The finding

The report’s 57% rise runs from 2023 to 2025. Yusuf’s caption calls it a rise on the previous year. The report gives about 25% for the one-year comparison, but two source tables disagree about spending during the same months. We need that difference explained before treating 25% as a fully checked annual trend.

  • £11.920bn rounds to £12bn for the defined household payments in 2025.
  • The 57% comparison covers two years, not one.
  • Household spending cannot all be assigned to foreign individuals.
  • The Misinformation Claim label applies to the wrong comparison period. It does not establish intent.

The post puts the rise in the wrong year

On 20 September 2026, Zia Yusuf shared a newspaper headline saying migrant households had received £12 billion in Universal Credit during the previous year.

His caption added: “That is an increase of 57% on the year before”. That makes the increase a one-year change.

The September report from the Centre for Migration Control (CMC), associated with the story, instead compares 2025 with 2023 for its 57% figure. This is the period error our Misinformation Claim label addresses. Yusuf’s wider political arguments are separate from this check.

Sources: Zia Yusuf on InstagramCharles Hymas / The Telegraph, lawfully syndicated by AOL

The starting year changes the answer

The CMC report gives £11.920 billion for 2025 and a reported £7.6 billion for 2023. The increase between those amounts is 56.8%, which rounds to 57%.

For 2024, the report gives £9.533 billion. Comparing that with £11.920 billion in 2025 produces about 25%. We recovered the earlier response pages containing the 2024 amount. Rounding to the nearest £1 million cannot explain the gap between 25% and 57%.

There is a limit to this comparison: the older and newer responses give different totals for some of the same months in 2025. We explain the discrepancy below. For that reason, about 25% is the comparison in the report, not a fully reconciled official measure of annual growth.

Sources: Centre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDWP response reproduced by Centre for Migration Control

Scroll across to see all columns

The comparisons printed in the associated report; these are published inputs, not a fully restated dataset
ComparisonStarting amount2025 amountCalculated risePeriod
2024 to 2025£9.533bn£11.920bn25.0%One year
2023 to 2025£7.6bn£11.920bn56.8%, rounded to 57%Two years

Who is included in the £12 billion?

The later response from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) gives £11,920 million for January to December 2025 in Great Britain. That rounds normally to £12 billion. The evidence does not establish a UK total including Northern Ireland.

DWP selected these payments using nationality records that excluded British and Irish nationality. It then counted the whole Universal Credit payment for each qualifying household, without dividing it between individual family members. This is a particular statistical group, not a count of every migrant household.

Here, a household award means a Universal Credit claim for a single person or a couple, including support for dependent children where applicable. It does not mean everyone living at the same address.

A payment can therefore support an eligible British partner or children too. The £12 billion is not money shown to have gone exclusively to foreign individuals. Nor is it an estimate of fraud or migration’s overall cost after tax contributions are considered.

The nationality records are self-reported and may not immediately reflect someone becoming British. The source is a DWP response reproduced by CMC, not a response obtained directly by TALLYCAT01.

Sources: Centre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDepartment for Work and Pensions / UK Parliament

Why we cannot treat every figure as directly comparable

The earlier response gives £5.587 billion for January to June 2025. Adding the same six months in the later response gives £5.861 billion. That is £274 million more, or about 4.9%, for the same period.

The difference is too large to explain by rounding alone. We do not know whether it comes from revised payments, nationality records, changes in how the data were selected, or another reason.

DWP would need to explain the difference or supply the annual totals using one consistent method. Until then, the narrow correction remains sound: the report attaches 57% to two years, while Yusuf attaches it to the previous year.

Sources: Centre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDWP response reproduced by Centre for Migration ControlDWP response reproduced by Centre for Migration Control

The £7.7 billion figure also describes household payments

The later table puts £7.669 billion in its not-in-work category, rounded to £7.7 billion. Yusuf’s caption describes households with at least one person out of work. That qualification is more careful than the shared image’s wording about “jobless foreign nationals”.

DWP says it cannot split joint payments between individual claimants. The table therefore does not show that all £7.7 billion went exclusively to foreign people without jobs, or that nobody in the included households worked.

The table’s in-work and not-in-work groups overlap. They are not two separate slices that can be added into a pie chart. The share of money spent is also different from the share of people receiving it.

Universal Credit can support low-paid workers and people with health, caring or childcare circumstances. These totals alone cannot tell us why an individual receives it.

Sources: Zia Yusuf on InstagramCentre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDepartment for Work and Pensions / UK ParliamentDepartment for Work and Pensions

A rise in spending does not explain what caused it

Spending can change because of arrivals, benefit rates, earnings, family circumstances or people moving onto Universal Credit from older benefits. These tables do not separate the contribution of each cause.

DWP says transfers from older benefits account for 78.3% of the overall rise in Universal Credit claimant numbers between December 2023 and December 2025.

That is a count of people across the wider system. It does not mean transfers explain 78.3% of this nationality group’s spending rise. The table also does not match these payments with tax paid or other public costs, so it cannot show the overall effect on government finances.

Sources: Centre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDepartment for Work and Pensions

What we still need to know

Checked: the rounded £12 billion amount and the report’s two-year 57% comparison. The recovered 2024 response also supports the report’s approximate 25% calculation, subject to the data differences above.

Still unclear: why the responses disagree for the same months, whether all years were selected consistently, which report version Yusuf saw and whether his wrong period was deliberate. The original response behind the reported 2023 figure has not been recovered.

What would help: DWP totals for 2023, 2024 and 2025 produced using one consistent method, an explanation of revisions, and the complete earlier response with its reference and date.

The broader annual-trend investigation is on hold. No clarification request has been sent and no response deadline is running. A routine Universal Credit release would not automatically supply this missing comparison.

Sources: Centre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDWP response reproduced by Centre for Migration ControlDepartment for Work and Pensions

Technical notes: why self-employment does not explain the data gap

Both responses exclude self-employed people from their not-in-work category. We therefore cannot claim that a changed treatment of self-employment explains the discrepancy.

Sources: Centre for Migration Control; reproduced Department for Work and Pensions responseDWP response reproduced by Centre for Migration ControlDWP response reproduced by Centre for Migration Control

What is established

  • The defined 2025 household payments total £11.920bn, which rounds to £12bn.
  • The report’s 57% comparison runs from 2023 to 2025.
  • The earlier response pages contain £9.533bn for 2024.
  • The two response versions differ by £274m for January to June 2025.

What remains unknown

  • Annual totals for all years produced using one consistent method.
  • Why the same six months have different totals in the two responses.
  • Which report version Yusuf saw and whether he corrected his wording elsewhere.
  • Whether the period error was intentional.

The story, in order

Earlier response published
CMC’s February article links the recovered response pages with the 2024 total. The response header and issue date are cropped.

Later DWP response dated
FOI2026/83815 covers calendar 2025 and appears in CMC’s September report.

The selected Instagram post
Yusuf’s caption describes 57% as an increase on the previous year.

TALLYCAT01 evidence check
The post, response reproductions and arithmetic are reviewed. No publication or outreach is implied.

YOUR TURN TO CHECK

Reproduce this investigation

Follow the original wording, identify the years being compared and repeat the arithmetic. Then check the discrepancy that limits how confidently the response versions can be combined.

You will need
A browser and a calculator, or Excel or another spreadsheet app. The optional Python file requires Python 3 and no extra libraries.

Published numerical inputs and provenance · CSVReproduced calculations and conditions · JSONRecalculate the published inputs · PythonStep-by-step guide · TXTSource notes · TXTTimeline · CSV
What you can and cannot repeat

These steps repeat published figures, not an analysis of individual claimants. We have not recovered the original 2023 response. The older response pages have cropped headers, and both reproductions are hosted by the requester. They disagree on the first half of 2025, so the annual figures are not yet a fully reconciled series. If you cannot access the post or article, record that you could not repeat that step.

  1. Record the exact claim

    Open the original Instagram post. Separate the caption from the image. Write down the sentence assigning 57% to “the year before”, and note that the £7.7bn sentence in the caption describes households.

    Open Yusuf’s post

    Keep in mind An inaccessible post cannot be treated as independently inspected. Our preserved check recorded publication on 20 September 2026.

  2. Find the comparison periods

    Open the September PDF at pages 2 and 3. Find the comparisons with 2023 and 2024. Record the year beside each percentage before looking at the size of the number.

    Inspect the comparison on page 2Inspect page 3

    Keep in mind The report’s 57% period is two years. Its approximately 25% comparison uses the previous year.

  3. Verify the household spending cells

    In the same PDF, inspect page 8 for the 2025 total and pages 7, 10 and 11 for overlap and definitions. Then open the older response’s second image and find £9,533m for 2024.

    Inspect the 2025 spending tableInspect the older overall table

    Keep in mind These are DWP response reproductions hosted by the requester. Preserve the older page’s missing header and date limitations.

  4. Calculate the one-year comparison

    Download the published-inputs CSV. Keep the rows whose input_id values are annual_2024_older_response and annual_2025_september_response. Both are in £m. Divide 11,920 by 9,533, subtract 1 and multiply by 100. Expect 25.0393%, usually displayed as 25.0%.

    =(11920/9533-1)*100

    Keep in mind This repeats the published-version comparison. It does not remove the extraction discrepancy checked below.

  5. Calculate the comparison that produces 57%

    Keep the annual_2023_cmc_reported and annual_2025_september_response rows. Divide 11,920 by 7,600, subtract 1 and multiply by 100. Expect 56.8421%, rounded to 57%. The years are 2023 and 2025.

    =(11920/7600-1)*100

    Keep in mind The £7.6bn input is reported by CMC. Its original 2023 response was not recovered, so this reproduces the report’s arithmetic rather than authenticating that original response.

  6. Check the same-period discrepancy

    Compare £5,587m for January to June 2025 in the older second page with £5,861m obtained by adding the six months in the later table. Subtract the earlier total. Expect £274m. Divide by £5,587m for about 4.9%.

    5861-5587 = 274 million pounds
=(5861/5587-1)*100 = approximately 4.9%
    Open the older January to June totalOpen the later monthly table

    Keep in mind Rounding alone is too small to explain the difference. The cause is not established. Do not silently merge these versions into a matched trend.

  7. Keep households separate from individuals

    Read the official parliamentary answer and the later PDF’s notes. Check what the source says about joint awards, individual allocation and overlapping work categories. Compare that with the image and with the more qualified caption.

    Read answer 74001Read the later definitions

    Keep in mind The precise later nationality/work-status join is not supplied. Do not invent which household member must be out of work.

  8. Write the narrow conclusion

    Keep three conclusions separate: £12bn is supported as a rounded household-spending total; the report’s 57% comparison covers two years; the exact one-year trend still needs consistent source data. Neither intent nor the reasons spending changed are established.

    Keep in mind No matched tax data, all-benefits total or causal decomposition is provided by this spending table.

Sources you can check

We inspected and preserved the rendered Instagram post, requester-hosted DWP reproductions, relevant official context and the actual page images. We recalculated published numerical cells and compared response versions. This is not individual-level analysis or a DWP response obtained directly by TALLYCAT01.

Inspect the evidence

Source notes include the links and verification limits. The timeline opens in Excel or any spreadsheet app.

Source notes · TXTTimeline · CSVPublished numerical inputs and provenance · CSVReproduced calculations and conditions · JSONRecalculate the published inputs · Python

Photo credit and licence

Zia Yusuf addresses Reform UK, Birmingham NEC, 30 June 2024. Z979 / Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0. Resized for display and cropped to fit. Homepage photographs also have a dark gradient and text overlay.

Carousel photograph credits and licences

These credits cover the carousel photographs. Original stock files are not distributed here. The logo remains separate brand artwork.

Research and production assisted by AI. Read our approach

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