Chris Stephens – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chris Stephens on 2016-09-05.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate his Department has made of the average length of time a person making an initial inquiry claiming social security benefit spent on the telephone in the last 12 months.

Caroline Nokes

The DWP’s benefit claim lines handle calls both enquiring about claiming benefit and making a claim to benefit. The average length of calls to these lines for the period 1 September 2015 to 31 August 2016 was 00:12:56. For some benefits, systems require that the data collected includes time spent updating records after the conversation has ended.

Data sources: Operational Management Information System (OPMIS) and data supplied by outsource partners.

Please note this information is derived from the Department’s management information designed solely for the purpose of helping the Department to manage its business. As such, it has not been subjected to the rigorous quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics. As DWP holds the information internally, we have released it. However, it is possible information held by DWP may change due to operational reasons and we recommend that caution be applied when using it.