Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what plans her Department has to measure the effectiveness of the 12-week awareness campaign on Pension Credit take-up that started on 12 February 2020.

The Government wants to make sure that all pensioners eligible can claim the Pension Credit to which they are entitled. There are already around 1.6 million people claiming some £5.4 billion in Pension Credit but some people may be missing out. That is why on the 10^th February we launched a 12 week nationwide campaign to raise awareness of Pension Credit and encourage those over State Pension age to check whether they’re eligible. The campaign includes a short, animated video that is being shown in GP waiting rooms and in Post Offices. It is also being shown to Facebook users and supported by messaging on social media.

As part of the campaign we are asking a sample of callers to the Pension Credit claim line whether they are calling as result of having seen the campaign materials and where they heard about Pension Credit. We are monitoring the Facebook activity using digital metrics which will give us insight on the performance of the adverts and how long people are watching the videos for. We are also monitoring the number of visits to the Pension Credit pages on www.gov.uk and use of the Pension Credit Toolkit (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pension-credit-toolkit). At the end of the campaign, we will carry out a full evaluation based on these results in order to measure the effectiveness and impact of the campaign.