Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and which public telephone lines operated by his Department are higher rate lines; how many calls have been made to those lines in the last 12 months for which data is available; what average duration of calls was to each such line; and what amount of money was charged to all callers using each such line.

The Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) current policy is that calls to claim benefit should be free so it uses 0800 telephone numbers for these calls. The Department uses 0345 telephone numbers where its customers call for other reasons, and these are calls that typically take less time to resolve. If a customer raises concerns over the cost of a call, we will offer to call them back.

Calls to 0345 numbers cost no more than a standard geographic call, and count towards any free or inclusive minutes in a caller’s landline or mobile phone contract. Therefore we are unable to calculate the overall cost to callers to our 0345 service lines. The Department currently provides around four hundred 0345 telephone numbers.

During the period 01/11/2015-31/10/2016 DWP received over 34 million calls to its 0345 telephone numbers and, therefore, calculating the average call duration for each line would incur a disproportionate cost to the department.