Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, for each year since 2012, what proportion of the population aged between 18 and 59 over the preceding four years were claiming working age benefits for three of those four years.

This statistic was part of a series last updated in April 2016 and has since been discontinued. It formed part of the Social Justice Outcomes Framework which was replaced by the Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families indicators, published in April 2017. Any new statistic measuring the duration of working age benefit claims would need to incorporate Universal Credit data. As a result, the information requested is not readily available and can only be provided at disproportionate cost.

The Government still produces data on long-term worklessness and on some individual out-of-work benefit claim durations. The Office for National Statistics publishes data on children in long-term workless households and on households where all members have never worked. There is also available data on the duration of Job Seeker’s Allowance, Income Support and Employment and Support Allowance claims.