Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average waiting time for employment and support allowance tribunals in the Wallasey constituency was in each of the last four years.

The information requested is set out in the table below:

Clearance times may be dependent on several factors, such as hearing capacity at the venue closest to the appellant, or the local availability of Tribunal panel members. (Depending on the issue in dispute, some ESA hearings may require the presence of a doctor as well as a Tribunal judge). Other factors might include the availability of the appellant or their representative, or the provision of further evidence.

¹ Waiting time is interpreted as the average clearance time – time taken for appeal receipt in HMCTS to outcome. The data are based on cases cleared at Tribunal hearing (both oral and paper) and exclude those cleared without the need for a Tribunal hearing.

² Includes ESA and ESA (reassessments)

³ SSCS data are recorded by the office which dealt with the case, and if the case went to oral hearing, the location of the Tribunal hearing, normally the hearing venue nearest to the appellant’s home address. HMCTS cannot retrieve data based on constituencies, but can produce reports detailing the numbers of cases that were heard at a specific venue. For the Wallasey constituency, this is the Birkenhead venue.

⁴ Financial year April – March

⁵ Data are provisional

Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale case management system and are the best data available.