Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many universal credit claimants each month are having more than 40 per cent of their monthly award deducted to repay debt.

Deductions may include a number of items that are debt repayments, but may also include other items such as payments to utility companies for current bills, or court fines. These are not debts. Disaggregating categories that represent debt, from those that do not, would incur a disproportionate cost.

In August 2018, 0.6% of Universal Credit claimants had a deduction that exceeded the normal 40% maximum deduction rate (this does not include sanctions or fraud penalties which are reductions of benefit rather than deductions). In these cases, a priority order is applied so that deductions for arrears of housing costs or fuel costs are applied first, in order to to protect claimant welfare.