Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what communications strategy her Department has to help ensure that pensioners who are eligible for but not in receipt of Pension Credit are aware that applying for Pension Credit may entitle them to other top-up payments to other benefits.

The Department continues to raise awareness of Pension Credit through the annual uprating mailing, sent to over 11 million pensioners in Great Britain, including those who are eligible for Pension Credit but not claiming. Proactive press and stakeholder activity will also continue.

Our initial internal management information suggests new claims for Pension Credit in the twelve months to December 2021 were around 136,000, representing an increase of around 30% compared to the 12 months to December 2019 when they were around 105,000. It also suggests that we have been receiving consistently high volumes of claims over recent months, at around 3,300 per week.

This management information has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics but is provided here in the interests of transparency. The impact of these claim volumes on numbers of successful awards and on Pension Credit take-up will take longer to establish given the usual cycle involved in producing those statistics.