Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment he has made of the (a) level of and (b) reasons for the variance between different job centres in the level of benefit payment sanctions for claimants of (i) jobseeker's allowance, (ii) employment support allowance and (iii) universal credit.

To monitor variation in sanction referrals, the Department has established a regular sanctions variation dashboard overseen by a senior steering group. This will allow the Department to make use of the latest internal data to ensure that any issues are identified in a timely way. The dashboard includes monitoring levels of variation, highlighting areas with unusually high or low referral rates compared to historical trends and also information about how rates differ between claimants due to certain characteristics such as ethnicity or age.

The Department has also been examining sanction data by a range of both claimant and geographical characteristics in order to better understand the reasons for variation in sanction referrals.