Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many universal credit claimants were subject to a deduction; and what the average sum deducted was in (a) South Shields and (b) the UK, in the most recent month for which data is available.

The Department’s deductions policy strikes a fair balance between a claimant’s need to meet their financial obligations and their ability to ensure they can meet their day-to-day needs. It maintains our policy to enforce social obligations such as the payment of court fines, ensure Government debt is recovered and vitally to safeguard claimants from the potential impacts of not repaying priority debts, such as homelessness or loss of utilities. Since October 2019, Universal Credit deductions are a maximum of 30% of a claimant’s standard allowance down from 40% previously. The Budget 2020 also set out that the maximum level will be further reduced, so that standard deductions will not exceed 25% of a claimant’s Standard Allowance from October 2021.

For Universal Credit payments due during August 2020:

a) 4,700 of 8,600 claims in the South Shields parliamentary constituency had a deduction, with £73 on average being deducted from these claims.

b) 1,847,000 of 4,536,000 claims of all GB claims had a deduction, with £70 on average being deducted from these claims.

Notes:

1. The number of claims per constituency are rounded to the nearest 100, total claims at GB level rounded to the nearest 1,000.

2. Deductions include advance repayments, third party deductions and all other deductions, but exclude sanctions and fraud penalties which are reductions of benefit rather than deductions.

3. Numbers are affected by the impact of the temporary suspension of some deduction types due to Covid-19. During April 2020, government deductions were temporarily suspended and only began to be reinstated from July.

4. Figures are provisional and are subject to retrospective change as later data becomes available.