Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps his Department is taking to expedite the resolution of complaints about decisions on benefits.

The Department is taking urgent action to reduce complaint backlogs and improve response times, with a clear focus on resolving issues as quickly as possible, including at the earliest point of contact where appropriate.

To support this, we have deployed additional resources to complaints and correspondence teams and prioritised activity to reduce outstanding volumes and strengthen performance monitoring to improve timeliness.

Where a complaint requires formal investigation, the Department’s service standard aims to provide a full response within 15 working days. More complex cases may take longer; however, the Department seeks to keep customers informed of progress and expected timescales.

In recent months, higher complaint volumes and increasingly complex cases have affected our response times. However, the Department is actively addressing these pressures and driving improvements in both timeliness and efficiency.