4.1 The government agrees with the Committee’s recommendation. Recommendation implemented 4.2 The department continually reviews and manages demand across the business, balancing the need to deliver existing services with any in-year pressures or new work. This is the case across all the department’s service delivery areas. For example, the department took a decision in Autumn 2021 to temporarily delay the move of staff from State Pension claims work to the State Pension Underpayment Legal Entitlements and Administrative Practice (LEAP) exercise, in order to tackle outstanding new claims. This ensured all outstanding State Pensions claims were cleared by the end of October. To maintain delivery of the LEAP exercise, the department has allocated additional resource, both from internal moves, and external recruitment to have over 1400 frontline delivery colleagues working on the exercise. The department has deployed over 500 colleagues to the LEAP exercise, with additional internal moves, and external recruitment of 560 Full Time Equivalents currently in progress. 4.3 Succession planning is at the heart of the department’s planning – colleagues working on the exercise will have the full end-to-end knowledge and skills needed for State Pensions service delivery. As part of this skills retention strategy, staff who had joined for the exercise on fixed term appointments were made permanent in December 2021.