Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to page 146 of the Office for Budget Responsibility's Economic and Fiscal Outlook 2018, published in 29 October 2018, if she will make an assessment of the contribution of (a) the cost of administering universal credit, (b) policy changes affecting the level payable under universal credit and (c) any other factors to universal credit becoming more expensive than the legacy system would have been from 2019-20 to 2022-23.

As detailed in Office for Budget Responsibility’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook 2018 (OBR EFO) Universal Credit is now forecast to be more generous to claimants than the legacy benefit system. This is a combination of forecasting changes which are detailed on page 150 of the OBR’s EFO as well as the impacts of the Budget 2018 which can be seen in table 4.28 and on pages 150 to 153. Therefore it is not the cost of administering the system which has caused these changes.

In our published Universal Credit Full Business Case Summary we set out that, Universal Credit will be less costly to deliver than the legacy benefit system, and that Universal Credit operational costs break even against legacy operational savings from 2019/20 and are reduced in steady state by over £0.3 billion (circa 30%) on a like for like basis.