Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average waiting time is from a claimant making an application to receiving a decision on their work capability assessment for the most recent period available.

The Department publishes Employment Support Allowance (ESA) Work Capability Assessment (WCA) statistics on gov.uk which can be found here. The median ESA WCA customer journey processing times for initial claims can be found in section 10 of the latest statistical bulletin. The statistics include the average time taken for the full end-to-end process.

More details can also be found in Table 1 of the ‘Clearance Times for Initial Claims’ dataset in the ESA Work Capability Assessments section of Stat-Xplore. Guidance for users is available here.

The information for Universal Credit WCA processing times is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.