Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his Department took to reduce delays to personal independence payment (PIP) special rules claims; how long it took to resolve those delays; what steps he plans to take to reduce delays to PIP claims in the normal rules; and what estimate he has made of the time that will be taken to reduce those delays.

As soon as I became aware of the length of time it was taking some Special Rules cases to be processed I took action to reduce the timescales and introduced:

• A dedicated phone service with specially trained staff;

• An electronic transfer of information between a claimant's health professional, DWP and assessment providers.

• a trial of a new process to enable decisions to be made in-house with support from health care professionals

I am pleased to say that we are now seeing improvements to clearance times for claims from terminally ill people.

We have acknowledged that claims under our normal rules are currently taking too long. We are absolutely committed to improving performance – ours and that of the assessment providers. We are already seeing improvements to our processes and will continue to work to further reduce delays and backlogs.

By the Autumn, we expect no one to be waiting for an assessment for longer than 26 weeks and by the end of the year, we expect no one will be waiting longer than 16 weeks.