Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people are in receipt of a sickness benefit.

People ‘in receipt of a sickness benefits’ have been assumed to be those in the main phase of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and the Universal Credit (UC) Limited Capability to Work (LCW) and Limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA) groups. The Department regularly publishes Benefit Combination statistics on Stat-Xplore and these were extended in February 2024 to include additional information for those on ESA and the UC Health Journey, so can now be used to provide the information, from quarter ending May 2019 to the end of the latest quarter, February 2024.

The figures can be obtained from the ‘Benefit Combinations - Data from May 2019 for England and Wales’ and ‘Benefit Combinations – Data from May 2019 for Scotland’ datasets using the ‘Additional Claim Details’ options. The ‘ESA Phase of Claim’ and ‘UC Health Journey’ options should be used to identify quarterly totals for ESA Support Group (SG), ESA Work-related Activity Group (WRAG), Universal Credit Limited Capability to Work (LCW) and Limited capability for work and work-related activity (LCWRA) groups, alongside Totals for those ‘Not on ESA’ and ‘Not on UC or UC Health Journey’.

Users can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest user and, if needed, can access guidance on how to extract the information required.

Using the Benefit Combinations data on Stat-Xplore and the assumptions above, there are 3,043,410 working age claimants of ESA (SG or WRAG) or UC Health (LCW or LCWRA) within GB, at Feb-24.

Notes:

1. Total is rounded to 10.
2. A person can claim both ESA and be on the UC health caseload and these claimants would be counted in each separate caseload in the published data on Stat-Xplore. Benefit Combinations data on Stat-Xplore allows these 'Dual claims' to be identified and only counted once in the above.