The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) are bragging about simply doing its job once again. The DWP is making a big fuss of the fact that they’re recruiting 500 new staff to clear the Access to Work backlog.
The department is making it sound like this is something they’re doing out of the goodness of their hearts, but it comes after multiple politicians have criticised their handling of Access to Work
The DWP announced:
As part of its efforts to move from a welfare state to a working state, the DWP is taking action to address the backlog by recruiting nearly 500 new members of staff to speed up processing times and help people get the support they need quicker.
The change is part of a range of measures to break down barriers for sick or disabled people left behind by the previous Government.
DWP backlog grows
The actual figure is 480, and this rounding up by 20 matters because of the sheer number of people waiting for Access to Work. In March, the minister for disabled people, Stephen Timms, answered a written question about how many claims had been processed since October 2025 and what the backlog was.
He confirmed:
From the period 10/10/2025 to 23/02/2026 51,924 Access to Work claims have been processed. As of the 23/02/2026 there were 66,749 applications awaiting a decision.
Crucially, that 51,924 isn’t the number of claims that had been approved; they’d just been processed. Conveniently, the DWP hasn’t published complete figures on how many claims were approved and denied since March 2025.
According to Decode, as of April 2026, an average PAYE employee is waiting around 38 weeks for their application to be referred to a case manager, while the average wait for a reconsideration is 33 weeks. More worryingly, self-employed disabled people are waiting on average 86 weeks to be referred. As John Pring at Disability News Service recently reported, self-employed disabled people have been put to the back of the queue and are suffering as the DWP tries to make it look like they’re supporting more people into employment.
There are currently 749 Access to Work advisors, so if they manage to employ 480, that’ll only be 1,229 advisors across the whole scheme. And that’s a big if, considering how bad DWP job retention is. It’s also important to note that whilst the DWP is bragging that they’ve ‘already recruited’ 157 since they took over, 118 of those were actually just redeployed work coaches.
If we’re looking at just the 66,749 applications that were waiting in February, without considering that figure will probably have gone up in the last three months, that’s 54 cases per advisor. And that’s assuming they actually do manage to recruit that many staff.
Taking credit for something they’ve been forced to do
However, the main thing here is that the DWP is once again taking credit for something they’ve been forced to do.
With more and more disabled people pushed into work, there will obviously be a surge in demand for Access to Work, but the department was left shame-faced in April when it was forced to admit there was essentially no plan for this.
It’s also a bitter pill to swallow that the DWP does apparently want to help disabled people get Access to Work support when they’ve been quietly cutting it for ages. In March, top DWP civil servants gave evidence at the Access to Work Inquiry. During this, they came under fire for not only the delays, but also for how much they’re completely stripping away previously agreed support.
Neil Coulling, best known for saying the carers’ scandal was the carers’ fault, once again attempted to wriggle out of it:
We were making mistakes on cases in 23, 24, as we attempted to clear that backlog, as Peter suggested, in too much of a hurry,
So those cases are coming up now for renewal, and they are producing lower awards, and people are saying, ‘Why have I got a lower award? Nothing has changed in my life.’
But we’d wrongly gave them a job aide, normally for 100% of the time, and we should have given them about 20% of the time. Because the job aides are not designed to do the work, they’re meant to support, lift the disabled person to the same level of… an employee.
It’s clear that after coming under so much scrutiny recently, the DWP have panicked and rushed out a recruitment drive. It’s typical, however, that this is only being done because they’ve been humiliated and not because they actually want to support disabled people, which is clear from the way they continually demonise them.
I wish I could be surprised by the fact that they’re bragging about something they had to do to save face, but nothing the DWP does shocks me anymore.
Featured image via Getty/Catherine Ivill
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