Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what steps his Department is taking to (a) strengthen (i) communication and (ii) digitisation and (b) reduce clearance times for War Pension and Armed Forces Compensation Scheme claims.
Defence Business Services is working hard to address feedback from Veterans to improve its communications around the War Pensions and Armed Forces Compensation Schemes. This includes the rolling out of customer journey maps that explain the end-to-end process for AFCS and WPS claims, which are readily available on gov.uk. at the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/learning-from-our-experiences-together
Further supporting products are in development with the next set being a series of short, how-to videos on making a claim that will be published on YouTube.
The ongoing £40 million Transformation Programme to digitise existing paper based processes and create a single customer portal for veterans aims to introduce automation, processing improvements and significantly reduce paper holdings. The first release of the new system is expected in late 2023. This will underpin the customer portal, which is being developed concurrently. This will enable claimants to provide and retrieve information electronically and allow them to securely access details of their entitlement and payments.
Clearance times for AFCS and WPS claims have generally been falling with average clearance time for AFCS at the end of May 2022 being 86 working days against a Key Performance Indicator of 90 working days. Average Clearance times for WPS claims had been falling each month since January, but rose to 132 working days in May, breaking the KPI of 127 working days for the first time since February after a high percentage of older cases were cleared.