Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether the providers for personal independence payment assessments have met their minimum contractual performance standards at any point since the beginning of their contracts.

PIP assessments are delivered nationally by two Providers, Capita and Independent Assessment Service (IAS). Both contracts include a number of service levels that both Providers are measured on. The service levels include the speed of clearance of cases, telephony calls and written enquiries, claimant satisfaction, quality of assessments, levels of rework and the speed of clearance for rework requests. Contractual targets and provider performance is formally reviewed monthly and actions put in place to improve on any under achievement.

Provider performance against each service level is formally reviewed each month with actions put in place to improve performance where performance has fallen below expectations. Since the beginning of the contract both Providers have consistently met/exceeded some of these each month and have never failed to meet all of them at any one point in time.