PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
(13 May 2025)

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many calls to the Pension Service helpline (a) were not answered, (b) involved the caller being on hold for more than 10 minutes and (c) were terminated by the Pension Service following the caller being on hold for more than 10 minutes in (i) February, (ii) March, and (iii) April 2025.

Asked by:
Sarah Gibson (Liberal Democrat)

DWP does not have a specific enquiry line called the Pension Service Helpline, so I have provided the data from the State Pensions enquiries line.

Over the period 1 February to 30 April 2025 a total of 28,775 calls were not answered due to caller abandonment. A monthly breakdown shows February 6,696; March 16,960 and April 5,119. The percentage of calls answered over these 3 months on average shows Feb 92%, March 84% and April 94%, against an expectation of 90%. A total of 67,736 callers were on hold for more than 10 minutes with the monthly breakdown showing February 9,082, March 51,746, April 6,908. No calls were terminated by DWP.

We do not hold the data before June 2023 and therefore have based our answer on the period from 1st June 2023 to 31st January 2025. In this data, calls not answered were due to caller abandonment. No calls were terminated by DWP.

Date	Abandoned	Hold for 10 mins or more
Jun-23	336	31
Jul-23	228	15
Aug-23	922	259
Sep-23	4563	4054
Oct-23	7634	11403
Nov-23	5828	10297
Dec-23	1208	366

Date	Abandoned	Hold for 10 mins or more
Jan-24	1676	12
Feb-24	6569	4124
Mar-24	3407	163
Apr-24	15829	29090
May-24	4752	3296
Jun-24	952	363
Jul-24	1947	1798
Aug-24	2854	2544
Sep-24	3131	1678
Oct-24	3478	3830
Nov-24	3671	3884
Dec-24	2321	1557

The information provided here is based on internal management information which is not intended for publication and has not been quality assured to official statistics standards.

Answered by:
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