Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many times the universal credit service has been unavailable since 23 March 2020; and for what reasons that service was unavailable on each of those occasions.

There have been over 3 million Universal Credit claims made since mid-March; six times the volume that the Department would typically receive. Despite that surge, the system is standing up to the challenge and demonstrating that resilience and scalability are integral parts its design, whilst maintaining high levels of payment timeliness.

There have been no unplanned outages of the Universal Credit online service since March 2020.