Guide to Financial Redress for Maladministration
Foreword
The Government's aim is to promote opportunity and independence for all. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has a crucial role to play on this:
- we touch on virtually everyone's life at some point, more than any other department
- our objectives go to the heart of opportunity and independence: more people in work, better support to those who cannot work, ending child poverty, and promoting security and independence in retirement.
In support of this and in their work each day, staff throughout the Department are engaged in supporting the financial needs of millions of people. We are committed to giving a high quality service to all our customers and that includes handling people and their complaints with consideration and fairness. Sadly, in handling so many claims it is perhaps inevitable that sometimes things will go wrong and when that happens we should seek to provide early corrective action together with proper apologies.
Everyone in the Department needs to contribute to handling complaints effectively; learning lessons from them and improving performance. Nipping complaints in the bud together with appropriate apologies will often be sufficient, but this guide describes when we should go further and offer some tangible redress.
Over the years we have developed a scheme for financial redress and the Parliamentary Ombudsman and her predecessors have accepted its scope. This revised guide describes that scheme and supersedes the guidance issued in March 2001. It gives further amplification to some of the issues that have caused doubt in the past and should be used with immediate effect. The breadth of the Department's work is huge and any guidance can only hope to cover the most common situations. This guide is no exception and if staff are in doubt as to whether some financial redress should be made they should seek advice from Agency Special Payment Teams or DWP Viewpoint at an early stage.
Our aim is simple. We should try to give a good service to all those we deal with in our official duties. As part of that, if we make errors we owe it to our customers to apologise and do all we can to restore them to where they should have been in the first place. In this way our customers will receive the service which Parliament intended.
PAUL GRAY
Consumer Champion
Department for Work and Pensions