Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his Department is taking to ensure current Royal Mail delays do not affect people's ability to comply with his Department's deadlines.
Answered by Andrew Western - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The delays to Royal Mail delivery have not had an impact on DWPs ability to deliver its services. DWP has robust plans in place that will be invoked should disruption to service occur, these plans include extension of DWP deadlines that can be invoked to ensure our customers are not impacted negatively.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his Department is taking to ensure current Royal Mail delays do not affect people's access to payments.
Answered by Andrew Western - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The delays to Royal Mail delivery have not had an impact on DWPs ability to deliver its services. DWP has robust plans in place that will be invoked should disruption to service occur, these plans include extension of DWP deadlines that can be invoked to ensure our customers are not impacted negatively.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what measures are in place to ensure that recipients of Universal Credit, State Pension and other DWP support are not financially disadvantaged by delayed postal communications, including in Stourbridge constituency.
Answered by Andrew Western - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The delays to Royal Mail delivery have not had an impact on DWPs ability to deliver its services. DWP has robust plans in place that will be invoked should disruption to service occur, these plans include extension of DWP deadlines that can be invoked to ensure our customers are not impacted negatively.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment his Department has made of the adequacy of support available to employers recruiting and retaining blind and visually impaired employees.
Answered by Diana Johnson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Disabled people and people with health conditions, including blind and visually impaired people, are a diverse group so access to the right work and health support, in the right place, at the right time, is key.
We have a range of specialist initiatives to support individuals to stay in work and get back into work. These include support from Work Coaches and Disability Employment Advisers in Jobcentres and Access to Work grants, as well as initiatives joining up health and employment support around the individual through Employment Advisors in NHS Talking Therapies, and WorkWell.
In our Pathways to Work Green Paper we set out our Pathways to Work offer, backed by £1 billion a year of new funding by the end of the decade. We are building towards a guaranteed offer of personalised work, health and skills support for all disabled people and people with health conditions on out of work benefits, building on existing initiatives.
Additionally, we have developed a digital information service for employers and continue to oversee the Disability Confident Scheme.
In November 2025, Sir Charlie Mayfield published the Keep Britain Working Report, setting out recommendations to reshape how government works with employers to improve work and health outcomes through creating healthier, more inclusive workplaces. We are now working with volunteer employers, providers and regions through a Vanguard Phase to test and refine approaches to help disabled workers and workers with long-term health conditions, including blind and visually impaired workers, receive the support they need to remain and thrive in employment. These include developing effective stay in work and return to work practices, strengthening prevention, and building the evidence needed to spread good practice.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his Department is taking to improve employment rates among blind and visually impaired people.
Answered by Diana Johnson - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Disabled people and people with health conditions, including blind and visually impaired people, are a diverse group so access to the right work and health support, in the right place, at the right time, is key.
We have a range of specialist initiatives to support individuals to stay in work and get back into work. These include support from Work Coaches and Disability Employment Advisers in Jobcentres and Access to Work grants, as well as initiatives joining up health and employment support around the individual through Employment Advisors in NHS Talking Therapies, and WorkWell.
In our Pathways to Work Green Paper we set out our Pathways to Work offer, backed by £1 billion a year of new funding by the end of the decade. We are building towards a guaranteed offer of personalised work, health and skills support for all disabled people and people with health conditions on out of work benefits, building on existing initiatives.
Additionally, we have developed a digital information service for employers and continue to oversee the Disability Confident Scheme.
In November 2025, Sir Charlie Mayfield published the Keep Britain Working Report, setting out recommendations to reshape how government works with employers to improve work and health outcomes through creating healthier, more inclusive workplaces. We are now working with volunteer employers, providers and regions through a Vanguard Phase to test and refine approaches to help disabled workers and workers with long-term health conditions, including blind and visually impaired workers, receive the support they need to remain and thrive in employment. These include developing effective stay in work and return to work practices, strengthening prevention, and building the evidence needed to spread good practice.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether he plans to review the Access to Work scheme to ensure that blind and visually impaired people can access workplace adjustments and specialist support in a timely manner.
Answered by Stephen Timms - Minister of State (Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government) (Equalities)
Reforms are essential to ensure a better service for customers, to help disabled people start and stay in work, including blind and visually impaired people. We are reviewing all aspects of the Access to Work scheme, utilising the outcomes of the Green Paper consultation, the Collaboration Committees, and engagement with key internal and external stakeholders to inform its future direction.
We have committed to recruiting and training an additional 480 case staff to process the higher volume of applications, to join the 658 staff already working on Access to Work. Recruitment has already begun, and new case managers will receive extensive training to handle complex applications with confidence. This is to ensure disabled people, and people with health conditions, including those that are blind and visually impaired, can receive timely support to secure and remain in employment.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many young people aged 16-24 are claiming the Universal Credit health element while in full-time non-advanced education under Universal Credit rules.
Answered by Stephen Timms - Minister of State (Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government) (Equalities)
The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many current cases are there where Work Capability Assessments have taken longer than the 13 weeks set out in departmental guidelines.
Answered by Stephen Timms - Minister of State (Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government) (Equalities)
It might be helpful to explain that the 13 weeks set out in departmental guidelines only applies to the assessment phase of Employment Support Allowance. It is the guideline for when the department expects a decision to be made upon entitlement to Employment Support Allowance (ESA) and is not a deadline for when a Work Capability Assessment (WCA) should be conducted by.
Due to this we have interpreted your question to mean how many ESA new claims the assessment suppliers currently hold that have been waiting for a WCA longer than 13 weeks.
As of 23rd February 2026, there are 6,500 new claims ESA cases that have been awaiting a WCA assessment for over 13 weeks.
Where an assessment takes longer than 13 weeks to complete, we will automatically award arrears from the 14th week of the claim, where appropriate, so that claimants do not lose out.
Please Note
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what is the average processing time for Employment Support Allowance and Personal Independence Payments.
Answered by Stephen Timms - Minister of State (Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government) (Equalities)
Information on average processing time for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) can be found on Stat-Xplore (https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/).
The requested data can be found in the ‘Clearance Times for Initial Claims’ dataset. Stat-Xplore will automatically select the latest completed assessment date. However, you can use the ‘Completed Assessment Date’ filter to produce completed assessment for a time period of your choice. You can expand ‘Measures’ and then ‘Clearance Time Breakdowns for Initial Claims’ to produce a breakdown of different types of clearance times. For average processing time covering claim registration date to DWP decision date, we suggest choosing the ‘Median of End-to-end Process (weekdays)’ measure. You can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest user.
Personal Independence Payment (PIP) clearance times are available as part of the PIP Official Statistics quarterly release. The latest release, with data available to October 2025, is available here (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-independence-payment-statistics-april-2013-to-october-2025). Table 1A in the underlying Excel tables of this release shows median average clearance times for normal rules new claims.
Asked by: Cat Eccles (Labour - Stourbridge)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if he will facilitate a vote on proposals for financial redress contained in the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman report on changes to women's State Pension age, published on 21 March 2024.
Answered by Torsten Bell - Parliamentary Secretary (HM Treasury)
The Government has made its decision on this case based on due process and careful consideration of the body of evidence. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State made a statement to the House of Commons and the detailed reasons for this decision have been placed in House library.