Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she has taken to increase awareness of the availability of Pension Credit in rural areas.

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 Britain. This included adverts on television; radio (including Greatest Hits Radio Black Country & Shropshire, Hits Radio Black Country & Shropshire, Classic FM Midlands, Smooth Radio); social media; on YouTube; on advertising screens in Pharmacies, Post Offices and leisure centres. The campaign also featured on train advertising panels as well as in national and regional press (including the Shropshire Star).

As part of the campaign, the Department engaged with all councils in Great Britain, through the regular Local Authority Welfare Direct bulletins. Shropshire Council supported the Pension Credit campaign during our ‘Week of Action’ in September 2024, and on social media.

More recently, around 11 million pensioners will have received a leaflet promoting Pension Credit along with their State Pension uprating letter.

Further campaign and promotional activity is planned for this year.

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(opens in a new tab). The statistics show that the Department made almost 50,000 extra awards on the comparable period in 2023/24.