Funeral Payments
(asked on 30th October 2020) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what proportion of funeral expenses payments claims made in the first six months of 2020-21 were cleared in (a) 15 working days, (b) 15 working days plus 2 days and (c) 15 working days plus 5 days.
The proportion of Funeral Expenses Payments made in the first 6 months of 2020-21 (April 20 to September 20) which were cleared in (a) 15 working days was 46%.
In April to September 2020 there was a backlog of claims which had built up over a period of months due to the closure of the Funeral Expenses Payments main processing centre in Balham in December 2019, and activity prior to closure to support staff through redeployment options. In March 2020 processing was impacted by colleagues shielding with health conditions under COVID.
We have since improved our processing and productivity times with a combination of additional processing support on loan, deployment of IT kit to colleagues at home and the introduction of process easements. These have been instrumental in improving the service to customers and the department are working with HMT and Ministers to seek permanent process changes.
We now have an Actual Average Clearance Time of 11.8 days in September 2020 compared to 34.7 days in September 2019.
Extract taken from RPT data store on 3rd November 2020.
Source: Departmental MISP from Social Fund Funeral Payment System
Please note that the data supplied is derived from unpublished management information which was collected for internal Departmental use only and has not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. The data should therefore be treated with caution.