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 steps he is taking to improve the uptake of Pension Credit among eligible people.
Answered by Laura Trott - Chief Secretary to the Treasury
Pension Credit provides vital financial support to our most vulnerable pensioners and we want all those eligible to claim it.
To raise awareness of Pension Credit and increase take-up, we launched a £1.2m nationwide communications campaign in April. The campaign included:
As part of the annual uprating of State Pension, we will once again be writing to over 11 million pensioners in the new year and promoting Pension Credit in the accompanying materials.
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 steps their Department is taking to reduce the time taken to respond to (a) written parliamentary questions and (b) correspondence from Members of Parliament.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Department for Work and Pensions attaches great importance to the effective and timely handling of Parliamentary Questions (PQs) and correspondence, and officials remain committed to providing the highest level of service.
All departments have access to regular training on the full suite of Parliamentary business, led by the Parliamentary Capability Team through the Government Campus.
The Ministerial Correspondence Team held tailored training sessions for correspondence drafting colleagues to drive up quality and timeliness of responses. These sessions were delivered twice between April and June 2022.
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 households in (a) Newport East constituency and (b) Wales have four or more children and are in receipt of Universal Credit or Housing Benefit.
Answered by Guy Opperman - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
Statistics on both the number of households in receipt of Universal Credit and Housing Benefit are published every three months. The latest statistics are available by the number of children in the household to May 2022, on Stat-Xplore.
If needed, you can access guidance on how to extract the information required from
Stat-Xplore.
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 households are subject to the under-occupancy penalty on the basis of under-occupying one bedroom in (a) Newport East constituency and (b) Wales.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The latest available data on households subject to the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy can be found on Stat-Xplore.
The relevant data sets are ‘Housing Benefit - Data from April 2018’ - which can be filtered by ‘Number of Spare Rooms’ and ‘Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies’ - and ‘Households on Universal Credit’ - which can be filtered by ‘Number of Spare Bedrooms’ and ‘Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies’.
Guidance on how to use Stat-Xplore can be found here.
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 households are subject to the under-occupancy penalty on the basis of under-occupying two bedrooms or more in (a) Newport East constituency and (b) Wales.
Answered by Mims Davies - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The latest available data on households subject to the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy can be found on Stat-Xplore.
The relevant data sets are ‘Housing Benefit - Data from April 2018’ - which can be filtered by ‘Number of Spare Rooms’ and ‘Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies’ - and ‘Households on Universal Credit’ - which can be filtered by ‘Number of Spare Bedrooms’ and ‘Westminster Parliamentary Constituencies’.
Guidance on how to use Stat-Xplore can be found here.
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 the £650 Cost of Living Payment is available to those on income-based benefits but not those on contribution-based benefits.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
Non-means tested benefits are not qualifying benefits for the Cost-of-Living Payment in their own right because people receiving these benefits may have other financial resources available to them. The Government is committed to managing the public finances in a responsible way by targeting the £650 Cost of Living Payment support at low income means tested households where it is most needed.
The guidance with the full list of support can be found at: Cost of living support - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
In addition to the new support, people on low incomes but not means-tested benefits may also benefit from previously announced measures to help people tackle the cost of living, including frozen alcohol duty and fuel duty, raising the NICs threshold, council tax rebates and the further rise in the National Living Wage to £9.50 an hour from April 2022.
From 1 October, a new ‘Energy Price Guarantee’ will mean a typical UK household will now pay up to an average £2,500 a year on their energy bill for the next two years. This is automatic and applies to all households. This will save the average household at least £1,000 a year based on current energy prices from October and is in addition to the £400 energy bills discount for all households. This applies to all households in Great Britain, with the same level of support made available to households in Northern Ireland.
From October 2022, Government is also providing an additional £500 million to help households with the cost of essentials, bringing the total funding for this support to £1.5 billion
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 the maximum payment amount that can be collected in a single transaction using the Payment Exception Service at a Post Office or pay point outlet is set at £100 requiring some claimants to make multiple transactions to access the full amount of their benefits or pension.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
The most secure way to receive payment is through a bank account. For those customers who are unable to open or manage a bank, building society or credit union account, the DWP’s new Payment Exception Service has been designed as a simple service to ensure customers have access to cash. Vouchers are uploaded to a card or sent electronically via SMS text or email. A customer can print their emailed vouchers and present them to the retailer. The maximum amount of a voucher is £100 so a customer may receive more than one voucher on their payment due date. Customers must cash the full amount of the voucher but do not have to cash all of their vouchers at the same time. This is a similar process to when customers used to be issued with Order Books and Girocheques.
Payment Exception Service vouchers can be encashed at over 26,000 PayPoint outlets nationally as well as Post Offices nationwide. The service provided by this contract meets DWP’s statutory requirement to ensure all customers can access payments, including where standard banking is not available to them.
The £100 voucher amount represents a value that protects vulnerable customers from being required to withdraw and carry large sums and is one that the PayPoint Retailer network can 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 assessment she has made of the potentials merits of extending Access To Work support to the newly self-employed, in the context of an individual not have an income straight away.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
Access to Work already offers support for newly self-employed disabled people operating a business. Access to Work can provide funding for in-work support needs for up to 3 years. At the end of this period the individual must have a business turnover which meets the Access to Work Lower Earnings Limit, currently £6,396. If this is not possible, Access to Work funding will stop.
For self-employed freelancers and contractors, as long as their contract value is equivalent to the National Minimum Wage and they satisfy the Access to Work eligibility criteria, grant funding can be provided for their in-work support needs for the length of the contract.
To support self-employed freelancers and contractors, Access to Work has introduced a Flexible Application to provide greater flexibility for disabled people to take up time limited contracts and freelance opportunities. The flexible application helps to avoid the need for re-applications for Access to Work every time a new period of employment begins and removes the need for repeated holistic assessments where the individual’s needs are unchanged.
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 plans to review the service standard Access To Work application timescales from application to approval.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
Access to Work has received significant increase in applications over the last year and have recruited new staff to meet the increased demand and reduce the time it takes to make decisions. We are also transforming the Access to Work service through increased digitalisation, that will make the service more efficient, will make the application process easier, and improve the time taken from application through to decision.
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 waiting time was for an Access to Work grant application to be processed in (a) 2019, (b) 2020, (c) 2021 and (d) 2022.
Answered by Victoria Prentis - Attorney General
The average processing times are shown below.
Please note that the data supplied is derived from unpublished management information, which was collected for internal Departmental use only, and have not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. They should therefore be treated with caution.
2018/19 13.2 days
2019/20 25.5 days
2020/21 28.1 days
2021/22 28.3 days