Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many households in the (a) Birkenhead constituency and (b) Wirral local authority area have been affected by the household benefit cap in each year since 2013.

The table below shows the number of households capped under Housing Benefit and Universal Credit in the requested areas in November of each year. We are not able to provide statistics on the numbers capped in total in each calendar year, but have provided the same month in each year to allow year-on-year comparisons.

Point-in-time Caseload: Number of households that had their Housing Benefit and Universal Credit capped.

Data Sources: DWP 100% Single Housing Benefit Extract, DWP Universal Credit Official Statistics Database and DWP Customer Information Service address file.

The Housing Benefit caseload data is taken from DWP Stat Xplore (https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/) whilst the Universal Credit caseload data is taken from the official statistics caseload tables, published on 7th Feb 2019 (https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/benefit-cap-number-of-households-capped-to-november-2018). Data on the number of capped households under Universal Credit by Parliamentary Constituency is not currently available on Stat Xplore or in the official statistics publication.

Table Notes:

1. Numbers less than 10 have been replaced with '..'’ and n/a indicates no recorded cases.
2. Figures include households that have had their Housing Benefit and Universal Credit full service capped. Universal Credit full service is available to all claimant types but only in certain areas of the country at November 2018.
3. Figures for Universal Credit may be revised in future publications, as Universal Credit awards may be retrospectively revised. More information on the revision of data can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/652170/universal-credit-statistics-background-methodology.pdf