Department for Work and Pensions: Telephone Services
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the (a) average waiting time for people calling and (b) time people spent on hold for her Department was in each of the last five years.
Answered by Sir Stephen Timms
The table below shows the Average Time to Answer and the Average Hold Time, in an hours, minutes and seconds (hh:mm:ss) format, for all people calling DWP for the last 5 business years, with 2025 to 2026 being to 12th Oct’ 2025* only, that being the last date for which data is available.
Reporting Year | Average Time to Answer (hh:mm:ss) | Average Hold Time (hh:mm:ss) |
2021-2022 | 00:09:39 | 00:00:36 |
2022-2023 | 00:08:22 | 00:00:28 |
2023-2024 | 00:08:34 | 00:00:26 |
2024-2025 | 00:07:22 | 00:00:23 |
2025 to date | *00:05:50 | *00:00:18 |
DISCLAIMER Please note this information is derived from the Department’s management information, designed solely for the purpose of helping the Department to manage its business. As such, it has not been subjected to the rigorous quality assurance checks applied to our published official statistics. As DWP holds the information internally, we have released it. However, it is possible information held by DWP may change due to operational reasons and we recommend that caution be applied when using it.
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