Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many unemployed single parent households are in receipt of universal credit.

The table below provides the estimated number of households on Universal Credit occupied by single parents in June 2018 by employment status. The accompanying notes should be read in conjunction with the figures provided.

Estimated number of households on Universal Credit occupied by single parents, by employment status, Great Britain, June 2018

Source: Household and people on Universal Credit datasets

Notes:

1. Figures have been rounded to the nearest thousand. Individual figures may not add up to the total due to rounding.

2. These figures have been calculated by matching the Universal Credit household dataset, which contains information about family type, with the people on Universal Credit dataset, which contains information about employment. The figure for households occupied by single parents has been deduced where the household has a family type of ‘single with child dependant(s)’. It has not been possible to determine the employment status of approximately 8,000 single parent households.

3. A count date of the second Thursday of the month is used when calculating the statistics for the people and households on Universal Credit. An individual on Universal Credit at the count date will be recorded as in employment if they have employment earnings recorded within their completed Universal Credit assessment period closest to the count date. They may not be in employment on the count date.

4. Further information on the background and methodology can be accessed here:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/739399/universal-credit-statistics-background-methodology.pdf