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 moving adult claimants on Disability Living Allowance to Personal Independence Payment.

We are committed to ensuring people can access financial support through Personal Independence Payment (PIP) in a timely manner.

We originally introduced a pause for most Disability Living Allowance (DLA) to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) reassessment activity as part of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic on 23 March 2020; the exception being for DLA claimants who reported a change in needs.

We are currently experiencing unprecedented levels of new claims to PIP. Reducing customer journey times for PIP claimants is a priority for the department and we are working constantly to make improvements to our service.

To ensure we have the capacity in place to prioritise new claims and changes in circumstances, we are continuing to pause activity to randomly invite eligible adult DLA claimants to claim PIP. However, we are still continuing to invite DLA claimants to make a claim if they fall into one of the following categories:

• on reaching age 16;
• are nearing the end of their DLA award; or
• report a change of circumstances.

Additionally, current DLA claimants who wish to move to claim PIP can do so. DLA claimants who claim PIP in these circumstances continue to receive their DLA while their PIP claim is being assessed.

This action, combined with improvements we have made to the claimant journey, has meant we are seeing a gradual improvement in new claim clearance times and the latest statistics show that the average end-to-end journey has steadily reduced from 26 weeks in August 2021 to 18 weeks at the end of July 2022.