Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what was the (1) average, (2) longest, and (3) shortest, clearance time for a (a) mandatory reconsideration, and (b) successful appeal outcome to be implemented, in relation to Employment and Support Allowance in each of the last 13 months.

Table 1 below shows the Median, Lower Quartile and Upper Quartile of the clearance time of Mandatory Reconsideration (MR) for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). This data covers ESA MRs from Work Capability Assessments (WCA) for each month from April 2019 – April 2020, the most recent 13 months for which data is available.

Table 1: Clearance time of MR decisions for ESA Work Capability Assessments, in calendar days, by month of decision, April 2019 to April 2020: Great Britain

Please note that information about the extremes of a distribution (e.g. the maximum clearance time) risks being disclosive. We would not release this information publicly. Therefore, we have presented information on the lower quartile, median and upper quartile of clearance times.

The information requested on the clearance times for a successful appeal outcome to be implemented is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

Data Source: Decision Maker and Appeals Case Recorder Computer System claimant records

Notes

• The average clearance time is derived by calculating the median number of days taken from the date when the Benefit Centre has determined that the Mandatory Reconsideration is a true MR, to the date the decision is cleared by the decision maker in the Dispute Resolution Team.
• The table shows the median clearance time of mandatory reconsiderations cleared within a given calendar month. The median number of days is the middle value if you were to order all the times within the distribution from lowest value to highest value. The median is presented as the average instead of the mean because the mean can be unduly affected by outlying cases.
• Definition of Quartiles: The lower quartile is the value for which 25 per cent of all clearance times fall below if you were to order the distribution from lowest value to highest value. The upper quartile is the value for which 75 per cent of all clearance times fall below if you were to order the distribution from lowest value to highest value.
• MR refers to Mandatory Reconsideration - the formal review process requested by the customer. MR incorporates all MRs raised in the WCA process and also includes Reconsiderations raised following the WCA.
• Only claims with a cleared MR decision are included.
• There may be an element of retrospection in the figures for the latest month; they may change when more up to date information is included.
• MR median clearance times are published here: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/