Universal Credit: Homelessness

(asked on 12th December 2022) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if his Department will make an assessment of the potential merits of a policy of pausing deductions from Universal Credit for those people (a) at risk of or (b) experiencing homelessness.


Answered by
Guy Opperman Portrait
Guy Opperman
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
This question was answered on 20th December 2022

The Government recognises the importance of supporting claimants to manage their liabilities.

The Government has reduced the standard deduction cap from 40 per cent to 25 per cent of the Standard Allowance in recent years. These reductions have helped hundreds of thousands of Universal Credit claimants to retain more of their award. Pausing deductions would result in a build-up of arrears of the range of debts a claimant has and stop vital obligations such as Child Maintenance payments being made at all.

The primary aim of deductions in Universal Credit is to protect vulnerable claimants by providing a last resort repayment method for arrears of essential services. We aim to strike the right balance between ensuring those protections are in place and allowing claimants to retain as much of their award as possible for day-to-day needs.

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