Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to improve the responsiveness of his Department's helplines.

We are continuing our efforts to improve our telephony services.

We have prioritised service reform through focusing extra resource to boost our performance.

Our call answering rate has increased to 86 per cent, the average answering time improving from eight minutes 34 seconds to seven minutes 22 seconds.

Our efforts have cleared up agent work queues and freed up capacity.