Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many applications for employment and support allowance (a) lapsed and (b) were withdrawn due to the death of the applicant in the most recent 12 months for which data are available.

The dataset used to provide Employment and Support Allowance statistics does not contain the relevant information needed to measure this. To provide a reply would require us to link together several additional complex datasets and quality assure the results. Although theoretically possible, it is estimated that this would take in excess of 4 working days and would therefore incur disproportionate cost.