Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time is for her Department to respond to Mandatory Reconsideration requests.

The median mandatory reconsideration (MR) clearance times have been provided for Universal Credit (UC), Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and Employment Support Allowance (ESA) Work Capability Assessment (WCA) benefit decisions. To provide information across all other DWP administered benefits would incur disproportionate cost.

Median clearance times have been provided as the mean can be unduly affected by outlying cases.

Universal Credit

The median clearance time for UC MRs cleared in the 2024/25 financial year was 33 calendar days.

Notes:

1. Each UC claim can have more than one reconsideration registered against it. The above includes all MR decisions (excluding withdrawn and cancelled).
2. The UC MR clearance times are based on the clearance times from the date the MR was registered to the date the MR was cleared.
3. This data on UC MR clearance times is unpublished data. It should be used with caution and it may be subject to future revision.

1. Definition of median: The median time is the middle value if you were to order all the times within the distribution from lowest value to highest value.

Personal Independence Payment

PIP MR clearance times are published at Personal Independence Payment statistics - GOV.UK. They can be found by accessing the latest release and opening the excel tables. Tables 4A – 4Biii contain information on PIP MR clearance times.

Employment Support Allowance

ESA WCA MR clearance times are available on Stat-Xplore: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/. They can be found by going through “ESA Work Capability Assessments”, “Mandatory Reconsideration – Clearances” “Table 4 – Median Clearance Times by Date of Decision”.