Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people have received support from the Personal Support Package announced in the Improving Lives: the future of work, health and disability White Paper.

The Personal Support Package (PSP) introduced in 2017 has helped fund a range of new initiatives and additional voluntary support for claimants with long term health conditions and disabilities.

This has included additional work coach time, mental health training for work coaches and more than doubling the number of Disability Employment Advisors to approximately 685 across England, Scotland and Wales in the 19/20 financial year. We aim to increase this number further during the 21/22 financial year.

It has also funded a number of small scale tests of new interventions designed to help understand what works to support claimants with long term health conditions and disabilities.

The PSP was not designed as an impact evaluation with a robust counterfactual and therefore we are unable to quantify the number of employment outcomes due to the PSP.

In the Improving Lives: the future of work, health and disability White Paper in 2017, we set a goal to see one million more disabled people in work by 2027. In the first three years of the goal, between 2017 and 2020, the number of disabled people in employment increased by 800,000.