Kate Green – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Kate Green on 2014-06-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what contingency arrangements have been put in place by the Department’s Child Maintenance Group to ensure that the Child Maintenance Options Service answers all calls promptly and there is a good service; and how often those contingency arrangements were invoked in the last year.

Steve Webb

The Child Maintenance Options service has an effective business continuity plan in place, which includes the ability to divert calls to other trained colleagues and deploy a variety of telephony-based solutions such as Interactive Voice Response.

There were around eight occasions in which contingency measures had to be used in the last year for reasons including brief local power outages, activation of the fire alarm system and occasions where call demands exceeded forecasted volumes.

Steps have been taken to prevent or minimise any reoccurrence of these events, including the installation of an uninterrupted power supply and better forecasting as we fully establish the impact of recent changes such as the use of Child Maintenance Options as a mandatory gateway to the statutory scheme.