What we can't tell you · Disclosure restricted

How many people claim each benefit in each local authority?

Disclosure restricted The data is collected but is withheld or coarsened to protect individuals, under statistical disclosure control or data-protection law.

Why

DWP publishes claimant counts by benefit, local authority and characteristic only through Stat-Xplore, which requires a registered account and an API key and rate-limits queries. The benefit expenditure and caseload tables that DWP publishes as open spreadsheets give Great Britain totals only. Civometry carries the national caseloads and does not carry local counts until they can be fetched from an open route.

What is known

What is not known

  • Local authority claimant counts from an open, unauthenticated download
  • Counts by nationality, which DWP publishes only for National Insurance number registrations

Who holds the data

  • Department for Work and Pensions

Would a Freedom of Information request help?

Unlikely. The data is published through Stat-Xplore; an FOI request would be directed there.

Privacy and disclosure restrictions

Stat-Xplore rounds and suppresses small cells to prevent identification of individuals.

Official sources checked

Last reviewed 2026-09-03. Availability changes; if a publication now answers this question, challenge the classification below.

Challenge this statistic

Challenges are methodological. Pick the part of the calculation you dispute and say what the correct source, count, population, mapping, period or formula is. This is not a comment form; opinions about the figure are not recorded.