PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Employment and Support Allowance and Universal Credit (4 October 2024)

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of incapacity benefit claimants receiving (a) Universal Credit Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity element and (b) Employment and Support Allowance are parents of dependent children.

Asked by:
Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (Labour)

a) For UC, the Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity (LCWRA) and Disabled Child Entitlement breakdowns are currently temporarily unavailable on Stat-Xplore as part of the Households on Universal Credit dataset. Work is being carried out to resolve the issues and both affected measures are expected to be available in the next scheduled statistical release on 12 November 2024.

Once re-instated it should be possible to produce the number of households receiving the LCWRA element by Family Type.

Users can log in or access Stat-Xplore as a guest and, if needed, can access guidance on how to extract the information required. A user guide to the Universal Credit Official Statistics on Stat-Xplore is also available.

b) The table below shows the latest available number of claimants with Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) in payment who receive Child Benefit. The data is from February 2023.

	ESA Claimants	Percentage of total ESA Caseload
Receives Child Benefit	158,028	9.7

To note:

• This will underestimate the number of dependent children as Child Benefit is not paid in respect of every child, for example due to them not being in full-time non-advanced education, or non-claiming due to high income.

Answered by:
Sir Stephen Timms (Labour)
9 October 2024