Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 19 October 2015 to Question 11226, for what reasons decisions were not made on 118,039 of the applications his Department received in the period between October 2014 and September 2015 for Short Term Benefit Advance.

We only collect limited data on those requests for a Short Term Benefit Advances that are refused although we do know that the vast majority of refusals are either because:
(i) There was a doubt about whether the claimant would be entitled to the benefit being claimed and, therefore, we could not be sure that there was any benefit to advance or
(ii) Actual benefit was paid instead, which is a better outcome for the claimant.