Member

I absolutely take the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, that people out there have had a bad experience of the DWP. All organisations make mistakes and the DWP is no exception. I regret that and, when we have complaints, we take all the steps we can to try to put them right. But my Secretary of State has made it part of her mission to try to reach out and look at ways to make sure that we can help to increase trust in the DWP. One thing she made clear in the Green Paper that she published was about wanting to review the whole way that the department does safeguarding, so we have already established a multidisciplinary team to support and join up our safeguarding approach across the department, and we are consulting on the new safeguarding approach as part of the Green Paper on get Britain working. We will actively go out and seek opinions. I have no doubt, from what the noble Baroness described, that we will get some back that will be hard to read, but hopefully others will be more positive and others will help us to make sure that we get that right. But the fact that we sometimes make mistakes does not mean that we cannot carry on doing the job that we have been given and make sure that we do the right things in relation to public money.