Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the Work and Pensions Committee report, entitled Uses of Health and Disability Benefits, published 3 February 2022, what steps her Department is taking to improve information sharing between medical professionals and Job Centre Plus to mitigate the need for claimants to repeat details of their health conditions.

We remain committed to making changes to improve the current assessment processes. We are exploring how we support claimants to provide the correct evidence earlier in the process and to see if current processes can be improved to give the claimant a more positive experience.

The Department is currently considering responses to Shaping Future Support: the Health and Disability Green Paper, which will feed into a White Paper on this subject later this year.

Over the longer term, the Health Transformation Programme is developing the Health Assessment Service (HAS), which aims to provide an improved service, such as more efficient use of the information used to make decisions. This includes exploring data sharing to secure better medical evidence to increase the speed and quality of decision-making.