A Bill to Make provision to remove the two child limit on the child element of universal credit.
Asked by: Pat McFadden (Labour - Wolverhampton South East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the policy paper entitled Transforming for a digital future: 2022 to 2025 roadmap for digital and data, updated on 29 February 2024, when his Department first assessed each of the red-rated legacy IT systems in his Department to be red-rated.
Answered by Paul Maynard
DWP has mature, industry standard mechanisms for assessing the risk of its core IT systems which has been implemented and running for decades. The first time DWP reported figures to the cross-government initiative led by CDDO was November 2022.
Asked by: Pat McFadden (Labour - Wolverhampton South East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the policy paper entitled Transforming for a digital future: 2022 to 2025 roadmap for digital and data, updated on 29 February 2024, what steps his Department has taken to mitigate the risks of red-rated legacy IT systems.
Answered by Paul Maynard
DWP has funded and resourced a dedicated Legacy Technical Debt Working Group within DWP. This group managed the population and ongoing accuracy of Legacy IT System Risk Score Cards. The information recorded includes plans for mitigating key risks which are assessed ahead of each fiscal planning round to bid for funds to implement mitigating measures.
Asked by: Pat McFadden (Labour - Wolverhampton South East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people in Wolverhampton South East constituency are on long-term sickness benefits; and how many were on such benefits in each of the past five years.
Answered by Mims Davies - Shadow Minister (Women)
People on ‘long-term sickness benefits’ have been assumed as those in the main phase of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and the Universal Credit (UC) Limited Capability to Work (LCW) and Limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA) groups. The Department regularly publishes Benefit Combination statistics on Stat-Xplore and these were extended inFebruary 2024 to include additional information for those on ESA and the UC Health Journey, so can now be used to provide the information, from quarter ending May 2019 to the end of the latest quarter, August 2023.
The figures can be obtained from the ‘Benefit Combinations - Data from May 2019 for England and Wales’ dataset using the ‘Additional Claim Details’ options. The ‘ESA Phase of Claim’ and ‘UC Health Journey’ options should be used to identify quarterly totals for ESA Support Group (SG), ESA Work-related Activity Group (WRAG), Universal Credit Limited Capability to Work (LCW) and Limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA) groups, and those on one benefit but not the other using the ‘Not On’ options. The ‘Geography’ option can then be used to filter by the relevant Westminster Parliamentary Constituency.
Users can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest user and, if needed, can access guidance on how to extract the information required.
Using the Benefit Combinations data on Stat-Xplore, the number of people on long-term sickness benefits in the Wolverhampton South East constituency is provided in the table below:
| Aug 2019 | Aug 2020 | Aug 2021 | Aug 2022 | Aug 2023 |
Total | 4,150 | 4,440 | 4,690 | 5,080 | 5,830 |
Source: Stat-Xplore
Notes: