Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will make an (a) assessment of whether universal credit adequately covers the cost of living for recipients and (b) estimate of the number of universal credit applicants who access food bank services.

No assessment of foodbank use has been made. There is no consistent and accurate measure of food bank usage at a constituency or national level.

Universal Credit is a flexible, personalised benefit which responds to people’s circumstances. It includes separate elements to provide support for housing costs, children and childcare costs and support for disabled people and carers. UC entitlement automatically increases when someone’s income falls, meaning that claimants are better supported. Spring ‘20 forecasts estimated that when fully rolled out, UC will be £2 billion per year more generous than the support it replaces.

Throughout the pandemic we have targeted our support to those most in need by raising the living wage, spending hundreds of billions to safeguard jobs, boosting welfare support by billions and introducing the Covid Winter Grant Scheme (now the Covid Local Support Grant).