up in such a way as to be able to collect them even if anyone wanted to — since, if it were, then finding out the numbers would be a matter of pressing a button and certainly wouldn’t involve any disproportionate cost.
So we have a great big system whose sole function is to make payments of the right amount to the right people at the right time, and — at least so far as the timing is concerned — the machine isn’t programmed to tell anyone whether the system is working.
I am now trying to find out whether the Department knows how many payments went to the wrong person.
Any bets on the answer?