Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what proposals his Department has to measure the time between a benefit claim being made and the claimant receiving their first payment.

The Department currently uses a suite of measures to track and manage the timeliness of processing for the range of benefits it administers. These measures are supported by business information systems and used to help manage and improve performance. Going forward, the Department plans to retain these measurements for working age benefits and is developing a processing time measure for Universal Credit along similar lines.