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<p>All government Departments have routine complaints procedures, this has been the
case under successive governments.</p><p> </p><p>The Department has a two tier complaints
process which considers formal complaints about our service. As outlined on Gov.uk,
DWP complaints processes encourages customers in the first instance to raise their
issues with the office they are dealing with, as a business as usual contact, so we
put things right.</p><p> </p><p>If the customer remains unhappy with the response,
they can escalate their concerns, which will be dealt with by the Complaints Resolution
Team as part of the formal DWP complaints process. The complaint is independently
investigated. Where cases cannot be resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, the customer
can escalate their complaint to the Director General as part of the tier two complaint
process.</p><p> </p><p>Escalated complaints represent the final business review and
response to the complaint.</p><p>Once a complainant has exhausted the DWP complaint
process they are signposted to the Independent Case Examiner’s (ICE) Office if they
are dissatisfied with the final response to their complaint.</p><p> </p><p>Complaints
received from women born in the 1950s and affected by changes in State Pension age
are handled in line with the overall Departmental complaints process published on
Gov.uk.</p><p> </p><p>The role of the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) is to consider
case-specific complaints of maladministration (service failure). The vast majority
of the complaints that are referred to ICE are complex and require the circumstances
of each case to be considered on its merits. Prior to the WASPI campaign the ICE Office
routinely accepted in the region of 1,100 and 1,200 complaints for examination each
year. At the end of February 2018, the Office had accepted 1,907 WASPI complaints
alone.</p><p> </p><p>In January 2017, the ICE Office took the decision to bring a
lead case into investigation in order to familiarise itself with the issues underpinning
the campaign. This investigation concluded in June 2017 – the ICE did not uphold the
complaint. Whilst the Office has had no additional resource to deal with the WASPI
campaign complaints, a dedicated team of investigation case managers was established
(from within existing resources) in October 2017 to investigate this group of complaints.
The ICE Office aim to complete investigation within 20 weeks of starting work on a
case, the WASPI related ICE reports that had been concluded to date have been completed
within an average of 9.75 weeks. To date, the ICE had not upheld any case specific
complaints that DWP failed to provide adequate and timely information relating to
the increase in their State Pension age. All final ICE reports explain how the complainant
can escalate their complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s Office.</p><p> </p><p>There
are no plans to dedicate additional resources to investigating this group of complaints,
as to do so would disadvantage other groups of complainants whose cases are awaiting
investigation.</p><p> </p><p>The Parliamentary Health and Service Ombudsman make final
decisions on complaints that have not been resolved by UK Government Departments.
This was set up in 1967 under the then Labour Government.</p><p> </p>
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