Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of his Department’s steps to increase Pension Credit claims in December 2022.

We undertook a further burst of communications activity in December which included press, radio and social media. This highlighted that successful Pension Credit applications made by 18 December would mean qualification for a £324 Cost of Living Payment – thanks to Pension Credit backdating rules. To promote this activity, I held an event at Portcullis House on 7 December. Around 40 MPs attended to show their support and help promote the message in their constituencies.

Internal management information shows that during the week commencing 12 December, DWP received over 7,200 claims. This is 177% higher compared to the same week the year before.

Since the beginning of the Pension Credit awareness campaign in April 2022, weekly Pension Credit claims volumes increased by an average of 73% compared to the year average before the campaign began (April 2021 to March 2022).

A range of other factors are also likely to have impacted claim volumes and it is not therefore possible to attribute the increase to the campaign alone.

This data is based on internal management information which has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics. They are provided here in the interests of transparency.