Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential merits of automatically moving claimants that would otherwise undergo managed migration to universal credit from 2019.

There are a number of issues with attempting to move claimants automatically from legacy benefits onto Universal Credit. Claimant data must be accurate and up-to-date to avoid transferring errors from legacy to Universal Credit. Claimants are not currently getting all the entitlements they are eligible for on legacy benefits, and making a new Universal Credit claim will ensure that the £2.4bn of currently unclaimed benefits will be paid to those who are entitled to them, an average of £285 per month for 700,000 households.

Universal Credit also requires some data, which is currently not held under the legacy system. For example, the Tax Credit system does not hold information on capital which is needed for a Universal Credit claim. The best way to ensure that we have the right data to process a claim is by requesting the claimant provide full and updated data.