Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to ensure the adequate performance of her Department's benefit processing systems as a result of increased demands during the covid-19 outbreak; and if she will publish data on (a) processing times and (b) payment timeliness in each benefit category since the start of the covid-19 outbreak.

DWP has redeployed over 8,000 staff on to critical frontline work, streamlined processes and increased the capacity of our IT systems to enable the Department to stand up to unprecedented levels of demand.

We do hold data on benefit processing times, and publish an annual view in the Annual Report and Accounts, which is published here: Annual Report and Accounts. We also publish data on key benefits such as Universal Credit payment timeliness, which is published here: Universal Credit 2013-2020 and on PIP processing times which is published here: PIP Statistics