The Department told us that, to improve productivity and the consistency of decision-making, it had introduced a new standard operating process in late 2025. It was rolling out the new process office by office and hoped to have completed this by summer 2026. The Department said that it would be in a position to carry out a new work study once the rollout had been completed.31 That study would help it to determine, given the change in caseload and what it now took to make an appropriate decision, what the productivity standard should be and what its aspirations should be in terms of clearing cases and the backlog.32