Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate her Department has made of the number of staff given responsibility for (a) monitoring and (b) responding to messages on universal credit claimants' online journals.

In December 2019 we had 4,598 Case Managers, 12,711 Work Coaches and 1048 UC Decision Makers delivering Universal Credit. All of these job roles will use the journal to correspond with claimants as just one part of their varied job roles, and Case Managers will use their dashboards to see their cases that have a journal entry waiting to be viewed. Not all journal entries will require a response.