Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people will benefit from the changes to the tapering on university credit announced in the Autumn Budget 2021 (a) nationally, (b) in York and (c) in York Central constituency.

Universal Credit recipients in work will soon benefit from a reduction in the Universal Credit taper rate from 63% to 55%, and increasing the work allowance by £504 per year means that 1.9m working households will be able to keep substantially more of what they earn. These measures effectively represent a tax cut, worth around £2.2bn a year in 2022-23, for the lowest paid in society, and are combined with a rise in the National Living Wage to £9.50 per hour.

The latest available statistics on the number of people who are on Universal Credit and are in employment, for Great Britain and by local authority and parliamentary constituency, are published and can be found at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/

Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started.html