Social Security Adjudication, Judicial Review and the Technology of Poverty

Abstract

'To err is human; to really mess things up takes a computer' is an aphorism which can currently attract widespread agreement. The problems confronting the Department of Social Security (DSS) and its clients during the drawn-out process of computerising benefit services add a rather Kafkaesque variation to that maxim, and provide an important context in which to discuss the Court of Appeal's decision in R v Secretary of State for Social Services ex parte Child Poverty Action Group and others.' The case arose out of an attempt by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) and others to challenge, by way of judicial review, the substantial delays in adjudication faced by many claimants under the Supplementary Benefits scheme. The problem of delay is one that has become embedded in the social security system during the 1980s, as a feature both of the level of claims being made, and the policy of staff reductions within the DSS and its predecessor. Judy McKnight, for example, has shown how staffing cuts within the then Department of Health and Social Security had increased the staff/claims ratio in supplementary benefit cases from 1:100 in 1979 to 1:132 in 1983.2 Although there is some slight evidence that delays have been reduced since the introduction of Income Support,3 this is likely, in part, to be explicable by the disappearance of time-consuming claims for single payments, while average figures still disguise wide variations in efficiency between, in particular, some inner city and other local offices.4 It was the extreme delays faced by claimants in inner London that prompted CPAG to bring this test case. CPAG built its arguments around sections 98 and 99 of the Social Security Act 1975. (These provisions survived the superseding of Supplementary Benefit