Notes and definitions
- Caseload take-up compares the number of benefit recipients - averaged over the year - with the number who would be receiving if everyone took up their entitlement for the full period of their entitlement.
- Expenditure take-up compares the total amount of benefit received - averaged over the year - with the total amount that would be received if everyone took up their entitlement for the full period of their entitlement.
- Take-up statistics are presented as ranges within which it is judged true take-up lies. These ‘ranges of true take-up’ account for possible biases in the data, as it is less than perfect. These ranges also account for effects of sampling error.
- Estimates cover the private household population in Great Britain and therefore omit people living in Residential Care Nursing Homes and some other, mostly small, groups. Also the full-time self-employed are excluded as the underlying data sources do not have sufficient information on incomes of the self-employed to allow a reliable assessment of benefit eligibility.
- Data sources: DWP Family Resources Survey and DWP/Local Authority administrative data