Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much (a) housing benefit and (b) UC equivalent allowance was paid directly to councils in each of the last three years.

The information requested for Universal Credit is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.

The information requested for Housing Benefit may be found by using the Detailed Housing Type and the Payment Destination fields in the “Housing Benefit - Data from April 2018” dataset in Stat-Xplore ((Stat-Xplore - Log in (dwp.gov.uk)). Guidance on how to use Stat-Xplore can be found here: https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/online-help/index.html. An account is not required to use Stat- Xplore; the ‘Guest Login’ feature gives instant access to the main functions.

The Department is working towards developing these statistics internally so that we will be in a position to answer similar Parliamentary Questions in the future.