Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average waiting from application to a decision being made was for people with cancer who applied for (a) employment support allowance and (b) personal independence payments in the most recent year for which figures are available.

(a)

The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

(b)

Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claimants assessed under normal rules waited an average of 12 weeks from the point of registration to a decision being made for new claims and Disability Living Allowance (DLA) reassessments respectively.

For claimants assessed under Special Rules, the average was 6 and 5 working days for new claims and DLA reassessment claims respectively.

This data includes cases on which a decision was made between 1^st November 2016 and 31^st October 2017, the latest full year for which data is available.

Information on clearance times split by normal rules and special rules claims and new claim or DLA reassessment claims can be found in the data tables, “Personal Independence Payment: Official Statistics to October 2017” within tables 5A-B here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-independence-payment-april-2013-to-october-2017.

Source: PIP Computer System claimant records.

Notes to (b):

1. Figures have been rounded to the nearest whole number of weeks.

2. Data includes normal rules and special rules as recorded at the point of the DWP decision, in accordance with the measure. It is possible for claims to transition between normal/special rules and new claims/reassessments during the course of the claimant journey.

3. The figures are the average (median) clearance time of claims cleared between 1^st November 2016 and 31^st October 2017.

4. The median time is the middle value if you were to order all the times within the distribution from lowest value to highest value. The median is presented here instead of the mean because the mean can be unduly affected by outlying cases (e.g. cases were the person has been hard to reach due to being in prison, hospital, failed to attend the assessment on numerous occasions etc.)

5. The 'Registration to DWP decision (end to end)' clearance time is measured as the average time between the date of registration of the claim and the date of the DWP decision to either award or disallow the claim. It does not include claims that were withdrawn by the claimant or claims that were disallowed by DWP pre-referral to the Assessment Providers (e.g. for failure to meet basic eligibility criteria or failure to return the Part 2 form within the time limit).

6. A claimant may have multiple disabling conditions but only the primary condition is recorded on PIP systems.

7. Cancer defined here is any condition falling under “Neoplasms (C00 - D48)” in the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) summary codes, as recorded on the PIP Computer System.

8. This is unpublished data and it should be used with caution and it may be subject to future revision.

9. ICD summary codes are based on the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, published by the World Health Organisation. For reporting purposes, the disability conditions as recorded on the PIP IT system have been mapped to reflect as closely as possible the appropriate ICD10 code