Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 20 June 2019 to Question 265489 on Personal Independence Payment, for what reason recent correspondence on casework enquiries to hon. Members states that waiting times for personal independence payments mandatory reconsiderations are 10 to 12 weeks in County Durham and table 7D, entitled MR clearance time (median calendar days), normal rules, by year of clearance, region and local authority of her Department's quarterly statistical publication, Personal Independence Payment: April 2013 to April 2019 states that such waiting times are 39 median calendar days.

The figures published in table 7D of the publication “Personal Independence Payment: April 2013 to April 2019” are based on median calendar days that a Mandatory Reconsideration (MR) is cleared in each Financial Year. Clearance times can vary over time, and the median time is the middle value if all the times were ordered from lowest value to highest value.

Table 7C of the same publication shows median clearance times by month for Great Britain as a whole, with April 2019 being the latest month official statistics have been published for.

There is no legislative clearance target for a mandatory reconsideration. However, from late May 2019 claimants have been advised that, as a guide, they should hear from the Department within 10 weeks.