Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many claims for personal independence payments submitted by individuals in Hemsworth in 2013 are still yet to be determined; and what steps his Department has taken to reduce delays in processing personal independence payment claims.

There are several reasons why a registered claim may not yet be determined. For example the claimant has not yet returned their additional information form or is awaiting their assessment date, DWP have not yet made a decision on their claim or the claimant has advised that they wish to withdraw their claim. At the end of December 2013 around 500 people in Hemsworth had registered a New Claim for PIP and around 100 decisions had been made.

I also refer the hon. Member to the written answer the previous Minister for Disabled People, the Rt. Hon. Member for Hemel Hempstead, Mike Penning, gave the Hon. Member for Halton (Derek Twigg), on 7 July 2014, Official Report, column 110W.

Derek Twigg: 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. [203699]

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

- a dedicated phone service.

- 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 further to 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.