Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many three year sanctions were issued by her Department to social security benefit recipients in each of the last 10 years.

Information on the number of three years’ sanctions is recorded on our systems and we centrally collate some Management Information. However, the total number cannot be calculated as it is collected across different benefits on different systems and is not centrally collated in a way that allows analysis to be undertaken easily. An extensive interrogation of our systems would be required in order to provide the information requested, which would incur disproportionate cost.

Nevertheless, from the Department’s quarterly sanctions publication, in table 1.7 of the supporting data tables, 2,904 individuals have received three (or more) high level JSA sanction failures, from October 2012 to January 2019. It is not possible to readily unpick how many of these were 3 year sanctions (if two high level sanctions received by an individual were more than a year apart then that would mean they would not have been escalated up to a 3 year sanction duration after their 3rd high level failure). The published data on individuals that received a third high level JSA sanction cannot be split by year. This is because the data is not structured in a way to readily analyse this.