Income Support Lone Parent Statistics (Correction)

Monday 24th February 2014 Written Statements

[The Minister of State, Department for Work and Pensions (Esther McVey)]

I regret to inform the House that an error has been identified within the income support lone parent regime official statistic. This has caused an over-count in the number of income support lone parent sanctions reported within four releases of the statistic (February, May, August and November 2013). During this time, a number of parliamentary questions (PQs) were tabled requesting this data; a list of all such PQs and the Members who tabled them can be found below:

PQ UIN 144830 - Kerry McCarthy

PQ UIN 148374 - Fiona Mactaggart

PQ UIN 150516 - Dame Joan Ruddock

PQ UIN 159327 - Shaun Woodward

PQ UIN 161444 - Jessica Morden

PQ UIN 165640 - Frank Field

PQ UIN 174368 - Stephen Timms

PQ UIN 175527 - David Ward

PQ UIN 175730 - Mike Hancock

PQ UIN 177178 - Barbara Keeley

PQ UIN 180927 - John Healy

I apologise to the House for this inadvertent error. The erroneous data were corrected on 19 February 2014 and are available at the following URL:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/income-support-lone-parent-regime-figures-on-sanctions-and-work-focused-interviews--2.

The affected figures are provided in summary below: