State Retirement Pensions: Telephone Services

Department for Work and Pensions written question – answered at on 21 March 2023.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Rachael Maskell Rachael Maskell Labour/Co-operative, York Central

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many calls to the Future Pension Centre helpline (a) were not answered, (b) involved the caller being on hold for more than 10 minutes and (c) were terminated by the Future Pension Centre following the caller being on hold for more than 10 minutes in each of the last 12 months.

Photo of Laura Trott Laura Trott The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

The DWP Future Pension Centre helpline has experienced unprecedented levels of contact from customers considering whether to pay voluntary National Insurance Contributions (vNICS) before the deadline.

In a normal month, the Department would receive 30,000 to 50,000 calls. In the four-week period to 26th March, the Department received more than half a million calls. In order to deal with this, additional staff have been deployed as quickly as possible and measures have been put in place to direct customers to the online version of the service at gov.uk.

See below data on the number of calls not answered. Note this is not the number of individuals who contacted the Future Pension Centre but the number of calls made, often multiple times by the same individual.

To alleviate customer concerns about meeting the deadline for paying vNICs, HM Revenue & Customs has also announced it will extend the deadline to pay these contributions until 31 July 2023.

Period of calls made to the Future Pension Centre Helpline

Calls to Helpline

Calls Answered

Calls Blocked*

28/02/2022 - 27/03/2022

60,106

47,626

1,693

28/03/2022 - 24/04/2022

54,474

40,739

3,691

25/04/2022 - 22/05/2022

51,009

42,123

1,725

23/05/2022 - 19/06/2022

50,049

40,180

493

20/06/2022 - 17/07/2022

53,235

40,851

864

18/07/2022 - 14/08/2022

46,392

35,793

5

15/08/2022 - 11/09/2022

44,606

35,614

18

12/09/2022 - 09/10/2022

41,263

32,636

2

10/10/2022 - 06/11/2022

88,884

39,053

29,644

07/11/2022 - 04/12/2022

63,500

40,902

4,947

05/12/2022 - 01/01/2023

36,452

25,589

999

02/01/2023 - 29/01/2023

202,996

41,508

128,885

30/01/2023 - 26/02/2023

516,861

45,613

442,845

*‘Calls Blocked’ refers to the instances when DWP does not allow the call to enter the call waiting queue and the line cuts off.

It is not possible to respond to elements b & c of the question as this information is only available at disproportionate cost to the Department for Work & Pensions, as the Department does not have a business requirement for this information to be retained.

The Management Information used has been taken from the same operational source data systems as our published administrative data. However, as this Management Information is not a recognised National or Official Statistic, it has not been subjected to the same level of Quality Assurance. As a result, these figures should be treated with caution.

Does this answer the above question?

Yes2 people think so

No1 person thinks not

Would you like to ask a question like this yourself? Use our Freedom of Information site.