Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to his Answer of 7 November 2022 to Question 80819, how many times his Department visited assessment centres to help audit the performance of providers in each year from 2015 to 2022.

The information requested is not available. We have a stringent performance management regime which includes Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) performance managers attending assessment centres; however, data for such visits is not retained.

Provider performance is measured across a range of service level agreements setting out the department's expectations for service delivery. These include quality, performance delivery targets and customer experience.

Independent Audit is one of the department’s tools to measure quality for performance management purposes. It is a self-contained team comprising of experienced health professional assessors who review a sample of assessment reports on a monthly basis to determine their quality. This helps ensure that assessment reports are fit for purpose, clinically justified, and provide sufficient information for the department to make a reasonable decision on entitlement to benefit. It is not an audit of the assessment provider as a whole.