Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans he has to quality assure average times taken to make decisions on Access to Work assessments to National Statistics publication standard.

Access to Work Official Statistics are published annually and show the number of people who had Access to Work provision approved, number of people who received at least one Access to Work payment and Access to Work expenditure.

However, the publication does not include average time taken to make decisions as the data on this is not of sufficient quality to meet the standard requirement for an Official Statistics publication. There are currently no plans to quality assure the data to an Official Statistics publication standard.

DWP Official Statistics are produced and published in line with the 3 pillars of the Code of Practice for Statistics which are built around three main concepts, or pillars:

• Trustworthiness – is about having confidence in the people and organisations that publish statistics
• Quality – is about using data and methods that produce assured statistics
• Value – is about publishing statistics that support society’s needs for information