Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of returning the assessment process for disability and long term sickness benefits in-house.

Delivery of functional assessments to support health and disability benefit processing has been outsourced by DWP since 1998. New five-year contracts for these services commenced in September 2024. In advance of the procurement of these contracts, a delivery model assessment was carried out in line with commercial best practice, which determined that outsourced delivery remained the best way of achieving value for money and service stability. A further delivery model assessment will be carried out in due course to inform decisions on future service delivery, beyond the current contracts.