Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, for what reason deductions for child maintenance are listed at numbers 13 and 14 in her Department's guidance on the deductions priority order for universal credit.
Answered by David Rutley - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
Schedule 6 of the Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker's Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Claims and Payments) Regulations 2013 sets out the priority order in which Departmental staff must consider all deductions from Universal Credit, including Child Maintenance. The deductions contained in that priority order are all priority debts and social obligations that are important for claimants to address.
The Department recognises the importance of Child Maintenance payments and these deductions are already prioritised above others such as benefit overpayments of Housing Benefit, Tax Credit and DWP overpayments and Recoverable Hardship and Social Fund loans.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the average time taken by the Child Maintenance Service to recover arrears for child maintenance was in (a) 2018, (b) 2019 and (c) 2020.
Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
We do not hold this information due to the complex nature of our unpaid Child Maintenance (previously known as arrears) negotiations. When arranging for unpaid Child Maintenance to be recovered, caseworkers speak to both the Paying Parent and the Receiving Parent to agree an affordable and acceptable amount for both parties.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether her Department accepts a statutory safeguarding duty of care to vulnerable benefits claimants.
Answered by Will Quince
The Department does not have a statutory safeguarding duty or legal duty of care. The safety of claimants is of great importance to us and the Department provides staff with training and guidance to help them identify those who require further support beyond the provision of benefits.
Our staff can direct vulnerable claimants to agencies and services who are best placed to support them, including those who have statutory safeguarding duties such as local authorities and social services.
DWP supports the work of all statutory safeguarding agencies, either when formally requested to do so, or by engaging with them to identify, where possible, those who might need particular support.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what representations her Department has received from (a) welfare and (b) disability groups on her Department's public sector equality duty as set out in the Equality Act 2010 to those people claiming disability benefits.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
DWP take our Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) seriously and are absolutely committed to ensuring our services are accessible to all.
We focus on being a learning organisation and are keen to capture the voice of the customer. A key part of this role is working with a number of representative groups from welfare and disability organisations through regular stakeholder forums.
They comprise of a range of organisations of and for disabled customers and through them we hear the voice of our customers. They let us know where we can improve the reasonable adjustments we offer and our processes for providing them, and they assist us by testing new products and procedures
One example is the Taskforce on Accessible Information which works at strategic level and meets three to four times a year.
Another is the Reasonable Adjustments Forum who work at an operational level and meet every two months.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will make it her policy to support an urgent independent inquiry into (a) the impact of the benefits assessment process on claimants' mental health and (b) preventing future deaths of those wrongly declared fit for work.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The Department’s key obligation is to ensure that claimants receive the benefits that they are entitled to, in a timely manner. We continually review our processes to ensure that benefits assessment processes are accessible and supportive to all customers, including those with mental health conditions. We recently put in place a number of improvements to disability benefits assessments, to ensure that vulnerable customers are identified and all evidence relevant to the claim is taken into account. These include enhancing Additional Support Markers on digital case files to indicate vulnerable claimants.
The Department is committed to learning from cases where there is suggestion or allegation that the Department’s actions or omissions may have negatively contributed to the customer’s circumstances. We conduct internal retrospective investigations (known as Internal Process Reviews) to capture these lessons, and take them forward to inform future policy and service.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if the Government will establish an independent inquiry into the (a) number and (b) causes of deaths of those who have died after being found fit to work following a benefits assessment in each of the last six years.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The Department’s key obligation is to ensure that claimants receive the benefits that they are entitled to, in a timely manner. We have recently put in place a number of improvements to disability benefits assessments, to ensure that vulnerable customers are identified and all evidence relevant to the claim is taken into account.
The Department is committed to learning from cases where there is suggestion or allegation that the Department’s actions or omissions may have negatively contributed to a customer’s circumstances. We conduct internal retrospective investigations (known as Internal Process Reviews) to capture these lessons, and take them forward to inform future policy and service.
In England and Wales (where engaged) a Coroner has responsibility for concluding the cause of death.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many families are in receipt of universal credit in Newport East constituency; and how many of those families are in receipt of the £20 uplift for that benefit.
Answered by Will Quince
The available information on the number of households with Universal Credit in payment by parliamentary constituency is published and can be found at:
https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/
Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at:
https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started.html
The £20 uplift applies to all Universal Credit claimants.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the pension credit take up is in (a) Newport East constituency and (b) each Welsh constituency.
Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
The information requested is not available.
The DWP publishes annual take-up statistics for income-related benefits, including Pension Credit, at Great Britain level. The latest data was published in October 2020 and provides take-up estimates up to financial year 2018/19: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/income-related-benefits-estimates-of-take-up--2(opens in a new tab)
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of bringing forward proposals to reduce the number of face-to-face assessments for disabled benefits claimants.
Answered by Justin Tomlinson - Minister of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
We are committed to improving the experience of accessing health and disability benefits. The Health and Disability Green Paper is an opportunity to understand how we can best improve the health assessment system, including the frequency of reassessments, and will inform our plan for change.
Asked by: Jessica Morden (Labour - Newport East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will take steps to ensure that universal credit claimants in Wales are able to receive their bonuses from both rounds of the Welsh Government's NHS and social care financial recognition scheme without deductions.
Answered by Will Quince
Frontline health and social care workers make a valuable contribution to our society and we are so grateful for their continued work through this pandemic.
The Department does not deduct from a Universal Credit claimant’s salary or bonus payment, however it may reduce the amount of Government support a claimant receives through Universal Credit if their earnings increase and they therefore have more money available to support themselves. It is a long-standing principle of means-tested benefits that as a person’s earnings increase their government support decreases – Universal Credit is no different.
Bonus payments, including those paid to health and social care workers, are earnings and therefore are treated in the same way as any other earnings. Universal Credit rules align closely to tax legislation (Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (ITEPA)). Amounts that are taken into account for a Universal Credit award include those that are general earnings, as defined in section 7(3) of ITEPA. Amounts paid as expenses that are exempt from Income tax under Part 4 of ITEPA are not taken into account for a Universal Credit award.
To ensure consistency with the approach taken across different forms of earnings and Covid-19 financial support, the UK Government does not believe there is a case for disregarding these payments from benefit calculations. They are therefore subject to the Universal Credit taper rate of 63%, unless the earnings form part of the work allowance, which is the amount someone can earn before the taper is applied to their earnings.