New Access to Work applicants being told they could have to wait 37 weeks for decision, MPs hear

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is now telling disabled people who need support through the Access to Work scheme that it could take 37 weeks to make a decision on their application, senior civil servants have told MPs.

They were giving evidence to the Commons public accounts committee after a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) found last month that Access to Work (AtW) was plagued by significant backlogs and delays, and inefficient systems.

The report found rising demand for the disability employment programme had led to increased spending and rising complaints about delays in processing applications.

The NAO report found that, in November 2025, the average time taken was 109 days, compared with DWP’s target of 25 days.

But Helga Swidenbank, DWP’s director of accessibility, disability and disputes, told the committee that calls to its Access to Work helpline are met with a voice recording that tells them how long it is likely to take for a decision to be made, and, currently, “we are saying 37 weeks”.

When members of the committee expressed alarm at this figure, she said this was “the longest it may take for some customers”.

Labour MP Amanda Hack, a member of the work and pensions committee, who was attending the session as a guest, said: “It is very hard not to be distracted by the 37 weeks figure – I had my first baby quicker than 37 weeks.”

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the committee’s Conservative chair, said the backlog was “causing people not to get the jobs they have applied for, it is causing businesses to go out of business because they are not getting the money that they expected, and it is causing hardship to some charities”.

Sir Peter Schofield, DWP’s permanent secretary, said there had been a doubling in AtW claims since the start of the pandemic, but there had also been “a greater complexity of claims” and so “simply doubling the number of people working on Access to Work has not been enough”.

He was the latest senior DWP figure to talk about the department’s drive for “greater consistency in decision-making” with AtW claims.

Sir Peter suggested to the committee that many disabled people were wrongly claiming AtW to pay for the ergonomic chairs they needed, when these kinds of reasonable adjustments should be funded by their employers.

He also claimed that many employers were “misusing” the scheme in an “inappropriate” way by encouraging disabled employees to apply for AtW grants for support workers, who were then used to carry out tasks that the employer “would normally take on an additional employee to do”.

Once the “consistency” in deciding claims has improved, he said, DWP will take on “another few hundred” AtW caseworkers.

Sir Peter, who will soon be retiring, said these measures should “start to arrest the growth in the backlog over the next few weeks and months, while DWP would then probably “seek to see it falling over the next 18 months or so”.

Disability News Service has previously reported that the proportion of AtW applications rejected rose by more than 12 per cent in 2024-25, and increased by another 22 per cent in April to October 2025.

Disabled campaigners have repeatedly warned that changes within AtW were leading to significant cuts to support for many individual disabled people.

The committee also heard on Thursday (12 March) that long-delayed plans for AtW reform may now not be published until much later this year, even though a consultation on its future – and other reforms to health and disability benefits and employment support – ended last summer.

Bill Thorpe, DWP’s policy director for working-age and child disability benefits, and policy lead for Access to Work, told the committee that the department would be developing the proposals with members of its new independent disability advisory panel.

Thorpe said the department would be working with the panel “over the next three to four months”.

He said: “I imagine, depending on what ministers want to do, it will be later in the year, maybe the second half of the year, that we will be able to set out any changes that we want to make to the scheme.

“We have heard loud and clear that we need to retain the scheme as a flexible and personal support to people, which is focused on that individual person’s needs.

“That will still be a central part of any reforms.”

A collaboration committee – which included “people with lived experience of our services, disabled people’s organisations, disability charities, healthcare professionals, academics, support providers and employer representatives” – has already advised DWP on its AtW reforms, but the five collaboration committees set up by the department completed their work last autumn.

Picture: Helga Swidenbank (left) and Sir Peter Schofield giving evidence