Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps he is taking to prevent (a) payment delays and (b) incorrect fluctuations in monthly payments for Universal Credit claimants in the North East.

The Department has a dedicated performance team in Universal Credit working with our teams nationally to continually level up caseloads/workloads to ensure timely and accurate payments to customers.

Our current payment performance shows we paid 92.1% of all new claimants to Universal Credit accurately and on time. In addition, we paid 97.1% of all other customers their Universal Credit entitlement accurately and on time.

Universal Credit payment timeliness statistics for new claims are published in Table 6 in the Households on Universal Credit section on Stat-Xplore. These figures can be filtered by different geographies and can be found at: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/

Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started.html