More than £4m a year is spent on handling appeals and reconsideration of Disability Living Allowance awards in Northern Ireland made by the Social Security Agency, it was revealed today.

Each year the agency is asked to reconsider some 8,000 of its decisions and customers make a formal appeal in more than 7,000 cases.

Last year the agency paid out £646m to 173,000 disabled claimants.

A report by John Dowdall, Comptroller and Auditor General for Northern Ireland, said that significant progress had been made in improving the appeals process and recorded that decisions overturned at appeal, due to agency error, had been very low and was zero in 2006-07, the last year for which figures are available.

However it showed the number of award decision overturned at appeal tribunals had increased significantly — from 24% in 2002-03 to 32% in 2007-08.

But the report made clear it was not because of mistakes by SSA staff.

“The main reason for this is the production of additional evidence by the appellant which was not made available to the agency at the time of the original decision,” it said.

It noted a reduction in the time it took from registration of an appeal to the first hearing, down from 16.2 weeks in 2005-06 to 10.3 weeks in 2007-08.

The reduction meant that the agency had broadly met its target of having a first hearing within 10 weeks.

But the report showed that there were still wide differences — with the shortest time from registration of appeal to hearing being 6.4 weeks and the longest 25.7 weeks.

There was also a huge difference in the time it took to issue a tribunal decision — with the shortest 6.4 weeks and the longest 85.9 weeks — against an average of 18 weeks.

The Audit Office said it was important that workload with the SSA and the tribunals system should continue to be monitored to ensure all cases were progressed effectively and on a timely basis.

It said performance measures should be established to provide key management information on the length of time appeals had been in the caseload and the range of time to process appeals.

It recommended key targets for performance and processing appeal cases should be published.

At the same time it proposed benchmarking performance against similar functions in Britain would help in assessing and evaluating performance standards in Northern Ireland.