Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of classifying Access to Work expenditure as Annually Managed Expenditure to help ensure the scheme can respond to demand from new and sustained employment of disabled people.

Access to Work is an important programme that supports many people to start and stay in work. We are committed to ensuring it can respond to demand. That is why we announced in May that we would recruit and train 480 additional staff to speed up decisions and tackle the existing backlog by September 2027. That is a 72.5% increase to the existing 658 staff already working on Access to Work.

Access to Work is funded within DWP’s Departmental Expenditure Limit (DEL) to support effective management of expenditure. Annually Managed Expenditure (AME) is generally reserved for spending that is particularly volatile or cannot reasonably be managed within departmental DEL budgets.