Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the time between the annual publication of pension credit take-up statistics and the year those statistics refer to.

The DWP publishes annual take-up statistics for income-related benefits, including Pension Credit (PC). These are produced from two data sources: firstly, administrative data covering people receiving PC. And secondly, survey data, from the Family Resources Survey (FRS) which is collected over the financial year. The data then goes through a thorough quality assurance process, followed by data matching to admin data. The survey data is then modelled using a static microsimulation model known as the Policy Simulation Model (PSM) which allows estimates of the population and unclaimed amounts for those who are entitled but not receiving (ENRs). Therefore, this process takes several months after the data has been collected.