<p>DLA is a self assessed benefit and does not have a formal assessment process as PIP does and only a proportion of DLA new claims are referred for a medical examination. The average clearance time for a new DLA claim under normal rules is 31.6 days.</p><p>PIP introduced an assessment undertaken by assessment providers 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 personal independence payment from spring 2014.</p><p>In order to manage the gap between personal independence payment go-live and the first release of Official Statistics in spring 2014, we are assessing whether we can release some management information. If the quality assurance of this management information shows that it is sufficiently robust and reliable then we aim to publish it via an ad-hoc statistical release.</p>