Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent estimate she has made of waiting times for tribunal hearings for (a) personal independent payment, (b) employment and support allowance, (c) income support, (d) jobseeker's allowance and (e) tax credits in the North West.

Information about the outcomes, and waiting times, for appeals in the First-tier Tribunal (Social Security and Child Support) (SSCS) are published at:

www.gov.uk/government/collections/tribunals-statistics

SSCS appeals are listed into the hearing venue nearest to the appellant’s home address. The published data (which can be viewed at the link above) provide information about the outcomes and waiting times for (i) Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and (ii) Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) appeals for hearing venues covering (a) Wallasey (b) Wirral (c) Merseyside and (d) the North West for the period July – September 2019, the latest period for which data are available.

The tables below contain the proportion of successful appeals for (iii) Income Support (IS), (iv) Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) and (v) Tax Credits (TC) for Wallasey and Wirral, Merseyside and the North West; and the average time taken to administer those appeals in the North West for the same period.

¹ Proportion of decisions in favour, based on the number of appeals found in favour of the appellant as a % of the cases cleared at tribunal hearing

² TC includes Working Family Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, and Working Tax Credit.

³ SSCS appeals for Wallasey and Wirral constituents are heard in the Birkenhead venue but this venue also hears appeals from other constituencies. It is not possible to provide constituency-specific data.

~ Equates to a value of five or fewer appeals received

⁴ Merseyside includes the SSCS venues Birkenhead, Liverpool and St Helens

⁵ North West includes the SSCS venues Barrow, Birkenhead, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Burnley, Carlisle, Chester, Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester, Preston, Rochdale, St Helens, Stockport, Wigan, Workington

Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale case management system and are the best data that are available.

Waiting times are calculated from receipt of an appeal to its final disposal. An appeal is not necessarily disposed of at its first hearing. The final disposal decision on the appeal may be reached after an earlier hearing had been adjourned (which may be directed by the judge for a variety of reasons, such as to seek further evidence), or after an earlier hearing date had been postponed (again, for a variety of reasons, often at the request of the appellant). An appeal may also have been decided at an earlier date by the First-tier Tribunal, only for the case to have gone on to the Upper Tribunal, to be returned once again to the First-tier, for its final disposal.