Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government how the rate of benefit sanctions varied by (1) region, and (2) ethnicity, in the past 12 months.

The Department regularly publishes monthly Universal Credit sanction rate statistics for Great Britain as part of the benefit sanction statistics. The latest statistics to August 2025 are available in table 2.1 of the latest benefit sanction statistics tables, with sanction rates by ethnic group provided in table 7.6.

The UC Sanction Rates dataset on Stat-Xplore can be used to produce the same information in table 2.1 for lower-level geographical breakdowns, such as region.

Monthly sanction rates by region, extracted from Stat-Xplore, and by ethnic group, from table 7.6 of the published tables, for September 2024 to August 2025 are provided in the attached spreadsheet.