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 reduce call waiting times on the PIP 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. Where we have been seeing higher call volumes, we have been deploying more of our available resource onto telephony and at times this has been up to 100% of that resource, whilst also balancing the need to complete necessary processing work. As a result, over the last month we have seen improvements with call wait times dropping by c30%.