Social Security Benefits: Foreign Nationals
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, if she will publish the number of foreign nationals in receipt of each benefit across working age welfare spending.
Answered by Andrew Western
There are no plans to start consistently collecting nationality data across all working age benefits. 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.
The Department publishes Universal Credit (UC) immigration status and nationality statistics as part of the Universal Credit statistics publication. The latest release of these statistics is included in the latest Universal Credit statistical bulletin. ‘Table 2’ in the latest Universal Credit immigration status and nationality data tables provides information on the number of people on Universal Credit by immigration status, nationality group and employment status, for each month from April 2022 to June 2025.
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