Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government why the Department for Work and Pensions and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs have stopped publishing data on tax contributions and welfare payments by nationality.

Following the review by the Office for Statistics Regulation, HMRC proposed changes to 25 statistics publications in a public consultation that ran from 24 October 2022 to 16 January 2023. In response to the user consultation the annual Income Tax, NICs, tax credits and child benefit statistics for non-UK nationals release was discontinued. The consultation suggested the statistics to be of limited value to users, due to the decrease in data coverage as tax credits claimants move across to Universal Credit, and the lack of timeliness in the data.

Separately the DWP reviewed the ‘Nationality at point of National Insurance number registration of DWP working age benefit recipients’ statistics and announced in July 2022 that it would be ceasing publication of these statistics as they no longer met the purpose for which they were created. The statistics reflected the nationality status of the benefit claimants at the point of National Insurance number (NINo) registration, which does not necessarily reflect the nationality at the point of claiming the benefit, as the allocation of a NINo can be made many years, or even decades, before an individual claims a benefit. Therefore, benefit recipients who were non-UK nationals and subsequently obtained British citizenship would have been counted in those statistics as non-UK nationals.

The proposals and outcomes from the consultation on changes to HMRC statistics publications are published on GOV.UK.

HMRC does publish information on non-UK nationals in PAYE employment by nationality, region and industry on GOV.UK.