Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent estimate his Department has made of the cost to the public purse to date of the IT system supporting universal credit.

The overall investment cost forecast for Universal Credit development reduced to £1.7 billion in the Outline Business Case (OBC) from an earlier forecast of £2.4bn; demonstrating the on-going cost control focus of the Programme. As part of that overall investment cost the Programme has spent around £500m of investment in IT related expenditure up to September 2017 to support the delivery of Universal Credit.

Our latest estimate of the whole life costs, the costs of investment plus the costs of running the system every year from 2015/16 to 2024/25 is £13.6bn, a reduction of £2.4bn from the previous estimate.