Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many benefit claims were subject to sanctions in the last three months for which data is available by constituency; and how much was the (a) total and (b) average sum of benefit income lost by claimants due to sanctions in each constituency in that period.

Sanctions are only ever applied when a claimant fails to meet their agreed conditionality requirements without good reason.

Statistics are published regularly showing the number of Universal Credit full service claimants with a payment that has been reduced due to a sanction. These can be found in the UC sanction rates dataset on Stat-Xplore and are available by Westminster parliamentary constituency, monthly from April 2019 to February 2023.

The additional information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost.