Disability Living Allowance (Hansard, 3 May 1994)

§ Mr. Ancram

Responsibility for the subject in question has been delegated to the Social Security Agency under its chief executive, Mr. Alec Wylie. I have asked him to arrange for a reply to be given.

Letter from A. Wylie to Mr. Eddie McCrady, dated 28 April 1994: I have been asked to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question on the average and range of times taken to process a review case for Disability Living Allowance. I am sorry that information on the processing of Disability Living Allowance review cases is not held in the format that you have requested. The procedure is that each year I set targets for the time taken to clear review cases. For the 1993–94 year these were: 60% of cases to be cleared in 55 days and 80% to be cleared in 75 days. Unfortunately the Agency has been unable to meet these targets. By the end of the 1993–94 year 22% of cases had been cleared within 55 days and 32% within 75 days. The reason for the failure to achieve the targets is that the number of requests for review far exceeded expectations and, by September 1993, there was a backlog of about 8,000 cases awaiting decision. Extra staff were recruited to deal with this and with the use of extensive overtime most of the outstanding cases were cleared by February 1994. I hope you find this information helpful.