Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to his Department's press release entitled Trial encourages low-income pensioners to apply for extra financial support, published on 17 July 2023, what the priority objectives are of the invitation to claim trial.

In addition to our ongoing Pension Credit communications campaign, in July we launched a more targeted ‘Invitation to Claim’ trial. Approximately 2,500 pensioner households across ten local authority areas in Great Britain were sent letters encouraging them to contact DWP and make a claim. The areas were chosen to be representative of urban, rural and coastal communities and target households were identified as most likely to be missing out because they were claiming Housing Benefit but not Pension Credit.

The objectives of the trial are to learn whether using data in this way can help accurately identify eligible households; and whether directly contacting households in this way is an effective way of boosting Pension Credit applications.