Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to Answer of 24 March 2020 to Question 30051 on Pension Credit stating that her Department will carry out a full evaluation of the 12-week Pension Credit awareness campaign that started on 12 February 2020, if she will outline (a) the results of that evaluation including how successful it was in meeting its objectives and (b) her Department’s plans for future awareness raising of Pension Credit following that evaluation.

The purpose of the campaign was to support Pension Credit take-up and test impact.

There was a 20% increase in telephone calls to the Pension Credit claim line (during the course of the campaign the weekly average was 2,493 phone calls compared to a weekly average in 2019 of 2,079 phone calls).

There was also significant engagement with social media and a spike of activity on viewing the Pension Credit website pages with more than 5,000 sessions on the launch day, 10 February (compared to 1,000 on 3 February).

However, it should be stressed that other factors may affect these numbers, including the BBC TV licensing decision and the effect of the Pandemic.

Due to the Pandemic, all pensions campaigns are currently on hold.