Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

Whether he has made an assessment of the potential merits of publishing levels of welfare spending on foreign nationals by benefit type.

My Department remains focussed on ensuring we provide robust, transparent data where this is available.

That is why we regularly publish quarterly official statistics on the number of Universal Credit claimants broken down by immigration status type and nationality group, as well as whether claimants are in work. We have no plans to change this approach.

In benefits other than Universal Credit, nationality and immigration status is not held or collected on digital systems in a way that allows it to be extracted for the publication as official statistics.