Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 24 June 2019 to Question 264329, of the 749,000 claimants with deductions from universal credit for non-universal credit debts, how many claimants are repaying debts in each of the Prescribed Social Security Benefits / Payments categories.

As at 24 June 2019, 593k of the 749k debtors are currently repaying debts*. DWP is unable to break this down by benefit.

The Department works hard to prevent potential benefit overpayments from occurring. Internal and external data matches are increasingly helping inform benefit payments and alerting staff to check for any undeclared changes in people’s circumstances in real time.

Where overpayments do occur, the Department ensures that appropriate safeguards are in place to protect claimants who are subject to deductions to repay these overpayments.

*The data provided in this response has been sourced from internal management information and was not intended for public release. It should therefore not be compared to any other, similar data subsequently released by the Department.