Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people received funding through an Access to Work grant to purchase hearing aids in the last 12 months.

Although the Department holds information on the specific types of support for which Access to Work payments are made, data which would allow payments for ‘hearing aids’ to be identified is not readily available. The data is recorded as descriptive free-text information and extracting it would require manual review of individual records, incurring disproportionate cost.

Statistics on the number of people receiving Access to Work payments by readily available element and support worker categories are published annually in Table PAY02 of the Access to Work official statistics: Access to Work statistics: April 2007 to March 2025 - GOV.UK.