Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many members of staff directly employed by her Department or contracted to work for her Department have been available to answer incoming calls to each benefit telephone line in each of the last 18 months for which data are available.

A large proportion of our staff are multi-skilled to answer the phone and process claims, and therefore we do not capture the data requested. The information we do hold is as follows:

Across all business groups each day we are likely to have 5,000 - 7,500 DWP staff and contractors actively on the phones delivering customer service. We retain the flexibility to adjust the number of colleagues working on some of the core functions to accommodate fluctuations in demand.