Access to Work Programme: Finance

(asked on 21st March 2023) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 20 March 2023 to Question 166319 on Access to Work Programme: Finance, when the earliest outstanding access to work funding application which has not been placed on hold at the request of the customer was received by his Department.


Answered by
Tom Pursglove Portrait
Tom Pursglove
Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
This question was answered on 24th March 2023

In addition to the response to question 166319 on 20th March, we have also looked at the second and third oldest application, and both are also awaiting information from the customer, employer, and/or outcome of workplace assessment, for the case manager to proceed with the application.

We currently have 7282 applications with case managers. It would be considerably resource intensive to look through all of these to identify the oldest that is not awaiting information from an external source. I can confirm that we do conduct internal checks on the older cases to ensure they are not unnecessarily delayed and that the average clearance time in February for all applications was 58 working days, with 42% of applications having a decision in 25 days.

Please note that the data supplied is derived from unpublished management information, which was collected for internal departmental use only, and have not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. They should therefore be treated with caution.

Reticulating Splines