Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the timescale is for all universal credit claimants who previously received (a) severe disability premium and (b) enhanced disability premium to (i) have their payments reinstated and (ii) receive backdated payments.

Disabled people are some of the biggest beneficiaries of Universal Credit, with around 1 million disabled households having on average around £100 a month more on Universal Credit than they would have had on the legacy benefits. When designing Universal Credit, a choice was made not to replicate every aspect of the disability provision in the previous system, including the Enhanced Disability Premium.

The Severe Disability Premium (SDP) gateway has been in place for over a year to prevent those claimants entitled to the SDP as part of their legacy benefit from claiming Universal Credit. We have successfully identified eligible former SDP claimants who have already moved to Universal Credit due to a change in circumstances, providing them with monthly payments and a lump sum in arrears, where appropriate.

As of 17 January 2020, 15,397 claims have been paid an SDP transitional payment. The median value of the lump sum payments is £2,280. To date, over £51.5m has been disbursed to support former SDP claimants, including the recurring payments that have now commenced.

Positive progress has been made and caseload growth has now slowed, however, in the event a new case is discovered payments will be in place quickly. It is not possible to estimate when we will have paid everyone who is entitled as some people become entitled to these payments retrospectively, and therefore the caseload is not a fixed number.