Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 25 February 2019 to Question 223480 on Social Security Benefits: Fraud, what estimate her Department has made of the cost to the public purse of recording that additional data.

To provide a costing for adding this functionality the Department would need to analyse this change in more detail, assess the amount of effort required to develop and test it, review the priority against other work that is already committed to, and assess any potential impact it could have on current operational procedures. This assessment process is resource intensive; therefore the Department cannot justify the use of this resource as there is no business reason to add this functionality.