Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Mike Penning

Monday 24th February 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

As we bed down the new benefit and the new policies, there will be issues within the Department, issues with the contractors and issues not only with people giving advice to claimants, but with claimants themselves. I am not blaming claimants. What we are saying is that there are delays in the forms coming back and delays because they are not filled in correctly. That is something that we need to work on. We need to be more informative about how those forms are to be filled in, and we are working on that. On the terminal illness side, we are working with Macmillan so that it works closely with those claimants.

[Lilian Greenwood (Nottingham South) (Lab)]

My constituent Pamela Brown applied for her personal independence payment in July last year, but the persistent failures by Capita meant that she faced a delay of more than three months just to get an assessment. She had numerous appointments that were cancelled and Capita did not even tell her. It was only after she put in numerous formal complaints that Capita addressed the matter. Pamela’s case is clearly far from unique, so can the Minister say a little more about what he is doing to sort out the mess at Capita’s end?