Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time taken is to process new state pension claims.
For the period August 2020 to August 2021, the average processing time for complex claims was 39 days.
Supporting Information
To Note: This is the latest data available.
We introduced the Get Your State Pension online system in 2018. Around 70-80% of State Pension claims are made via Get Your State Pension and of those 50-60% are cleared the same day, as they can be automatically awarded and put into payment to the customer without any agent intervention. Only the most complex cases are now considered when calculating the average clearance time for a State Pension claim, which means the ‘average’ that we are able to provide is heavily inflated.