Department for Work and Pensions: Complaints

(asked on 4th June 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of the communication to customers of her Department's complaints processes.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 11th June 2021

The Departments complaints process which considers formal complaints about our service can be found on Gov.uk (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/complaints-about-the-department-for-work-and-pensions)

As part of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to make changes to our complaints model to allow staff to be deployed to support processing claims and payments. From 9 July 2020, the Department triage complaints to prioritise vulnerable claimants who may be at risk, and those with benefit payment issues for example.

We continue to look into all complaints as quickly as we can and, as part of the triage process, we write or call those customers where there may be a delay in answering their complaint.

We are reviewing the approach we have taken throughout the pandemic as part of developing the future complaints operating model.

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