§ Mr. CoxTo ask the Secretary of State for Social Security how many people living in the London Borough of Wandsworth were on income support on 1 June. [87451]
§ Angela EagleThe administration of benefits is a matter for Peter Mathison, Chief Executive of the Benefits Agency. He will write to my hon. Friend.
Letter from Peter Mathison to Mr. Tom Cox, dated 22 June 1999:
The Secretary of State has asked me to reply to your recent Parliamentary Question about the number of people living in the London Borough of Wandsworth on Income Support (IS) on 1st June.This information is not available in the format requested, the Benefits Agency does not hold collate information by local authority boundary. However, a figure can be obtained by identifying the postcode of customers living in the area.367WThe number of IS claims from within the London Borough of Wandsworth is approximately 18,000. This represents the number of IS claims, not the total number of beneficiaries of those claims. It is rounded to the nearest thousand cases, and is subject to a degree of sampling error. The sample size was 5% of the IS live load, taken from the IS Statistics Quarterly Enquiries, November 1998.I hope this is helpful.