Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average waiting time is for a personal independence payment assessment for claimants in (a) the Torbay local authority area, (b) the South West and (c) England.

Personal independence payment (PIP) started from April 2013 and although limited data has started to feed through, we need to wait until the Department has quality assured, meaningful figures for publication. The Department is working to guidelines set by the UK Statistics Authority to ensure we are able to publish statistics that meet high quality standards at the earliest opportunity. We intend to publish official statistics on PIP from spring 2014 in line with our publication strategy:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/284330/pip_stats_release_strategy_feb14.pdf

An ad-hoc release of PIP information was published on 11 February 2014.