PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Habitual Residence Test (10 July 2020)

Question Asked

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many habitual residence tests were carried out in each of the last five years; and what proportion of those tests were passed.

Asked by:
Ed Davey (Liberal Democrat)

Answer

The table below gives the total number of Habitual Residency Tests (HRT) completed by Universal Credit (UC) full service claimants for the last five years, and the proportion of these HRT where a pass outcome was recorded.

Year UC claim declared

UC claims with an associated HRT

UC claims with an associated HRT that passed

Proportion of Passes

2015

50

50

100%

2016

4,600

4,100

89%

2017

51,400

44,800

87%

2018

245,900

201,900

82%

2019

417,400

364,100

87%

2020

231,400

211,900

92%

Table Notes:

  1. All figures rounded to 100, but 2015 figures are rounded to the nearest 50.
  2. Figures are taken from Management Information on Universal Credit Full Service claims and do not include Live Service claims for which HRT data is not available.
  3. The month used in this data is the month in which the UC claim was declared (regardless of when the UC claim passed the HRT).
  4. Subtracting the number of HRT passes from the total number of UC HRTs undertaken would not provide the number of HRT fails, as this also includes HRTs where the outcome could not be determined, for example, a claim was withdrawn before the HRT result was recorded.
  5. The year refers to the calendar year, January – December apart from 2015 data which only includes June-December 2015 data and 2020 data which only includes January-March 2020 data.
  6. Information on Universal Credit Full service claims may be subject to future change; this is because claim data may be entered retrospectively for past months. Any retrospective changes are most likely to affect recent months; for this reason, we have provided data up to the end of March 2020.
  7. The UC full service data supplied is derived from unpublished management information, which was collected for internal Departmental use only and has not been quality assured to National Statistics or Official Statistics publication standard. The data should therefore be treated with caution.

Answered by:
Justin Tomlinson (Conservative)
20 July 2020

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.