Child Maintenance Service: Members

(asked on 8th February 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment her Department has made of the average response time to hon Members' offices regarding Child Maintenance Support enquiries; and if she will make a statement.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 11th February 2021

The Department does not measure timings as described in the question and to determine this request, we would need to examine each individual case, which the Department considers to be cost prohibitive to provide.

The Department has a 15 working day target for MP to Director General Correspondence and a 20 working day target for Private Office correspondence. These timescales are in line with Cabinet Office directives.

As part of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department had to make changes to its complaints and MP correspondence model to allow staff to be deployed to support processing benefit claims and payments. From 9 July 2020, the Department now triage complaints and MP Correspondence giving priority to vulnerable claimants who may be at risk, and those with benefit payment issues.

We continue to look into all complaints and MP correspondence as quickly as we can and, as part of the triage process used to determine priority, we write or call those customers and MPs where there may be a delay in answering their complaint or enquiry.

We are reviewing the effectiveness of the approach we have taken throughout the pandemic as part of an ongoing review into complaints and MP correspondence handling.

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