Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to paragraph 35 of the equalities impact assessment for the Government’s decision to freeze Local Housing Allowance rates in 2021-22, if she will place the data her Department collected in respect of the second bullet point, which states that we will monitor the proportion of LHA claimants with shortfalls and the amounts of those shortfalls, in the House of Commons Library.

As stated in the Equality Analysis, the department collects data which enables the calculation of the proportion of LHA claimants with shortfalls and the amounts of these shortfalls. Shortfalls relate to the value of a household’s rent which exceeds the Local Housing Allowance.

Since the production of the Equality Analysis, we have monitored these two metrics as provided below for each quarter of data since. Shortfall Prevalence relates to the proportion of LHA households which have a shortfall. Average Monthly Shortfalls relate to the mean average amount of monthly shortfalls for LHA households. Both are at the Great Britain level for households in receipt of Housing Benefit and the Universal Credit Housing Element.