Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of waiting times to speak to the Disability Service Centre.

Telephony is our customers’ primary channel to contact us. We continually assess the number of calls we are receiving and the associated waiting times, deploying resources accordingly to support service levels wherever this is possible.

However, due to recent higher volumes of calls than forecast, from the 24th of April and throughout May, we are deploying dedicated telephony specific resource to the Personal Independent Payment telephony lines which will give better support when dealing with sudden increases in traffic.