Work and Pensions written question – answered at on 24 January 2012.
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how many and what proportion of all adults potentially eligible for council tax benefit are pensioners in each local authority in England.
Estimates of the population entitled to council tax benefit are not available at a local authority level due to insufficient sample size. Estimates are available for Great Britain from the Income-related Benefits Estimates of Take-up report. The report produces estimates of take-up of council tax benefit by family type. The latest figures cover the period 2008-09.
The report brings together information from DWP/local authority benefit records and the Family Resources Survey to provide estimates of take-up among the private household population in Great Britain. Take-up estimates are presented as robust ranges of the population who are entitled to but do not take-up council tax benefit. These ranges account for possible biases that arise in estimating take-up from the available data sources. These ranges also account for the effects of sampling variation (otherwise known as sampling error).
As the full entitled population of council tax benefit consists of both the entitled recipients (those entitled to and receiving the benefit), and the estimates of entitled non-recipients (those entitled to but not receiving the benefit), the number and proportion of this population who are pensioners is presented as a range in which it is assumed the true value lies.
As such, the number of pensioners who were entitled to council tax benefit in Great Britain, 2008-09, was between 3,950,000 and 4,490,000 (rounded to the nearest 10,000) which is equivalent to between 50% and 63% of the entire population entitled to council tax benefit.
For context, the take-up rates of pensioners in 2008-09 were lower than non-pensioners for council tax benefit: pensioners had a take-up rate of between 56% and 64% while non-pensioners had a take-up rate of between 72% and 81%. The full take-up report can be found at:
Yes0 people think so
No0 people think not
Would you like to ask a question like this yourself? Use our Freedom of Information site.