Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Sherlock on 3 February (HL13743), what assessment they have made of the reasons that Universal Credit sanction rates vary by (1) ethnicity, and (2) region.

No formal assessment has been made, but work is ongoing to expand the benefit sanction statistics, detailed below, to allow analysis in the future.

The Department regularly publishes Universal Credit sanction rate statistics for Great Britain as part of the benefit sanction statistics. These include a breakdown of the sanction rate by ethnic group and an analysis of the sanction ethnicity statistics which can be found at section 5 of the latest publication.

The Department also published an ad-hoc analysis in February 2025 of the Variation in the Universal Credit sanction rate by jobcentres using the UC Sanction Rate dataset on Stat-Xplore.

The ‘Benefit sanction statistics to August 2025’ and the ‘Variation in the Universal Credit sanction rate by jobcentres from January 2017 to August 2024’ are provided in the attached PDF documents.