Oral Answers to Questions

Melanie Onn Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2016 Commons Chamber

[Melanie Onn (Great Grimsby) (Lab)]

3. If the Government will establish a public inquiry into Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ contract with Concentrix.

[Robert Flello (Stoke-on-Trent South) (Lab)]

9. If the Government will establish a public inquiry into Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs’ contract with Concentrix.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Jane Ellison)]

The independent National Audit Office is carrying out an inquiry into the Concentrix contract and it plans to publish its report in early 2017. That is in addition to Select Committee and Public Accounts Committee scrutiny, which has been extensive to date and will no doubt be extensive in the future.

[Melanie Onn]

I should like to take this opportunity to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh), who is not in her place, whose hard work got this issue on to the agenda and forced HMRC to act. In July, the independent Social Security Advisory Committee said that the Concentrix contract was a

“major departure for HMRC, as decisions about a claimant’s past eligibility to a benefit are being made by a commercial organisation”,

and that

“this same organisation is then performing mandatory reconsiderations when a claimant challenges the initial decision.”

What are the Government going to do to prevent this situation from happening again?

[Jane Ellison]

The chief executive of HMRC addressed that particular issue in one of his evidence sessions to a Select Committee. I hope the House will be pleased to hear that HMRC has taken back and completed all 181,000 cases from Concentrix and has now cleared most of the mandatory reconsiderations. [Interruption.] There are of course issues to consider. That is why the National Audit Office is carrying out its inquiry, which is already under way, and the Government will of course respond to its report in due course.