{
 "id": "housing-benefit-caseload",
 "title": "Housing Benefit claims, Great Britain",
 "category": "welfare",
 "summary": "Housing Benefit claims in Great Britain, falling as working-age claimants move to Universal Credit.",
 "unit": "count",
 "chart": "line",
 "volatile": false,
 "status": "",
 "notes": [
  "Claims, not people: a couple make one claim. Most working-age claimants have moved to Universal Credit's housing element; Housing Benefit continues mainly for pensioners and supported or temporary housing.",
  "DWP's total, like its published figures, includes cases abroad and cases whose address is not known, so the nations may not add up exactly to it.",
  "DWP adds a small random amount to every figure in Stat-Xplore to protect confidentiality (it calls this Introduced Random Error) and publishes no bound for it, so nations and regions may not add up exactly to the total. The verification page shows the gaps for information.",
  "Each refresh compares the March figure with DWP's Annual DWP Benefits Statistics Compendium on GOV.UK, to the nearest thousand; every other month is checked against Stat-Xplore itself, queried twice.",
  "The full series is on DWP's Stat-Xplore (stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk), where anyone with a free account can build the same table."
 ],
 "provenance": {
  "publisher": "Department for Work and Pensions, Stat-Xplore",
  "publisher_url": "https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-work-pensions",
  "source_page": "https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/dwp-statistical-summaries",
  "licence": "OGL-3.0",
  "licence_name": "Open Government Licence v3.0",
  "licence_url": "https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/",
  "attribution": "Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.",
  "retrieved_at": "2026-10-30T11:44:16Z",
  "raw_files": [
   {
    "name": "table.json",
    "url": "https://stat-xplore.dwp.gov.uk/webapi/rest/v1/table",
    "sha256": "c2242665e89655ae3e76d3e9ad11253e28223d3536d7630cb63656031d5379d3",
    "bytes": 37052,
    "content_type": "application/json"
   }
  ]
 },
 "meta": {
  "latest_period": "2026-03",
  "frequency": "annual",
  "coverage": "Great Britain",
  "areas_period": "2026-03",
  "areas": [
   {
    "x": "Great Britain",
    "v": 1446949.0
   },
   {
    "x": "England",
    "v": 1241528.0
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   {
    "x": "Wales",
    "v": 69649.0
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   {
    "x": "Scotland",
    "v": 134648.0
   },
   {
    "x": "North East",
    "v": 74621.0
   },
   {
    "x": "North West",
    "v": 172466.0
   },
   {
    "x": "Yorkshire and The Humber",
    "v": 115667.0
   },
   {
    "x": "East Midlands",
    "v": 88730.0
   },
   {
    "x": "West Midlands",
    "v": 150824.0
   },
   {
    "x": "East of England",
    "v": 115069.0
   },
   {
    "x": "London",
    "v": 254031.0
   },
   {
    "x": "South East",
    "v": 163871.0
   },
   {
    "x": "South West",
    "v": 106247.0
   }
  ]
 },
 "headline": {
  "label": "Great Britain",
  "value": 1446949.0,
  "period": "2026-03"
 },
 "series": [
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   "name": "Great Britain",
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}