Add public body questions for Social Security agencies

[mdeuk]

Relevant issue(s)

Fixes #745
Partly solves #722

What does this do?

This implements a series of public body questions for the three Social Security agencies in the UK:

• Department for Communities (Northern Ireland) (dfc - 57878)
• Department for Work and Pensions (dwp - 24)
• Social Security Scotland (social_security_scotland - 89236)

It also refactors the questions we have for the Home Office (home_office - body 7), and improves the generic answer that we have for said body, by including some specific pointers.

Key themes:

• Claim benefits / state pension
• Ask about a benefit claim
• Ask for a copy of records (e.g. RoAR / SAR)
• Ask about Visas
• Ask about Passports

Why was this needed?

We consistently see users contacting these bodies in regard to matters which concern their own personal circumstances and in no way relate to a FOI or EIR request. This can result in personally identifiable information, which is often hard to remove, being published.

Being able to signpost users to relevant external resources and dissuade them from misusing our service may help reduce misuse, which takes significant administrative resources to resolve.

Implementation notes

This will work best if mysociety/alaveteli#6807 is implemented, as the questions tie into the simplified heading that has been used here.

The public body name for Social Security Scotland (e.g. social_security_scotland) has been shortened to socsecscot in the code - this has been tested on a dev instance and showed no issues.

There are a couple of generic boilerplate statements (generic_deny_boilerplate, generic_deny_askcouncil,generic_deny_gdpr_rightofaccess) to save repetition and improve maintainability. The first is essentially a facsimile of the original misuse text from the Home Office, which has been refactored and simplified.

Screenshots

A short video showing some of the options:

DWP.for.Github.mov

Home Office:

• 
• 

DfC:

• 
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Social Security Scotland

• 
• 

Notes to reviewer

There is a bug of sorts - but it appears to exist in core Alaveteli - when a radio button is clicked, we don't automatically focus the browser on the relevant text, meaning the user needs to scroll. This isn't a massive thing, but it might be slightly more intuitive if we did that.

Some care has been taken to ensure our responses are neutral, in that we don't express an opinion regarding a public bodies policies or procedures - the links to external resources, which are from reputable organisations such as Citizens Advice, can do that much better than we can - as they have the resources to let them keep data up-to-date.

Some of the off-site links are, unfortunately, rather long - sorry about that.

[garethrees]

Thanks for this! It's probably going to take us a little while to review due to annual leave and ongoing LSE issues, but we'll do our best 🙏

[mdeuk]

Thanks for this! It's probably going to take us a little while to review due to annual leave and ongoing LSE issues, but we'll do our best 🙏

It’s not quite ready yet - there’s a further commit coming (hopefully tonight) to add some contest to links.

Sorry it’s quite a hefty script though - there’s a fair bit of nuance which prevents reuse of some elements, but I’ve tried to be as generic as possible.