Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the number of staff hours that were used by her Department to issue ESA65B letters to GPs in 2018.

The ESA65B letter is sent to GPs when an Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) claimant has been found fit for work following a Work Capability Assessment (WCA), to inform them of the outcome of the WCA and advise them that fit notes are no longer required for ESA purposes.

The ESA65B is computer generated and the action of sending it out is a ‘business as usual’ process. As a result, we do not hold the information required to calculate the number of staff used to issue this type of letter.

Furthermore, due to the volumes of different letters issued by the Department to claimants and third parties, we are unable to provide a figure for how many ESA65B letters were sent to GPs in 2018.