Employment and Support Allowance

(asked on 17th November 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how his Department monitors waiting times for employment and support allowance claimants from their initial submission to the decision on whether they require a work capability assessment or will be placed in the support group.


Answered by
Sarah Newton Portrait
Sarah Newton
This question was answered on 22nd November 2017

From a client statistics point of view, DWP does not produce regular official statistics to monitor the time taken to decide whether an individual will have a face-to-face Work Capability Assessment (WCA), or a paper-based WCA that may lead to them being assigned to the Support Group without a face-to-face WCA. However, information on the volume of paper-based versus face-to-face WCAs between October 2008 and May 2015 was previously published and can be found here

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/esa-wca-by-decision-outcome-and-paper-based-assessment-oct-2008-to-mar-2015

DWP monitors performance and times in the HCP supplier place by measuring the time it takes from submission to the supplier, to recommendation. This is published data, and was 16 weeks in March 2017. DWP works closely with the supplier to improve the time taken.

We follow each element of the journey our customers experience, to inform the setting of appropriate and robust measures to monitor performance and waiting times. We continually review our processes in order to make them as efficient as possible, while maintaining a high quality service. Latest published statistics show that the median end to end clearance time has reduced by nearly half and now stands at 21 weeks, since reaching a peak of 38 weeks in August 2014.

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