Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what progress his Department has made on enabling new benefit claimants to submit their supporting documents electronically via a secure online portal.
The Universal Credit Programme has already implemented mechanisms for uploading documents electronically to the Full Service online system, such as CVs. Work is ongoing to allow other documents to be uploaded, whilst ensuring that the security and data protection responsibilities are adhered to. We are building improvements to the UC system all the time, in an agile way, safely and securely, to minimise any disruption to claimants. We expect enhancements to the upload facility to be available in 2017.