Working age benefit claimants

The information in this dataset refers to numbers of Working Age Benefit Claimants and is derived from a 100% data source; the Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study (WPLS).

The dataset provides counts of benefit claimants categorised by their statistical group (their main reason for interacting with the benefit system). For example if a client is claiming Jobseeker's Allowance, they are categorised in this dataset as a "Job Seeker". In the case that a client is claiming for more than one benefit, a benefit hierarchy is applied to ensure that clients appear only once in the dataset. The main advantage of this dataset is that the double counting of claimants of multiple benefits has been removed so that users will get a more accurate picture of benefit claiming and worklessness at a small area level.

Each claimant can only be assigned to one of eight statistical groups, in the following priority order:

Job Seekers: Jobseeker's Allowance claimants.

Employment and Support Allowance and incapacity benefits: Employment and Support Allowance or Incapacity Benefit or Severe Disablement Allowance claimants.

Lone Parent: Income Support claimants with a child under 16 and no partner.

Carer: Carers Allowance claimants.

Others on Income Related Benefit:Other Income Support (including IS Disability premium) or Pension Credit claimants under State Pension age.

Disabled: Disability Living Allowance.

Bereaved: Widow's Benefit, Bereavement Benefit or Industrial Death Benefit claimants.

Unknown: Disability Living Allowance data are not available until May 2002. Prior to this, claimants who would have appeared in the disabled category or below are classed as unknown.

Benefits are arranged hierarchically and claimants are assigned to the highest statistical group that they belong to. Thus a person who claims Income Support as a Lone Parent and also receives Incapacity Benefit would be classified into "Employment and Support Allowance and incapacity benefits"; group. For this reason the group "Lone Parent", for example will not contain all lone parents claiming Income Support. Some will be included in the "Employment and Support Allowance and incapacity benefits" group instead.

The data refer to a snapshot in time, and these snapshots are taken at quarterly intervals at the end of February, May, August and November.

Data is for "CAS wards" which were in place at the time of the 2001 Census. Please see A Guide to the Geographies of Surrey | Surrey-i (surreyi.gov.uk) for further details.

Frequency: Calendar Quarter