Speeches

Jim Cunningham – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Jim Cunningham on 2016-01-25.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, whether his Department has made any revisions to (a) the amount his Department forecasts will be required for the diffuse mesothelioma payments scheme and (b) the number of people his Department forecasts will apply to receive payments from the scheme in the first 10 years of its operation since it last published those figures.

Justin Tomlinson

The Department makes revisions to the DMPS financial forecast annually for the purposes of calculating the levy. A Ministerial written statement (HCWS460) was tabled in the House of Commons on 12 January 2016 and provides details of the DMPS levy for 2015/16.

Similarly, the Department forecasts the number of applicants annually. In 2014/15, there were 410 applicants to the DMPS. The next set of official DMPS statistics will be released 28 January 2015 and will contain six months’ worth of data on applications for 2015/16. Assumptions could be derived from those figures for the remainder of the year.

No revisions have been made to longer term forecasts since the DMPS Impact Assessment was published 6 March 2014. This can be found at:

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/286525/mesothelioma-payment-scheme-ia-mar-2014.pdf