Universal Credit

(asked on 13th June 2019) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many occasions universal credit claimants have registered concerns, questions, or complaints on Real Time Information in each of the last 12 months.


Answered by
Alok Sharma Portrait
Alok Sharma
COP26 President (Cabinet Office)
This question was answered on 21st June 2019

The Department has been working closely with HMRC since Universal Credit went live in 2013 to support and inform employers who report earnings to emphasise the importance of timely reporting via the Real Time Information (RTI) system.

HMRC have updated their guidance to reiterate to employers the importance of reporting accurate dates and the impact on payment cycles; the Financial Secretary to the Treasury is also working closely with HMRC and employers to do this.

RTI concerns, questions and complaints data is not centrally collated and could only be supplied at disproportionate to the Department.

The Department received over 31 million RTI notifications from employers for Universal Credit claimants in the last 12 months (17 June 2018 to 16 June 2019). These records were used to produce over 18.5 million individual earnings calculations and 77,952 of those calculations were disputed by claimants, of which around a fifth were upheld.

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