Work Capability Assessment Timescales

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2026 Westminster Hall

[Wendy Chamberlain (North East Fife) (LD)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Work Capability Assessment timescales.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Western. I welcome the Minister to his place to discuss this important issue. I am grateful to him and his office for their recent engagement with my office on this issue. I am sure he has gathered from our recent correspondence that the focus of my remarks today will not be about the timescales for first-time applications for work capability assessments, but those for people who have requested a new assessment or a reassessment.

There are lots of reasons why someone might need a new assessment. No health condition follows a set path. Although we hope that someone’s health might stay stable or improve, often that is not the way it works out. I do not know how many applicants are waiting for brand-new work capability assessments, but I know that the Minister wrote to me last month to tell me there was a backlog of 35,000 reassessments waiting to be seen. That is a lot of people struggling or unable to work and arguably not getting the support that they need. In response to recent parliamentary questions, I was told that the Department has no breakdown on that backlog, which I find quite concerning. I hope the Minister will take that away. I hope he will tell me in his remarks all the ways they are trying to fix the backlog, but I put it to him that we cannot add capacity if we do not know where to target, so we need a breakdown of that backlog.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady for securing this debate. To add my support from a personal point of view, in my office I have a lady who looks after nothing else but benefits. She has told me that there are major issues regarding reassessment waiting times for those who are up for review. The official internal figures for Northern Ireland show that the mean average wait was around 290 working days—58 weeks—and some people are waiting as long as seven to eight years. I have to say, in all honesty, those are extremes, but it does underline the very issue that the hon. Lady is talking about. Does she agree that the one way to solve this problem is more staff? They must be hired to deal with the backlog, as applicants are feeling stressed and anxious that their financial stability might change.

[Wendy Chamberlain]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for his intervention. I will go on to talk about my own caseworkers’ experience. It is right that we recognise that they are the people dealing with the brunt of this. I am going to outline some of the challenges and what I hope the Minister might tell us he is doing to address those.

There are different assessment providers across the UK. Maximus serves my constituency of North East Fife, whereas other assessment contracts sit with Capita, Serco and Ingeus. I would be grateful for more staffing near North East Fife, but the Department for Work and Pensions seems to have no knowledge of whether the problems are greater in Scotland or Skegness. When I talk about delays, I am not talking about a service standard being missed by a few weeks or even a few months. Like the hon. Member for Strangford, I have cases where wait times are 18 months or more.

I want to talk about the impact of such delays on people on the waiting list. I hope the Minister and you, Mr Western, will understand that for the security and wellbeing of my constituents, I am not going to share individual details. There are common denominators across the cases that can paint a picture but, as most MPs know, the people we support are often vulnerable and have suffered considerably in their lifetimes, and it is important that we safeguard their welfare.

The common denominators are backgrounds of serious abuse, sometimes back to childhood—abuse that is hard to imagine and has a serious impact on adult mental health and wellbeing; severe anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder; physical symptoms and pain, sometimes linked to external factors like car accidents and other times linked to past and ongoing trauma. I also have at least one case waiting for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In general, there is extreme vulnerability across the board.

Summer 2024 seems like a long time ago. There were 243 happy and optimistic newly elected Labour MPs filling the Palace, the Paris Olympics were just kicking off, London was full of Swifties for the Eras tour, and my constituents were taking the difficult decision that their health struggles were too much to manage to hold down a job and starting the process of requesting support from the DWP. That illustrates how long they have been waiting. These extended waits are absolutely debilitating. The not knowing is incredibly difficult. I think all MPs know from experience that these people worry to the point of obsessive hyper-fixation that their existing benefits will be taken away. That is added to by the stigma people feel for not being able to support themselves or their children, relying on the food bank and not being able to meet their basic needs for energy or clothes, and the anxiety of being judged by those around them.

The hon. Member for Strangford mentioned his caseworkers. I spoke with my caseworkers in the run-up to this debate. I want to take a moment to appreciate our caseworkers, because we need to remember that they are not trained as benefit advisers, counsellors or welfare specialists, but they are the ones picking up the phones day in, day out, trying to unpick what has gone wrong and providing back-up to constituents who find themselves in crisis with nowhere else to go. That is true of all MPs’ offices.