Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps are being taken to identify those entitled to pension credit who have not taken it up in each region of the UK.

Pension Credit take-up statistics cannot be broken down to regional level.

The Department has undertaken a range of actions to raise awareness of Pension Credit, encourage pensioners to check their eligibility, and to make a claim. This has included a Pension Credit media day of action in June last year as well as setting up a Pension Credit working group, which is made up of a diverse range of organisations and tasked with identifying new practical initiatives that we can work on together to help increase Pension Credit take up. We continue to use opportunities to promote Pension Credit using proactive press activity and social media to reach potential recipients, their families and friends.

Our initial internal management information suggests new claims for Pension Credit in the past twelve months to December 2021 were around 136,000, representing an increase of around 30% compared to the 12 months to December 2019 when they were around 105,000. It also suggests that we have been receiving consistently high volumes of claims over recent months, at around 3,300 per week.

This management information has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics but are provided here in the interests of transparency.

The impact of these claim volumes on numbers of successful awards and on Pension Credit take-up will take longer to establish given the usual cycle involved in producing those statistics.