Chris Ruane – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chris Ruane on 2014-04-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether the contract for the introduction of personal independence payment included targets for the (a) proportion of assessments to be conducted face to face and (b) average length of time for each assessment.

Mike Penning

The Department has not set Personal Independence Payment assessment providers targets for the proportion of assessments to be conducted face to face and the average length of time for each assessment.

Personal Independence Payment started from April 2013 and although limited data has started to feed through we need to wait until the Department has quality assured meaningful figures for publication. The Department is working to guidelines set by the UK Statistics Authority to ensure we are able to publish statistics that meet high quality standards at the earliest opportunity. We intend to publish official statistics on PIP from spring 2014 in line with our publication strategy.