Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many applications were made for short-term benefit advance and hardship payments in the last 12 months; and what proportion of such applications were successful.

The information requested in relation to Short Term Benefit Advance (STBA) is shown in the following table.

For context we have also supplied the number of claims which have been referred for decision and those which have not been submitted for decision due to primary benefit being paid.

Notes:

STBA Applications Received cannot be calculated using the totals of Primary Benefit Paid and Referred for Decision due to other categories being included that are not shown.

Only Working Age Benefits (i.e. ESA, IB, JSA and IS) are included in the above information for benefit advance applications as the number of applications received for State Pension Credit and Carer’s Allowance is not available.

Source:

STBA Applications Received, Primary Benefits Paid & Referred for Decison - Management Information System Programme (MISP). This collation is based on clerical counts submitted by the each Centre and is Internal MI which has been agreed for use in publications of Parliamentary questions and Freedom of Information requests.

STBA Awarded - Benefit Expenditure Business Information system

The information requested in relation to hardship applications and awards is shown in the table below.

Notes:

1. The tables show the total number of JSA and ESA hardship applications received and the number of awards made in the period from 1 April 2015 to 31 March 2016. These figures show applications and awards rather than the number of individuals; individuals may have made more than one application and received more than one award.
2. Data has been given to March 2016 to align to the date of latest published information on ESA and JSA sanctions.
3. It is not possible to state the proportion of applications that were or were not successful, as there are a number of reasons that an application may not convert to an award, including withdrawal of the application.
4. Figures are rounded to the nearest 100.

Source:

Hardship applications and awards - The numbers are collated from aggregate DWP MISP Management Information. This data is a combination of system and clerically sourced Management Information. As such it may contain duplicates and other inaccuracies. It does not form part of the official statistics outputs that are released by the Department in accordance with the UK Statistics Authority’s Code of Practice, and is subject to potential future revision.