Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will provide details of the (a) three trigger point targets in the universal credit system and (b) the proportion of the working day that universal credit service centre employees are expected to spend on each trigger point.

Our case managers, work coaches and decision makers work together to support claimants. Our Universal Credit Case Management approach has been designed to enable case managers to prioritise their workload by using their dashboard and triggers, which contain categories of cases requiring action selecting the most urgent cases to work on first, therefore they are not performance targets. The categories are those requiring payment; action to prevent a payment from being blocked; responses to claimant contact; and further action to manage a claim. The aim is to clear any pending actions once a case is taken up, therefore there is no expectation on how long a case manager should spend on each section of their dashboard.