Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the cost to the public purse of her Department's advertising in the 22 May 2019 edition of the Metro newspaper.
Answered by Alok Sharma - COP26 President (Cabinet Office)
The Department provides services to around 22 million people, and has a responsibility to communicate policy and essential information to claimants and other key audiences, in a similar way to other government departments. Newspaper advertising contributes to our routine communications activity that has been running alongside the rollout of Universal Credit since 2013.
The Universal Credit Uncovered media partnership with the Metro is currently underway and running for a further six weeks so we are unable to provide accurate spend to date figures for the partnership. However, we can commit to publish final full spend on the partnership at the end of July once all activity has concluded.
The information used for the partnership was sourced by DWP officials. The content features actual claimant case studies and interviews from Jobcentre work coaches, and the advertorials have been developed in partnership with the Metro.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the proportion of universal credit claimants who have had payments reduced because they had previously received advances.
Answered by Alok Sharma - COP26 President (Cabinet Office)
Universal Credit (UC) new claim advances provide access to a payment for those in financial need, which can be accessed on the same day, until their first UC payment is due. Claimants can access up to 100% of the total expected monthly award, for which they can pay back over a period of up to 12 months.
The Department has taken a number of steps to ensure that advances meet the needs of claimants and that recovery arrangements are personalised and reasonable. From October 2019 we are reducing the maximum rate of deductions to 30 per cent and from October 2021 we are increasing the maximum recovery period for advances from 12 to 16 months.
The latest available data is for eligible claims to UC Full Service that are due a payment in February 2019. Of these claims 44% had a deduction to repay a UC advance.
Notes:
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 5 June 2019 to Question 257500, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of formally adopting a definition for destitution.
Answered by Will Quince
This Government is committed to broadening our understanding of people’s living standards. New experimental statistics to measure poverty are being developed, based on the work undertaken by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) which was presented in the SMC’s ‘A New Measure of Poverty’ report last year. This development work includes consideration of groups of people previously omitted from poverty statistics, like rough sleepers and those just above the low income threshold but in overcrowded housing, as well as consideration of a wider measurement framework of poverty covering the depth, persistence and lived experience of poverty.
There is no agreed way of defining destitution. External organisations (most notably the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF)) have attempted to define and measure destitution. The JRF’s definition of destitution, however, is complex, and challenging to measure with accuracy. The JRF admit that there is a wide margin of uncertainty about the numbers they identify as destitute. The government therefore has no plans to adopt this definition as any official definition of destitution should be measurable and accurate.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what criteria her Department uses to assess whether people are (a) destitute and (b) living in destitution.
Answered by Will Quince
There is no official definition of destitution. The Department for Work and Pensions annually publishes Households Below Average Income (HBAI) statistics, based on the Family Resources Survey, which sets out four official measures of relative and absolute low income before and after housing costs. The closest measure in HBAI to a measure of destitution is the number of children in “severe low income” (50% of median before housing costs). HBAI also provides measures of material deprivation based on questions to parents and pensioners about their ability to afford the basics in life such as heating homes and paying bills. In addition, new questions have been added to the Family Resources Survey to develop a food insecurity measure from 2021.
New experimental statistics to measure poverty will be developed, and published by DWP in 2020. The new analysis will be based on the work undertaken by the Social Metrics Commission (SMC) which was presented in the SMC’s ‘A New Measure of Poverty’ report last year.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 20 May 2019 to Question 254154 on Poverty: Children, what assessment she has made of the reasons for the decline in the number of children in absolute low-income households between 2004-5 and 2009-10.
Answered by Will Quince
Absolute low income takes the 60 per cent of median income threshold from 2010/11 and moves this in line with inflation. This is designed to assess how low incomes are faring with reference to inflation. The percentage of individuals in absolute low income will decrease if individuals with lower incomes see their real incomes rising (increasing by more than inflation).
Trends in the number of children in absolute poverty can be found using the link below, in table 4.4tr, in the file “children-trends-hbai-1994-95-2017-18-tables.ods”.
Between 2004/05 and 2009/10 the number of children in absolute low income households before housing costs fell, indicating that children in lower income households saw their real incomes rise by more than inflation. However, the number of children in absolute low income households after housing costs was 3.8m in both 2004/05 and 2009/10. This suggests that for low income households with children, these real rises in income were offset by increasing housing costs during this period.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the number of children in absolute poverty in each year between 1989 and 1997.
Answered by Will Quince
National statistics on the number of children living in absolute low income are published annually in the “Households Below Average Income” publication.
HBAI data is unavailable before 1994/95 and are for the United Kingdom from 2002/03 onwards. Earlier years are for Great Britain only. The number of children in absolute poverty from 1994/95 can be found using the link below, in table 4.4tr, in the file “children-trends-hbai-1994-95-2017-18-tables.ods”.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many three year sanctions were issued by her Department to social security benefit recipients in each of the last 10 years.
Answered by Alok Sharma - COP26 President (Cabinet Office)
Information on the number of three years’ sanctions is recorded on our systems and we centrally collate some Management Information. However, the total number cannot be calculated as it is collected across different benefits on different systems and is not centrally collated in a way that allows analysis to be undertaken easily. An extensive interrogation of our systems would be required in order to provide the information requested, which would incur disproportionate cost.
Nevertheless, from the Department’s quarterly sanctions publication, in table 1.7 of the supporting data tables, 2,904 individuals have received three (or more) high level JSA sanction failures, from October 2012 to January 2019. It is not possible to readily unpick how many of these were 3 year sanctions (if two high level sanctions received by an individual were more than a year apart then that would mean they would not have been escalated up to a 3 year sanction duration after their 3rd high level failure). The published data on individuals that received a third high level JSA sanction cannot be split by year. This is because the data is not structured in a way to readily analyse this.
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimates he has made the number of children in absolute child poverty in each year since 2005.
Answered by Will Quince
Estimates of the number of children living in low income are published in the Households Below Average Income (HBAI) series. The latest publication is available here.
Estimates of the number of children in absolute low income households before housing costs in each year since 2005 are available below:
Year | Number of children living in absolute low income households before housing costs |
2004/05 | 3.0m |
2005/06 | 3.1m |
2006/07 | 3.0m |
2007/08 | 2.9m |
2008/09 | 2.8m |
2009/10 | 2.5m |
2010/11 | 2.3m |
2011/12 | 2.6m |
2012/13 | 2.5m |
2013/14 | 2.4m |
2014/15 | 2.3m |
2015/16 | 2.3m |
2016/17 | 2.2m |
2017/18 | 2.5m |
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the Office for National Statistics' personal and economic well-being in the UK data series, what estimate she has made of the proportion of (a) people that are long-term sick and (b) disabled people that suffer from low personal wellbeing.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The proportions of individuals aged 16-64 in the UK who reported low personal wellbeing, in January-December 2018, by long-term health and disability status, are given in the table below.
| Long-term health condition | Disabled | All aged 16-64 |
Life satisfaction | 9.7% | 13.8% | 4.5% |
Feel activities worthwhile | 7.8% | 11.4% | 3.7% |
Happiness | 14.4% | 19.2% | 8.4% |
Anxiety | 29.5% | 35.7% | 20.3% |
Notes:
Asked by: Chris Ruane (Labour - Vale of Clwyd)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate she has made of the proportion of rejected claims for personal independence payments that were overturned at tribunal stage in each year since 2014.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The requested information is shown in the table below:
Volume of initial decisions where PIP was disallowed, and the number & proportion of these decisions that were Overturned at the appeal Stage, by year of initial decision.
Financial Year of Initial Decision | Volume of PIP Claims Disallowed | Decisions Overturned at Appeal | Percentage of Initial Decisions Overturned at Appeal |
2014/15 | 275,090 | 12,730 | 5% |
2015/16 | 324,850 | 22,320 | 7% |
2016/17 | 390,210 | 36,220 | 9% |
2017/18 | 392,280 | 29,420 | 8% |
2018/19 | 282,280 | 3,410 | 1% |
Source: PIP Computer System
Since PIP was introduced 3.9m decisions have been made up to December 2018, of these 10% have been appealed and 5% have been overturned.
Data has been rounded to the nearest 10, and the nearest percent respectively.
This data is unpublished data. It should be used with caution and it may be subject to future revision.
Disallowances include those both pre-referral and post-referral to an Assessment Provider.
An appeal can only be made against a decision which has gone through the Mandatory Reconsideration (MR) process. The figures above will include decisions which have been changed at MR to award PIP, and where the claimant continues to appeal for a higher PIP award, and are then changed again at tribunal appeal.
Decisions overturned at appeal may include a number of appeals that have been lapsed (which is where DWP changed the decision after an appeal was lodged but before it was heard at Tribunal).
Claimants who have received benefit decisions more recently may not yet have had time to complete the claimant journey and progress to appeal.