Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to increase the speed of processing covid-19 vaccine damage payments; and if his Department will publish its target timeframes for the processing these claims.

The Department continues to work with the NHS Business Services Authority to increase the speed of processing all claims to the Vaccine Damage Payment Scheme (VDPS). We have increased administrative and medical assessment capacity and the NHS Business Services Authority has also implemented Subject Access Requests to encourage the timely return of medical records required to carry out medical assessments.

The average claim takes approximately six months to investigate and process from the date a claimant’s medical records are requested. There are no target timeframes as this can vary from case to case, depending on how quickly medical records are received.