Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much his Department spent on short term benefit advances for claimants of universal credit in (a) 2013-14 and (b) 2014-15 to date.

Short Term Benefit Advances (STBA) are only available against legacy benefits. Universal Credit has it's 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.

Currently these costs are not reported separately. UC benefit expenditure is published in the table in the attached link

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/benefit-expenditure-and-caseload-tables-2014