People phoning the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) collectively spent more than 753 years waiting for their calls to be answered in 2023/24, according to a spending watchdog.

This was made up of around 652 years waiting on DWP’s in-house lines and 102 years on its outsourced lines, the National Audit Office (NAO) said. The figures have been rounded.

DWP aims to answer 85% of calls to its in-house lines but overall 76% of calls were answered in 2023/24.

Some 17.3 million calls were answered and 5.3 million calls were abandoned after customers had joined a queue.

In 2023/24, the average time DWP took to answer calls to its in-house lines was 15 minutes and 23 seconds.

Poor service can have a range of detrimental impacts, including frustration, distress and disruption for customers, and additional cost for DWP

NAO report

DWP expects 90% of calls to outsourced providers to be answered. In 2023-24, they answered 94% of calls – 19.4 million calls were answered with 1.2 million calls abandoned.

The DWP makes benefit and pension payments to over 20 million people to support them through life events such as being out of work, being retired or living with disabilities.

In 2023/24, it spent £268.5 billion on these payments plus £7.3 billion on running costs.

The NAO said claimants, many of whom are vulnerable or have complex needs, rely on benefit income to avoid or mitigate financial hardship, and so the quality of the service they receive matters.

The report said: “Poor service can have a range of detrimental impacts, including frustration, distress and disruption for customers, and additional cost for DWP.”

Since 2020/21, DWP has fallen slightly short of its benchmark for good performance, which is for 85% of customers to be satisfied with the service they received.

The department measures satisfaction using a customer experience survey.

In 2020/21, 88% of surveyed customers were very or fairly satisfied with the service received and the DWP attributed this to customers welcoming changes it made to streamline processes during the coronavirus pandemic, the report said.

Some 83% of customers were very or fairly satisfied in 2022/23.

Customer satisfaction also varies between benefits.

The report found that 93% of state pension customers were satisfied in 2022/23, compared with 77% of personal independence payment (Pip) customers.

The department could make more use of survey data to generate deeper insights into how customer characteristics, experiences and perceptions affect satisfaction, and to explore common reasons why customers are dissatisfied, the report said.

It also noted that the likelihood of processing new claims on time also varied between benefits. Overall, 72% of new claims were processed on time in 2023/24.

This included 52% of new Pip claims being processed within the expected timeframe of 75 working days, while 96% of new state pension claims were processed within the expected timeframe of 10 working days.

The report said DWP’s customer base is growing, with the number of people claiming benefits and the state pension rising by 2.4 million since 2019 because of a range of economic and societal factors.

The number of people receiving benefit and pension payments in Britain rose from 20.3 million in May 2019 to 22.7 million in May 2023.

The growth in demand was mainly for universal credit (UC), with a rapid rise in claimants during the Covid-19 pandemic in particular, and for Pip, reflecting the growing number of people with long-term health problems and disabilities, the report said.

It continued: “DWP has published little information on the standard of service that customers can expect, increasing the likelihood of customer queries and greater pressure on its services.”

The department does not consistently tell customers up-front what they can expect in areas such as claim processing or call waiting times, the NAO said.

The report added: “It told us it is planning to make more use of text messages to update customers, but noted that providing up-to-date information is not straightforward because of the range and complexity of its services.”

The NAO said the DWP’s “limited transparency about service standards” increases the likelihood of customers calling for progress updates and reassurance.

The report said the DWP had analysed calls to in-house telephone lines for eight benefits and estimated that 31.6 million minutes of customer call time for these benefits were avoidable in 2022/23. This represented 43% of call time on these lines.

Payment accuracy has also declined, meaning some customers have not received the right amount of benefit, the report said. Overpayments can leave claimants with significant debts which they may find difficult to pay back.

In 2023/24, an estimated 3.7% of benefit spending was overpaid, totalling £9.7 billion, compared with 2.4% in 2019/20. UC had the highest rate of overpayments at 12.4% (£6.5 billion).

In 2023/24, claimants received an estimated 1.6% (£4.2 billion) less than they were entitled to, with particularly high levels of error for disability benefits, the report said.