Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Department of Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 18 April 2017 to Question 70208, if he will provide information on how the estimated savings from the minimum income floor for universal credit were calculated for (a) 2017-18; (b) 2018-19; (c) 2019-20; (d) 2020-21, and (e) 2021-22.

The Minimum Income Floor is expected to encourage those reporting very low self-employed income to increase their earnings. Some people will respond to this by increasing their earnings from self-employment, others will look for other employment to increase their income and it is applied equally across all sectors of self-employment.

The Minimum Income Floor is modelled using the Policy Simulation Model and Integrated Microsimulation Model (INFORM) where we apply it to the Universal Credit award calculation for the projected population of Universal Credit self-employed claimants.

The Minimum Income Floor is calculated, as per policy, based on claimants characteristics i.e. National Minimum Wage/National Living Wage (which is a function of age), tax bracket and maximum work search requirement for a given claimant type.

A more detailed modelling methodology of Universal Credit forecasts is likely to be published by Office for Budget Responsibility in 2018 as a part of their Welfare Trends Report series.