Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, in the most recent month for which data is available, in what proportion of universal credit assessments for working claimants was income data taken from (a) RTI data provided by HMRC and (b) claimants' payslips.

The information requested is not held by the Department. Adjustments to payments owing to RTI and self-reported earnings cannot always be separated from other adjustments to a payment, such as a repayment of advances.

From the information that is readily available for Universal Credit Full Service, in January 2019, over 1 million households had payments processed, and of these around 380,000 had an adjustment.

Of the 380,000 payments processed that had an adjustment:

• 88% of the records had earnings information from HMRC’s Real-Time Earnings system.
• 2% of the records had Self-Reported Earnings - cases where there were no available real time information feeds. Some of this information would have come from payslips, however it is not possible to break this data down further.
• less than 0.5% of the records had both Real-Time and Self-Reported Earnings information; and
• 9% of the records had earnings from other sources such as self employed earnings and other income, which cannot readily be separated.

Notes:

• Figures are rounded to the nearest 1,000.
• Percentages are rounded to the nearest %.