Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the Institute for Public Policy Research's paper entitled The Sanctions Surge published March 2023, what estimate he has made of the proportion of adverse decisions against Universal Credit claimants that were made due to a failure to attend or participate in a mandatory interview between August 2021 and October 2022.

The Claimant Commitment is agreed between the claimant and the Work Coach, and it is based on the claimant’s particular circumstances.

People are only sanctioned when they fail, without good reason, to meet the requirements set out in their Claimant Commitment.

Failure to attend or participate in a mandatory interview, as agreed in the Claimant Commitment, accounted for 98.5% of adverse decisions made between August 2021 and October 2022.