Stephen Timms – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2016-01-28.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, pursuant to the Answer 27 January 2016 to Question 23759, whether there is scope for the Work Coach to pass on details of the claimant’s universal credit application to their local authority in order to begin automatically the application for council tax reduction.

Priti Patel

A process to automate the sharing of data between Universal Credit and Local Authorities to support applications to Local Council Tax Reduction Schemes will be implemented in the next month.

There are no plans to automate applications for Council Tax Reduction through Universal Credit. This must be done separately by the claimant with the Local Authority.