Social Security Benefits: Uprating

(asked on 21st May 2019) - View Source

Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pursuant to the Answer of 20 May 2019 to Question 254832 on Social Security Benefits: Uprating, what estimate his Department has made of the cost of resuming the uprating of social security payments in line with CPI for each of the next five years; and from which budget his Department plans to pay for that uprating.


Answered by
Elizabeth Truss Portrait
Elizabeth Truss
This question was answered on 4th June 2019

Twice a year, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) produce detailed forecasts for the coming five years, assessing the likely impact of policy decisions and expected developments in the economy. A key component of this is the welfare annually managed expenditure (AME) forecast, which estimates future government expenditure on social security benefits and tax credits.

The current welfare freeze, which was announced in 2015, runs from 2016/17 to 2019/20. As such, the cost of resuming the uprating of frozen benefits from 2020/21 is already accounted for in the welfare forecast – which combines DWP, HMRC and BEIS AME expenditure. The OBR does not routinely disaggregate the cost of uprating within the forecast.

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