Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the National Disability Strategy, published in July 2021, whether her Department plans to make Access to Work a digital service.

Access to Work already offers an online route for individuals to apply for the grant; however currently, when it comes to claiming the grant, this is a paper-based process. We are currently working on a new service to enable claiming the grant as well; this will allow users to:

• Submit a new claim online for any type of award.
• View previously submitted claims.
• See how much of their grant they have left.
• Upload any evidence required as part of the same interaction.
• Have claims counter-signed by employers/suppliers online.

We aim to release this new service to a small number of users towards the end of the year and scale it up over the subsequent months. Aside from the online claims portal we also have plans to transform the complete end-to-end journey, including agent-facing systems, in order to improve usability, accessibility and efficiency across the whole service.