Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 6 November 2014 to Question 212396, what the mean number is of front line work coaches involved in testing in each stage of user acceptance testing.

We plan the testing of each new release of Universal Credit carefully and arrange for specific expert users to test the changes. This means that staff who have particular expertise in parts of Universal Credit are asked to specifically test that part of the system – such as Work Coaches or Service Centre agents. We do not have an average numbers of testers who are required to participate in testing – each test phase varies the numbers and length of testing completed, depending on the size and complexity of the elements of the release.