Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what was the (1) average, (2) longest, and (3) shortest, clearance time for (a) a mandatory reconsideration, and (b) a successful appeal outcome to be implemented, in relation to Universal Credit in each month of 2020.

Table 1 below shows the Median, Lower Quartile and Upper Quartile of the number of days taken for a Universal Credit (UC) Mandatory Reconsideration (MR) to be cleared from registration. This data covers all UC MRs cleared in each month from January 2020 – October 2020, and does not include those cancelled or withdrawn.

Table 1: Times from UC MR registration to clearance in days from January 2020 – October 2020

Please note that information about the extremes of a distribution (e.g. the maximum clearance time) risks being disclosive. We would not release this information publicly. Therefore, we have presented information on the lower quartile, median and upper quartile of clearance times.

Over the same period the UC caseload, expressed as ‘People on Universal Credit’, increased from 2.77 million to 5.73 million with a sharp increase from 3.00 million to 5.26 million between 12^th March and 14^th May 2020. People on Universal Credit counts the number of people with an open claim on the count date who had accepted a claimant commitment and verified their identity. These figures are from the Universal Credit official statistics publication available on gov.uk which also includes figures on volumes of claims, starts and households.

The information requested on the clearance times for a successful appeal outcome to be implemented is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

Notes

• Figures are for Great Britain only.
• The MR clearance times are unpublished data. They should be used with caution and may be subject to future revision.
• The median is presented as the average instead of the mean because the mean can be unduly affected by outlying cases.
• Definition of Lower Quartile: The lower quartile is the value for which 25% of all clearance times fall below if you were to order the distribution from lowest value to highest value.
• Definition of median: The median time is the middle value if you were to order all the times within the distribution from lowest value to highest value.
• Definition of Upper Quartile: The upper quartile is the value for which 75% of all clearance times fall below if you were to order the distribution from lowest value to highest value.