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9 April, 2020 Open access

‘Exceptional demand’ resulted in more than 2 million telephone calls being made to the DWP on a single day last week

Department is 'working around the clock' as a result of the challenging circumstances presented by the coronavirus outbreak, says Permanent Secretary

'Exceptional demand' resulted in more than 2 million telephone calls being made to the DWP on a single day last week, the DWP's Permanent Secretary Peter Schofield has said.

In a letter to the chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee Stephen Timms, the Permanent Secretary says that the Department is 'working around the clock' as a result of the challenging circumstances presented by the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. With 10,000 staff being redeployed from other parts of the DWP and additional staff being recruited to help with the processing of claims, Mr Schofield says that while in a 'normal' week the Department would expect to receive around 55,000 claims for universal credit, since 16 March 2020 more than one million claims have been received.

Acknowledging that call volumes are currently extremely high, Mr Schofield says that in order to protect services across the national telephony network, including services such as NHS 111, network providers have introduced measures to control the number of calls 'onto' the universal credit line. Between 23 and 27 March 2020, Mr Schofield says that approximately 1.8 million calls were made to the universal credit helpline, and on 30 and 31 March it received 2.2 million and 1.8 million calls respectively.

However, the Department has introduced new processes to ease pressure on waiting times for identity verification over the phone, Mr Schofield says, including efforts to pro-actively contact new claimants via an outbound call to conduct initial verification following their online claim, where people can't get through on the phone. (Mr Schofield also says that the wait time for registration for gov.uk Verify is now less than five minutes.)

NB - elsewhere in the letter, the Permanent Secretary confirms that -

For more information, see the DWP Permanent Secretary's letter to the chair of the Work and Pensions Select Committee (3 April 2020).

Stop press (9 April 2020) - the DWP has announced that no new claimants for universal credit need to phone the helpline, and that instead it will proactively call claimants if any information needs to be checked.