Information requested is listed in the following table. Housing and council tax benefit are awarded by the claimant’s local authority and therefore, are not included in the table. The information is extracted from management information held by the Department’s two Regional Delivery Centres and does not include numbers of mail items sent from the Department’s local offices about these benefits as this information is not held centrally and could be obtained only by disproportionate cost.
Volume 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 (a) Pension credit 3,053,168 9,601,349 16,826,461 14,595,985 11,694,195 (c) Income support 40,579,060 36,211,335 25,970,123 21,882,796 21,575,397 (d) Jobseeker’s allowance 36,731,443 33,285,018 26,238,083 19,584,809 19,806,068 (e) Incapacity benefit 15,082,958 12,306,938 11,357,700 9,214,905 9,860,895 (g) State pension 26,305,633 25,399,385 24,973,194 19,251,923 26,755,872
The information about how many mail items were sent to deceased individuals is not held centrally and could be obtained only at disproportionate cost. The Department has processes in place to collect death notifications from the Office for National Statistics (for England and Wales), the General Registrar (Scotland) and the General Registrar (Northern Ireland) on a weekly basis in order to update records. However, many notifications are received from the next of kin in advance of the notification from the Registrars. As part of the Office for National Statistics Modernisation Programme, dates of death will be notified to the Department on a daily basis from March 2008 which should ensure the level of notifications sent to deceased individuals by the Department is minimised.
The Department received over 18.5 million notifications of change of address in 2006, relating to the actual number of individuals who have moved. For example if a family consisting of man, wife and two children changed address, we would expect to receive four changes to personal details, if the children were the subjects of a child benefit claim. Every effort is made to ensure databases are updated with change of address details as soon as they are received.