Social Security Benefits: Medical Examinations
(asked on 30th June 2021) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time taken is to send a copy of the assessor's report and initial decision to claimants following an assessment for (a) employment support allowance, (b) universal credit and (c) personal independence payment.
We don’t routinely send a copy of the AP report to a customer, instead we send a decision letter advising whether the customer will receive PIP, which components and at which rate. According to published Official Statistics for PIP, the time between the AP reporting to DWP and the DWP decision can vary during the year due to demand, but currently it takes on average 2 weeks for a new claims customer to receive a decision after assessment and on average 3 weeks for a re-assessment decision (median values in April 2021). There may be a delay between the assessment being carried out and the AP reporting to DWP, but the actual assessment date is not collected on DWP analytical data sets.
If a customer does wish to receive a copy of their AP report then they can do so by contacting the DWP and requesting this.
Data on the average time between return of the Assessment Provider’s recommendation to DWP and the date of the DWP decision is published in table 2A (column F) of the following published statistical tables:
Statistics on Employment and Support Allowance Work Capability Assessments outcomes are published quarterly here:
Statistics on Work Capability Assessments for Universal Credit are currently under development for future publication and have not previously been published as official statistics. We will issue them in due course as an official statistics release in accordance with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. Whilst the initial statistics will not have median clearance times these will be developed for publication in due course.