Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government how many national insurance numbers were issued in each of the past five years; and how many were outstanding at each year end.

The department regularly publishes the number of National Insurance Numbers (NINOs) allocated by DWP to Adult Foreign Nationals on Stat-Xplore, and these are shown in Table 1 for the past five years. The number of outstanding applications at the end of each year are shown in Table 2. These figures do not include those NINOs issued by HMRC to juveniles.

Table 1: Annual number of National Insurance Numbers Allocated to Adult Foreign Nationals, April 2018 to March 2023

Source: Stat-Xplore

Note: Data has been rounded to the nearest 10,000.

Table 2: Number of outstanding National Insurance Number applications at the end of the last 5 business years

Source: Internal NINO clerical Capacity Plans and NINO Work Position Overviews.

Note: Data has been rounded to the nearest 1,000.