Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many people claiming universal credit have accessed short term benefit advances to date.

Short Term Benefit Advances (STBA) are only available against legacy benefits. Universal Credit has its own system of benefit advances. The equivalent support to STBA is provided by either the Universal Credit (new claim) advance or the Universal Credit (change of circumstance) advance.

The information you have requested is not currently available. The Department published its strategy for releasing official statistics on Universal Credit in September 2013 which can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/universal-credit-statistics

These statistics however will be published in accordance with the relevant protocols in the Code of Practice for Official Statistics.

As outlined in the strategy, officials are currently quality assuring data for Universal Credit, therefore it is not yet possible to give a definitive list of what statistics will be provided in the future.