Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many habitual residence tests were carried out in each of the last five years; and what proportion of those tests were passed.

The table below gives the total number of Habitual Residency Tests (HRT) completed by Universal Credit (UC) full service claimants for the last five years, and the proportion of these HRT where a pass outcome was recorded.

Table Notes:

1. All figures rounded to 100, but 2015 figures are rounded to the nearest 50.
2. Figures are taken from Management Information on Universal Credit Full Service claims and do not include Live Service claims for which HRT data is not available.
3. The month used in this data is the month in which the UC claim was declared (regardless of when the UC claim passed the HRT).
4. Subtracting the number of HRT passes from the total number of UC HRTs undertaken would not provide the number of HRT fails, as this also includes HRTs where the outcome could not be determined, for example, a claim was withdrawn before the HRT result was recorded.
5. The year refers to the calendar year, January – December apart from 2015 data which only includes June-December 2015 data and 2020 data which only includes January-March 2020 data.
6. Information on Universal Credit Full service claims may be subject to future change; this is because claim data may be entered retrospectively for past months. Any retrospective changes are most likely to affect recent months; for this reason, we have provided data up to the end of March 2020.
7. The UC full service data supplied is derived from unpublished management information, which was collected for internal Departmental use only and has not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. The data should therefore be treated with caution.