Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average waiting time was for a case to be assigned a caseworker at the Independent Case Examiner in the latest period for which data is available.

The average time taken from complaint receipt to allocation to an investigator (based on cases in investigation on 31 January 2026) was 26.62 weeks. Despite increased demand levels, this is a significant improvement compared to January 2024, when the average wait time was 56.08 weeks.

Of those cases in investigation on 31 January 2026, the case which had waited the longest took 45.29 weeks to be allocated to an investigator from the date it was received at ICE.

The Independent Case Examiner’s office continually seeks to improve further.