Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his Department is taking to resolve the faults with the Child Support Agency's automated telephone system.

During the 2016/2017 operating year 97.4% of calls were answered within 60 seconds. During this period, there have been two issues with the Child Support Agency telephone system which impacted client calls. These were (1) Monday 07 November 2016 from 16:30 to 20:00 with some client calls cut off; and (2) Monday 20 February 2017 from around 11:00 to 19:30 an issue with the IT system meant we needed to deploy a telephone call plan requesting clients call back the following day.

These faults were resolved quickly minimising impacts on our clients