What was claimed
The new daily allowance for peers in the House of Lords is £323.
Our verdict
This is correct as of April 2020.
Universal Credit monthly allowance is more than House of Lords daily allowance – for now
5 August 2020
What was claimed
The monthly allowance for a single person over 25 on Universal Credit is £317.82.
Our verdict
This was correct until April 2020, when the rate was set to rise to £323.22. However, it has temporarily risen to £409.89 during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A post on Facebook with over 1,000 shares has claimed the following:
“The new *daily* allowance for peers in the House of Lords is £323. The *monthly* allowance for a single person over 25 on Universal Credit is £317.82”
This suggests that the amount peers in the House of Lords can claim every day is more than the amount a Universal Credit recipient can claim every month.
It’s true that, since 1 April 2020, members of the House of Lords can claim a maximum of £323 per day. The standard monthly allowance of Universal Credit for a single person over the age of 25 was £317.82. This was due to rise to £323.22 in April 2020, but was temporarily increased to £409.89 on 6 April 2020 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
This means that, if it was not for Covid-19, the maximum daily allowance for peers would have been the same as the monthly Universal Credit allowance for a single person over 25.
As we’ve explained before, most members of the House of Lords do not receive a salary but can claim an allowance for each day of attendance in Westminster, as well as other things like travel costs.
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Peers who don’t get a salary for their parliamentary duties can claim an allowance
Increases in the allowance are linked to the increase in MPs’ salaries, which are set by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) and based on average public sector pay increases. The Office for National Statistics put this increase at 3.1% in December.
However, this does not mean that all peers will necessarily claim £323 a day. Lords do not have to accept any daily allowance at all—and 141 of them (out of around 800) did not claim anything in the 2018/19 financial year (the last full financial year for which there is data).
They can also choose to claim a reduced daily allowance, set at half of the full rate. This reduced amount is how much can be claimed when a peer’s parliamentary business takes them away from Westminster. Peers can only claim for days they actually attend the House of Lords or its committees.
In 2018/19 the daily allowance was set at £305. In this year, 296 peers claimed an average daily rate of £300 or more. The reduced allowance back then was set at £153.
Changes to Universal Credit
At 2019/20 Universal Credit levels, a single person over the age of 25 could claim £317.82 a month. In 2019 the government announced a 1.7% benefits rise, which was due to come into force in April 2020, meaning this amount would rise to £323.22.
However, lockdown restrictions that were introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic led to a surge in Universal Credit claimants, with 2.9 million new claims between 16 March and 26 May—almost double the total number of claimants before the pandemic.
On 20 March, the chancellor Rishi Sunak announced that Universal Credit would be increased by £1,000 a year for 12 months. The standard allowance increased on 6 April 2020, so that a single claimant over the age of 25 would receive £409.89 a month.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as partly false because the figures given for Universal Credit are out of date.