Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to create effective information sharing processes with the Department for Health and Social Care so that people with a permanent disability are no longer required to repeatedly prove the existence of their disability for receipt of disability benefit.

Personal Independence Payment, the main disability benefit, is based on an assessment of the customer’s needs and not whether they have a particular condition or not. Award reviews are a key feature of these benefits to ensure that the level of benefit matches the customer’s current needs.

The Health Transformation Programme is modernising health and disability benefit services to improve efficiency and customer experience. By improving how we gather evidence and by enabling the re-use of information, the new service will provide DWP agents and Healthcare Professionals with easier access to relevant information. This will reduce the burden on customers to provide complex information and reduce the need for them to provide it more than once. As part of this, we are exploring the potential for data sharing between the Department for Health and Social Care and DWP.