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 improve waiting times for the Personal Independence Payment helpline.

Telephony is our customers’ primary channel to contact us. We continually assess the number of calls we are receiving and the associated waiting times, deploying resources accordingly to support service levels wherever this is possible. However, due to recent media articles regarding PIP, we have been receiving high volumes of calls. As a result, we have been deploying, where practical (whilst also balancing the need to complete necessary processing work) 100% dedicated telephony specific resource to the Personal Independent Payment telephony lines which will give extra support with the increase in both volume of traffic and waiting times.