Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the note on his Department's website, dated 17 October 2022, on the loss of Maternity Allowance statistics for May 2022, for what reason this data was lost; and whether his Department (a) has received and (b) expects to receive financial compensation for the data loss.

The 5% Maternity Allowance data scan for May 2022 has not been produced following an administrative error by data suppliers in the scheduling of the run of the data. The scan containing MA data was run a month ahead of schedule and therefore reflected an incomplete count.

Since discovery, suppliers have implemented safeguards to prevent a reoccurrence.

Data for the next data point, August 2022, were created successfully using the new safeguards and will be released at 9:30 on 14 February 2023.

Provision of this data is core funded with an internal Service Level Agreement with no financial compensation in the agreement. Therefore, no compensation is expected.