Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent steps he has taken to (a) review and (b) improve the accuracy of the decision making process at the Child Maintenance Service.

The DWP manages quality through the DWP Quality Assurance Framework, conducting three separate tiers of quality assurance, allowing us to measure how well we are doing and identify any required improvements. Tier One checking is internal within the Child Maintenance Service and focuses checks on the more complex and high-risk decisions. The results provides both individual learning redressed through coaching support, and organisational learning to help us improve decision-making through for example improved instructions and learning products.

There are 2 Tiers of independent assurance, reporting ultimately to NAO (National Audit Office). Learning from both these layers of quality assurance is routinely fed back into our organisation to help us determine product and process improvement.

In January 2022 we introduced a new Learning and Innovation approach, making continual learning for colleagues more accessible for point of need in our decision-making process. This brings together self-paced learning products, guidance, tools, and videos to assist colleagues with their continuous learning journey. This was followed in May 2022 with a new Learning and Innovation Panel, with a remit to identify and address learning needs, review and ratify learning products – resulting in several improvements delivered year to date as a result of their scrutiny.

This work and focus continues to deliver a high level of accuracy in the decision-making process conducted by the Child Maintenance Service, with the monetary value of error confirmed by NAO as less than 1% in the last operational year.

The Department’s estimate of assessment accuracy for 2021/22 is 99.4%, which is unchanged from 2020/21 (99.4%). The Department expects automation to continue to have a positive impact on accuracy as the proportion of calculations carried out by the system rises relative to the manual activity of caseworkers. Whilst the risk of manual caseworker error cannot be removed, significant efforts are being made to reduce the likelihood of error.

Better Management Information (MI) has also contributed to improving accuracy through increased transparency of the CMS 2012 system. CMG operations has implemented targeted checking regimes, developed using this improved MI. This has allowed early identification of emerging trends, allowing greater focus on getting things right first time for the client. New and improved training materials have been developed and work is also being done to embed a culture of continuous improvement