Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what is the average processing time for Employment Support Allowance and Personal Independence Payments.

Information on average processing time for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) can be found on Stat-Xplore (https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/).

The requested data can be found in the ‘Clearance Times for Initial Claims’ dataset. Stat-Xplore will automatically select the latest completed assessment date. However, you can use the ‘Completed Assessment Date’ filter to produce completed assessment for a time period of your choice. You can expand ‘Measures’ and then ‘Clearance Time Breakdowns for Initial Claims’ to produce a breakdown of different types of clearance times. For average processing time covering claim registration date to DWP decision date, we suggest choosing the ‘Median of End-to-end Process (weekdays)’ measure. You can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest user.

Personal Independence Payment (PIP) clearance times are available as part of the PIP Official Statistics quarterly release. The latest release, with data available to October 2025, is available here (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-independence-payment-statistics-april-2013-to-october-2025). Table 1A in the underlying Excel tables of this release shows median average clearance times for normal rules new claims.