Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the (a) mean and (b) median average waiting time was between application for Access to Work and an initial assessment, in each of the past two years, broken down by region.

Access to Work does not record the information requested in a way that allows data to be extracted by region. Providing this would require manual examination of individual case records and would therefore incur disproportionate cost.

Access to Work applications are managed through a national queue and processed in chronological order, meaning that a customer’s region does not determine waiting time.