Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the effect of trends in the number of universal credit applications during the covid-19 outbreak on the ability of her Department to process applications in a timely manner.

In response to unprecedented numbers of new claims, the Department has taken steps to ensure that people get the support they need quickly. The latest payment time statistics show over 90% of new eligible claimants are paid in full and on time. Data on payment timeliness up to April 2020 will be available on Stat-Xplore from 11th August

The latest available information on Universal Credit payment timeliness is published and can be found at:

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/.

Guidance on how to extract the information required can be found at

https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/Getting-Started.html

Notes:

Payment timeliness is published with a further month between the publication date and the latest period being published for other UC household official statistics. This is because the data is subject to a lot of retrospection. Publishing data earlier would lead to relatively large revisions and to a loss of confidence in the earlier figures. This is the earliest payment timeliness can be published when balancing the needs of quality and timeliness of the statistics.