Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether additional resources will be made available to housing charities for retraining advisers to deal with the effect of the roll-out of universal credit.

At a national level the Universal Credit Programme has been working with a wide range of stakeholder and delivery partners including housing charities to build their understanding of Universal Credit. This includes holding regular meetings and providing upskilling and awareness sessions to help support our mutual customers.

The Programme has also built the capability of local partnership facing staff so that they can effectively engage with housing charities, delivery partners and customer representatives. In addition the Programme has developed a suite of products to build the understanding of delivery partners so that they can support claimants and service users at a local level 6 months prior to going live.