I have a client who applied for Child Benefit for his new child in mid December. He was told at this point that they would make a decision in 8 weeks. He phoned recently and has now been told it will be 16 weeks. The child was born in France, so there may be good reasons for the delay, however ...

The targets listed on the HMRC website say that they aim to process about 70% of claims within 5 days. Sadly they don't publsih a target for how quickly the other 30% of cases should be processed. This is a lot shorter than 16 weeks. What is the longest amount of time that it's reasonable to wait for such a decision, and is there any way they can be persuaded to speed things up a bit? Thanks.