Asked by: Lord Bishop of Manchester (Bishops - Bishops)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that the Crisis and Resilience Fund will help local authorities to address the causes of financial crisis instead of the symptoms.
Answered by Baroness Sherlock - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Crisis and Resilience Fund aims to enable local authorities to provide preventative support to communities – working with the voluntary and community sector – as well as assisting people when faced with a financial crisis. The Fund will support local interventions that prevent people from falling into crisis and improve their citizens’ long-term financial resilience, reducing the need for crisis support in the long-term.
My Department has engaged extensively with stakeholders on the design of the Crisis and Resilience Fund through a structured co-design process involving a representative group of local authorities, third-party organisations and academics. We are considering all feedback received through this process, and we plan to publish guidance in January 2026.
Asked by: Lord Bishop of Manchester (Bishops - Bishops)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they plan to publish the data, routinely collected since February 2022, on care leavers claiming Universal Credit.
Answered by Baroness Sherlock - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
We have no plans to publish data on care leavers claiming Universal Credit.
DWP started routinely collecting data on care leavers claiming UC in February 2022. All new claimants are now given the option of reporting their care leaver status, and work coaches can record existing claimants’ care leaver status if they are they are told about this.
This data is being monitored for data quality and does not meet the quality assurance standards for official statistics: the data coverage is still very limited and the claimants we have data on are not representative of the UC caseload. Therefore, no figures are available for publication.
The Department will continue to carefully review the data in the usual way.