Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate she has made of the number of people in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England who have unmet care needs; and what steps her Department is taking to ensure those care needs are met.
Answered by Helen Whately - Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions
Local authorities are responsible for assessing individuals’ care and support needs and, where eligible, for meeting those needs. Where individuals do not meet the eligibility threshold, they can get support from their local authorities in making their own arrangements for care services, as set out in the Care Act 2014.
We recognise that some people still experience challenges in accessing the care and support they need, when they need it. That is why ensuring that people find adult social care fair and accessible is one of the three main objectives of our 10-year reform vision for adult social care. To achieve this vision, we are supporting local authorities to address workforce pressures, drive improvements in their local area, and better streamline their assessment processes.
To support this, the Government has made available up to £8.6 billion in additional funding over the financial years 2023/24 and 2024/25, to support adult social care and discharge. This includes up to £1.5 billion of additional grant funding for adult social care for 2024/25, compared to 2023/24, alongside a 2% increase to the adult social care precept for local authorities with social care responsibilities, uptake of which will generate a further £609 million in 2024/25. In addition, the Market Sustainability and Improvement Fund, worth almost £2 billion over two years, is designed to support increased adult social care capacity, improve market sustainability, and enable local authorities to make improvements to adult social care services.
Asked by: Colleen Fletcher (Labour - Coventry North East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many pensioners in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England (i) receive the basic state pension, (ii) receive pension credit and (iii) are eligible for pension credit but do not claim it; and what steps his Department is taking to ensure that all pensioners receive their full entitlement to pension credit.
Answered by Paul Maynard
Caseload statistics are routinely published and made publicly available via DWP Stat-xplore. The figures below show the Pension Credit and Basic State Pension caseloads in each area:
| Pension Credit | Basic State Pension |
Coventry North East Constituency | 2,873 | 10,083 |
Coventry | 7,168 | 33,981 |
North West | 131,692 | 773,219 |
England | 1,160,826 | 7,190,718 |
The latest available Pension Credit take-up statistics cover the financial year 2021 to 2022 and are available at: Income-related benefits: estimates of take-up: financial year ending 2022 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). These statistics are only available at Great Britain level and cannot be broken down to smaller geographical areas.
We continue to promote Pension Credit through our national awareness campaign, which has been ongoing since April 2022 and has included advertising on national TV, newspapers, broadcast radio, on social media and via internet search engines as well as on screens in Post Offices and GP surgeries.
At the start of 2024 - as in previous years - the DWP wrote to over 11 million pensioners as part of the annual State Pension up-rating exercise. The accompanying leaflet included prominent messaging promoting Pension Credit using the 'call to action' messaging from the communication campaign, including how Pension Credit opens the door to other financial help such as housing costs, Council Tax and heating bills.
There is a strong indication that the campaign has had a positive impact. The latest available figures covering the 3 months to November 2023 show that there were over 28 thousand more households in receipt the Guarantee Credit element of Pension Credit than in May 2022.