Community Groups To Gain Access To Benefits Records

Advisers in community-based organisations such as Citizens Advice will have direct access to their client's benefits records as a result of a national plan to join up their IT systems with those of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), E-Government Bulletin has learned.

By the end of 2007, it is hoped that work on joining Citizens Advice IT systems to the Government Gateway will be complete, enabling staff from organisations such as Citizens Advice (http://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/) staff to view individual client records held by DWP. Advisers will be able to check the entitlement of their clients to benefits, calculate amounts they will receive, and also perform job searches.

"Next year, we will look at deeper services, but thereafter it's something of an unknown. We would like to look at being able to handle payments enquiries, and possibly submissions of some types of claim form," DWP told E-Government Bulletin. The work with Citizens Advice will pave the way for organisations such as the Royal National Institute for Blind People, The Royal National Institute for Deaf People, Help The Aged and Care UK to have the same facilities.

The main elements of the work involve making changes to the Government Gateway in order to authenticate individual organisations; installing secure desktops in these organisations so that individual advisers are authenticated; and putting in place service level agreements and auditing processes to ensure that DWP records are accessed securely and for the right purposes. For example, advisers will only have access to the records of a specific individual, and will not be able to make changes to records, said DWP.

Access to the Gateway will be introduced to Citizens Advice and the other organisations in a phased way. "We won't guarantee to do it all in one hit," said DWP. Aside from putting authentication technologies in place, there are other important issues to tackle, such as changing the internal processes of the organisations, and managing issues such as the high turnover in staff often seen in charities. "Citizens Advice has around 20 per cent staff turnover," said DWP. At present, Citizens Advice provides information and advice from more than 3,000 locations, and has more than 20,000 volunteers.

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