Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the Answer of 5 February 2025 to Question HL4289 on Pension Credit and with reference to the oral contribution of the Economic Secretary to the Treasury of 3 December 2024, Official Report, column 141, what steps she is taking to improve the processing of pension credit claims.

As referenced in previous responses HL4289 and Question 5385, DWP works to a planned timescale of 50 working days to clear Pension Credit claims.

The funding was the first stage followed by securing staffing resource, training those people and enabling learning consolidation to process Pension Credit claims. As a result the Department has deployed over 500 additional people to ensure it has the capacity to assess all claims in reasonable timescales.

Since this action, the latest Average Actual Clearance Time is now down to 56 working days in week commencing 3 February 2025 after a peak of 87 working days week commencing 9 December 2024. However, Pension Credit is a complex benefit, and some claims require additional investigation or information from the customer, which can result in longer processing times.

Statistics on Pension Credit application volumes were published on 28 November 2024. This includes numbers of applications that were received, awarded and not awarded, up to 17 November 2024.Pension Credit applications and awards: November 2024 - GOV.UK The latest publication is due on 27th February 2025 and will cover data up to week commencing 17^th February 2025.

Please note, the Average Actual Clearance Time figures shown is unpublished management information, collected and intended for internal departmental use and has not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. It is rounded to the nearest working day and based on the week the claim was cleared, rather than the week the claim was made.