Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the (a) average processing time, (b) approval rate and (c) refusal rate is of requests for Alternative Payment Arrangements from private landlords where their tenant is in receipt of housing benefit.

There is no target timescale for processing applications for Alternative Payment Arrangements (APAs). APAs are available at any point during Universal Credit claims where there is risk of financial harm to a claimant and/or their family.

APAs can help claimants who need additional support with:

• paying housing costs of Universal Credit as a Managed Payment direct to the landlord;
• more frequent than monthly payments; or;
• split payment of an award between partners.

Universal Credit payment timeliness statistics are published in the Households on Universal Credit section on Stat-Xplore. These figures can be broken down by those with APAs and can be found at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/(opens in a new tab).

Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started.html

Regarding (b) approval rate and (c) refusal rate, the information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate costs.