Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many complaints have been made to Capita on the disability benefit assessment process since 2010; and how many of those complaints were upheld by (a) Capita (b) DWP and (c) the Ombudsman.

Capita commenced their delivery of the Personal Independent Payment contract in June 2013. Since the beginning of their contract Capita has received 15,666 complaints of which 9,834 were upheld by Capita. The number of upheld complaints equates to 1.03% of the number of referrals to Capita during the same period.

Capita’s complaint process signposts complainants to the Independent Case Examiner (ICE) in the event that they are dissatisfied with the providers final response to their complaint. The Independent Case Examiner (ICE) is an independent complaints review service which investigates complaints about the Department for Work and Pensions and its providers. Data from ICE can only be provided from 2015 as records are only kept for the last three years. Over this three year period there were 17 complaints escalated to ICE for the Capita PIP contract of which six were partially upheld and one was fully upheld. The remaining 10 were not upheld.

DWP does not hold information about the number of complaints the Ombudsman received about Capita for 2010 to 2012. For the reporting years 2013 to 2017 the Ombudsman received eight enquiries about Capita Business Services Ltd. However we are unable to identify if these are in relation to the PIP Capita contract specifically. None of the eight enquiries progressed to an investigation.