Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps her Department is taking to help increase the level of uptake of Pension Credit in (a) Harpenden and Berkhamsted constituency and (b) the rest of England.

The Government wants all pensioners to get the support to which they are rightly entitled. That is why we ran the biggest ever Pension Credit take-up campaign across the whole of Great Britian. This included adverts on television; radio; social media; on YouTube; on advertising screens in Pharmacies, Post Offices and leisure centres (including in Harpenden and Berkhamsted). The campaign also featured on train advertising panels (including on Chiltern, Greater Anglia, and Thameslink services) as well as in the press.

As part of the campaign, the Department engaged with all councils in Great Britain, including Hertfordshire council, through the regular Local Authority Welfare Direct bulletins. We also directly targeted 120,000 pensioners in receipt of Housing Benefit inviting them to claim Pension Credit. More recently, around 11 million pensioners will have received a leaflet promoting Pension Credit along with their State Pension uprating letter.

Building on the success of our campaign, we are now writing to all pensioners who make a new claim for Housing Benefit, and who appear to be entitled to Pension Credit, encouraging them to make a claim.

The latest Pension Credit applications and awards statistics were published on 27 February and are available at: Pension Credit applications and awards: February 2025 - GOV.UK. The statistics show that the Department made almost 50,000 extra awards on the comparable period in 2023/24. The next set of statistics will be published on 29 May.