Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many Universal Credit claims were subject to deductions; how much on average was deducted; what the total sum of deductions was; what proportion of each of those sums was deducted to repay advance payments in each local authority in the 2021-22 financial year; and if he will make a statement.

The requested analysis of Universal Credit claims with deductions, in the 2021-22 financial year, by Local Authority in Great Britain (GB) is provided in the separate spreadsheet, with the following points to note:

1. Average deduction amounts have been rounded to the nearest £1 and proportions have been rounded to the nearest percentage point. The sum of individual constituencies may not sum to the total figure due to rounding.

2. Deductions include advance repayments, third party deductions and all other deductions, but exclude sanctions and fraud penalties which are reductions of benefit rather than deductions.

3. The' unknown' parliamentary constituency label relates to claims for which a constituency could not be determined due to incomplete postcode information. Unknown parliamentary constituency accounts for 0.2% of all UC households.

4. In April 2021, the maximum deductions limit was reduced from 30% of the standard allowance to 25%. In May 2021, the additional court fines deduction was removed lowering the rate to 5% of standard allowance.

5. "Advances" include all four UC advance types: New Claim, Benefit Transfer, Budgeting and Change of Circumstances.

6. The table includes the number of distinct Universal Credit households subject to a deduction in the period 2021-2022. Any household with deductions in more than one assessment period within the period requested will only be counted once. Deduction amount represents the total deduction taken for a particular household. So if a household has multiple deductions in the same assessment period these figures provide the total of all deductions taken.

7. Figures are provisional and are subject to retrospective change as later data becomes available.

__________________________________________________________________________