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 (a) reduce waiting times on her Department's helplines and (b) prevent calls from being cut off after long waiting periods.

(a) Reduce waiting times on Department's helplines

DWP reviews forecasted telephony demand and plans resourcing accordingly to keep wait times down. Wait time performance is frequently reviewed and where DWP’s telephony is delivered by an outsourced provider we use the Key Performance Indicator of percentage of calls answered. All DWP customer telephone lines are Freephone numbers.

The Department is investing in a new capability that aims to better route customers to the right offer at the right time. This will help to reduce waiting times by supporting customers to utilise digital alternatives where appropriate and enables telephony agents to speak to our customers that really need to speak to someone. If a customer indicates they may be at risk of physical or mental harm e.g. suicide, terminal illness, homelessness, and clinical mental health, they will be routed to a telephony agent in as short a journey as possible.

The Department offers a wide range of reasonable adjustments for customers, including production of communications in a range of alternative formats. We are currently testing further digital solutions for British Sign Language interpreter connectivity within our jobcentre environment.

(b) Prevent calls from being cut off after long waiting periods

Regarding disconnections, while mobile phone contracts may disconnect after a certain time period, we do not intentionally cut off customers after long wait times. We do not have anything configured in our Contact Centre platform to automatically cut customers off after any time threshold, or period of waiting.

We do, however, inform customers when they are in a queue and we know their call won't be answered before the line closes, and request that they call back.