Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many children were living in households (a) in receipt of Universal Credit and (b) subject to deductions in each parliamentary constituency in the most recent month for which data is available; what the (i) total and (ii) average sum of Universal Credit deductions was for households with children in each constituency; and what proportion of those sums was deducted to repay advance payments.

The requested information is provided in the separate spreadsheet and are subject to the following caveats:

1. For low level geography: volumes have been rounded to the nearest 100, total amounts have been rounded to the nearest £1,000 and average amounts have been rounded to the nearest £1. For totals at GB level: volumes have been rounded to the nearest 100,000, total amounts have been rounded to the nearest £1,000,000 and average amount has been rounded to the nearest £1. Proportions have been rounded to the nearest percentage point.

2. The sum of individual low level geographies may not sum to the total figure due to rounding.

3. Deductions include advance repayments, third party deductions and all other deductions, but exclude sanctions and fraud penalties which are reductions of benefit rather than deductions.

4. Children are defined here as being people who are declared as living in the same household as the UC claimant(s) and who are under the age of 20. The number of children may not be equal to the number of dependent children in the household who are eligible for child element for various reasons. This includes children over the age of 16 in non-advanced full-time education, looked-after children and, other young people living in multigenerational households whose parents are not the claimant. Those affected by the policy to provide support for a maximum of two children may also have a larger number of children compared to the number of children entitled to the child element in their household.

5. Figures are provisional and are subject to retrospective change as later data becomes available.

6. The ‘unknown' parliamentary constituency equates to 0.4% of all households and relates to households for which a constituency could not be determined due to incomplete postcode information.

7. Data for August 2023 has been provided in line with the latest available UC Household Statistics.

8. Claim numbers and numbers of children on UC will not match official statistics caseloads due to methodological differences.