Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the oral contribution of the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in response to the question from the hon. Member for Wokingham of 12 February 2025, Official Report, column 176WH, when further information in writing will be provided.

It is not currently possible to accurately identify all pensioner households who may be entitled to Pension Credit from Council or DWP data. This is because eligibility for Pension Credit depends on a household’s specific financial and personal circumstances – information which the Department does not usually hold but requires from the customer.

However, there are significant opportunities for DWP and Councils to work together, not least on the overlap between Pensions Credit and Housing Benefit. As part of our Pension Credit campaign, the Department wrote to 120,000 pensioner households in receipt of Housing Benefit inviting them to claim Pension Credit. Using existing Housing Benefit data, which local authorities also have access to, enabled the Department to make an assessment of potential Pension Credit eligibility and target those households directly. Since February, we have been targeting all new Housing Benefit claimants who we identify as potentially eligible for Pension Credit in this way.

More generally, the Department shares extensive data with local authorities for a variety of purposes. Despite what is sometimes claimed, local authorities are allowed to re-use that data under the terms of a data sharing Memorandum of Understanding, subject to them seeking their own legal advice, and subject to them notifying the Department of their intent. This data reuse process can include reusing data originating from DWP to help identify people eligible for Pension Credit.