Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people were waiting for a decision on their Access to Work application for each of the last 12 months.

Access to Work has had a significant increase in applications over the last year and have recruited new staff to meet the increased demand and reduce the time it takes to make decisions. Customers making new applications where they are starting work within the next 4 weeks, or have a grant coming to an end that requires renewal, are prioritised to ensure customers are able to enter and remain in the labour market. We are also transforming the Access to Work service through increased digitalisation, that will make the service more efficient, will make the application process easier, and improve the time taken from application through to decision.

The management information presented here has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics, but is provided in the interests of transparency.