Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer of 14 October to Question 6949 on Social Security Benefits: Foreign Nationals, if she will make it her policy to collect data on the nationality of those claiming benefits.

There are no plans to start consistently collecting nationality data across all DWP benefit lines. This is because DWP policy responsibility lies in establishing a customer’s eligibility to claim benefits. An individual’s specific nationality does not play a role in this.

The Department checks immigration status when assessing eligibility for benefits, but this information is not collated centrally across all benefit lines and hence is not readily available. We are, however, exploring the feasibility of developing suitable statistics related to the immigration status of non-UK / Irish customers.