Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average wait time for a phone call to be answered was to the universal credit helpline in (a) each of the last three months and (b) 2018.

Universal Credit is a 24 hour, seven days a week, digital service that allows claimants to manage their own data and account online at a time which is convenient for them. Via their account claimants can check their Universal Credit benefit payments, notify us of changes and record notes via an online journal facility. In addition, established claimants who call the Freephone Universal Credit helpline are connected directly to the person or team who are dealing with the case.

The average waiting time for a person calling the Universal Credit Full Service helpline in each of the last three months was:

The average waiting times for a person calling the Universal Credit Full Service helpline in 2018 was 5 minutes 52 seconds

Our Average Speed of Answer (ASA) measure is the average customer wait time from the point of entering a queue to connection to an agent. This excludes any time spent in pre-queue messaging and any wait time for calls ultimately abandoned by callers prior to answer.

Notes:

For calls connected to the owning Case Manager or team, the Average Speed of Answer was 1 minute 10 seconds in February 2019.

Data Source: BT - OPMIS and Historical Management Information (GI2 – HMI)

Outsourced partner data is included.

The data supplied is derived from unpublished management information, which was collected for internal Departmental use only and has not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. The data should therefore be treated with caution.