Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate his Department has made of the cost to the public purse of providing free (a) bus passes, (b) television licences, (c) medical prescriptions and (d) other benefits to all pensioners.

Tables showing benefit expenditure and forecasts from Autumn Statement 2016 will be published on 21 December 2016 and will be available at GOV.UK. However, expenditure and forecasts on a Budget 2016 basis for TV licences and other DWP pensioner benefits are available at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-2016

The annual cost for the England National Concessionary Travel Scheme (ENCTS) is around £1 billion.

It is not possible to provide total expenditure figures for the statutory concession in isolation, as data collected on the cost to public authorities of reimbursement and administration includes discretionary local extensions to the scheme, such as free peak-time travel or care-assistant concessions.

The detailed data is published on the GOV.UK website:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/bus08-concessionary-travel

Those aged 60 and over are exempt from NHS prescription charges. We do not hold information about the pensioner status of those claiming this exemption. The Department of Health has estimated that if this exemption was not available, but all other exemptions and the availability of prescription prepayment certificates remained the same, the saving to the public purse would be around £700 million.