Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent estimate she has made of the number and proportion of unemployed people who are entitled to claim (a) jobseeker's allowance and (b) universal credit but are not doing so.

At this point in the Universal Credit (UC) rollout schedule, we are not able to distinguish between Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) and UC claims at entitlement level within the Family Resources Survey data (available on gov.uk) for the purposes of estimating take-up statistics. Therefore the JSA data are not of a suitable quality to be published. We are also unable to estimate UC take-up rates at present.

In total, there are 700,000 households not claiming their full entitlement under the legacy system, that we expect will claim Universal Credit because it is a more accurate system.