Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time taken is to process new claims for employment and support allowance across the UK in the last 12 months.

The average processing time for an Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claim decision to be made is 8.1 working days. This data is based on the last 12 months from October 16 – September 17.

The data provided relates to claims processed in England, Scotland and Wales.

This is internal management information which does not form part of the official statistics outputs that are released by the Department in accordance with the UK Statistics Authority’s Code of Practice