Fury mounts over 1M unanswered calls to CSA |
|
|
Published
:
Sun, 30 Oct 2005 00:35
|
LONDON: The creaking Child Support Agency has perhaps had its day. Lib Democrat MP David Laws’ comments made yesterday echoed Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkett’s opinion expressed last month. “The CSA is a failing organization” he said recommending its functions be transferred to the Inland Revenue. The MP obtained figures that said one in three phone calls to the CSA have gone unanswered over the past 16 months.
The damning statement doesn’t end there. It provides exact numbers – 1,140,675 - calls that have failed to get through. Nearly half of these – 590,482 got lost in the answering system, while another 502,136 hung up in frustration after getting no response.
These numbers are from the agency’s own statistics which said a total of 3,350,629 calls were made to it between April 2004 and July 2005. It also said 48,057 callers got an engaged tone. The agency receives calls mostly from parents hoping to know the status of their application or having a query about the new payment system.
The agency is deep in trouble with a backlog of 347,000 cases. An agency official confirmed that it takes on an average 448 days to assess a claim. For most claimant mothers it only means the agency could take forever. Well, almost forever, if you calculate at the rate it takes to clear one claim, the last one could be cleared no sooner than nine years from now!
In the past couple of occasions the CSA has blamed the mess on the EDP system it had installed. The data also revealed that 261,000 applications remained to be processed and these included 73,000 that were made two and half years ago.
People would like to know why with a staff of 10,000 does the agency does have such a huge backlog?
It is currently handling 1.47 million cases and each case costs the agency an average of £200. The agency had kicked up a controversy last month when it announced it had written off £1bn owed by runaway dads.
The impression people have of the agency is of a sluggish bureaucratic firm that is best avoided else you’d be sucked up in a complex and never ending process - a fate much worse (for claimant mothers) than what runaway dads would have to face when asked to pay up.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Print this Story
