Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether his Department has made a recent evaluation of the effectiveness of the under-occupation deduction policy for social rented housing.

The Department has not recently evaluated the effectiveness of the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy.

Information on the number of households subjected to the Removal of the Spare Room Subsidy, by nations and regions, is available on Stat-Xplore via the Housing Benefit and Universal Credit official statistics (https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/). The information can be found in the Households on Universal Credit dataset, and the Housing Benefit – Data from April 2018 dataset, and are currently available to August 2025.

Users can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest, and if needed, can access guidance on how to extract the information required. There is also a Universal Credit Official Statistics: Stat-Xplore user guide.