Guidance

Benefit sanctions durations and sanction rate calculation: explanation of methodology

Updated 14 May 2024

Read the Benefit sanctions statistics.

This background document explains the methodology for the benefit sanction duration statistics and sanction rate that is used from the February 2024 release for:

• Universal Credit (UC)
• Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA)
• Employment and Support Allowance (ESA)

It supplements and should be read alongside the UC sanction statistics background and methodology document.

The series for sanction durations and median sanction length, and Universal Credit sanction rate data for earlier than April 2019 have been reinstated with effect from the February 2024 release. These data were suspended from the November 2020 release while an investigation and review of the code was carried out.

Following this review methodological improvements have been made to the complex code used to derive the suspended sanction durations, median sanction length and UC sanction rate measures. Extensive Quality Assurance activities have been undertaken to ensure improvements are robust before they were reinstated in the February 2024 release of the Benefit Sanction Statistics.

Users referencing releases earlier than February 2024 should be aware that the methodology for benefit sanction duration and the sanction rate was different. Users can access previous versions of this document explaining previous methodologies from the National Archives.

Context of the statistics

To claim Universal Credit, a Work Coach will set out with the claimant what is required of them in their Claimant Commitment. If they fail to meet each of their responsibilities that they agreed in their Claimant Commitment without good reason, they may be subject to a sanction. A sanction will reduce their UC standard allowance until they comply with their Claimant Commitment again and, depending on the number of similar failures by the claimant and their age, for an additional fixed period. Medium and higher level sanctions will reduce the claimant’s UC standard allowance for a fixed period. For more context on UC sanctions, read the UC sanction statistics background and methodology document.

Purpose of the statistics

Statistics on the duration of a benefit sanction and the sanction rate are of interest to parliament, charities and not-for-profit groups, external commentators, the media and policy makers. They regularly feature as a topic in questions and comment in parliamentary questions, parliamentary select committees and Freedom of Information requests.

Universal Credit

Data Sources

Universal Credit sanction data is sourced from central systems used to administer Universal Credit. These systems are Universal Credit (UC) live service, including Payment Management Systems (PMX), and monthly data feeds of Universal Credit (UC) full service administrative data.

UC live service was gradually introduced to Jobcentres from 2013. It was available in every Jobcentre (excluding Northern Ireland) by May 2016. All claimants were moved to UC full service by April 2019.

New claims to UC live service ceased in January 2018, and since then the remaining UC live service cases were gradually migrated to UC full service. By 1 April 2019, the systems that were used to administer live service cases were shut down.

UC full service is the digital system that administers UC for the full range of claimant groups. It was gradually introduced to Jobcentres from 2016 and was available in every Jobcentre (including Northern Ireland) by December 2018. It is worth noting that whilst UC full service is available in Northern Ireland, these statistics exclude these cases.

The data on both systems shows the date of which the claimant did not comply with their requirements, the date when a decision maker determined the sanction is to be applied and, for each assessment period the sanction was active, the number of days the sanction was applied in the assessment period (only UC full service splits this into open and fixed days served).

Due to the availability of some data on UC live service it has not been possible to apply the methodology described in this live service document to all UC sanctions before January 2017. Therefore, statistics are only presented from January 2017.

The data on UC live service and UC full service are brought together into one data file. As there are no consistent identifiers to link the sanctions that were still active when a claimant transferred from UC live service to UCFS, it has been necessary to utilise data matching techniques using consistent information between the two systems to estimate sanctions that are the same on the two systems. It is possible that not all sanctions that transferred from UC live service to UC full service have been identified in this process and that a small number have been incorrectly linked. These limitations have no material impact on the statistics.

The Quality Assurance of Administrative Data (QAAD) details the quality assurance measures and processes on the data used in the production of the Benefit Sanctions Statistics.

Unit of Measurement

Durations measure the length of each completed UC sanction from when the sanction started to be applied to when it stopped being applied and the length of the sanction is counted in the month in which the sanction ended.

Where a sanction is a combination of ‘open-ended’ and ‘fixed’ days, the duration is the sum of those days. The duration is not necessarily the length of time between a claimant non-complying and re-complying as a fixed period may be added on to the period where they were not compliant with their requirements. Where a claimant has multiple benefit sanctions running one after the other, these are each treated as separate sanctions.

The sanction rate measures the number of claimants undergoing a sanction on the second Thursday of the reference month (the count date) divided by the number of UC claimants in conditionality regimes where sanctions can be applied.

All UC sanctions in progress on the count date are measured, including those where there is no reduction in the claimant’s UC payment. A claimant may not have a reduction in their UC payment if their standard allowance has been reduced to nil by other means, for example because of the earnings taper. Therefore, the number of people being sanctioned should not be read as the number of people that have had their UC payment reduced because of a sanction.

UC sanction start date

A start date for the sanction has been derived based on when the claimant did not meet their requirements and when the decision maker confirmed the sanction to be applied. The following rules are made to determine the start date:

• if the non-compliance date and decision date to impose the sanction are in the same assessment period, the start date will be the non-compliance date
• if the decision date to impose the sanction is in a later assessment period than the non-compliance date, the start date will be the start of the assessment period in which the decision is made
• if the claimant is already serving another sanction on the start date (as determined in the above bullets), then the start date will be the day after all existing and deferred sanctions have completed

In a small number of sanctions the methodology will derive a start date that is before the non-compliance date. This occurs when a claimant will be serving a sanction entirely within 1 assessment period and there are insufficient days remaining in the assessment period from the non-compliance date to serve the fixed days. This is a decision taken in the methodology of the statistics and does not occur in practice. In an assessment period a claimant that will have an amount deducted from their UC payment equal to the number of days they do not meet the requirements of their claimant commitment and an amount for their fixed days, if there is sufficient standard allowance remaining after the reduction for the open-ended part of the sanction.

Sanction end date and length of sanction

The end date for the benefit sanction is the number of open and fixed days sanctions were imposed as shown in the data added to the sanction start date, inclusive of the sanction start date.

The length of the sanction is the number of days between the start and end of the sanction.

Overturned sanctions

The purpose of these statistics is to provide a picture of the number of people who were serving a sanction at the time of the original payment for the assessment period. When a sanction has been overturned at a later date and the payment for the assessment period adjusted the overturned sanction will still be included in these statistics as it reduced the UC payment in the original payment for the assessment period.

As an overturned sanction may bring forward the start dates of subsequent sanctions to be imposed, the methodology applied in these statistics may show the claimant serving two sanctions at the same time. This is a compromise in the methodology to derive these statistics and not a feature that occurs in practice. Where this occurs we will only count the claimant being sanctioned once when calculating the sanction rate. However, each sanction will be counted at the end date of the sanction for durations.

Median

The median length of a sanction is calculated by sorting all sanctions by length from shortest to longest, and then identifying the middle value. The decision was made to use the median value – rather than the mean – to represent sanction lengths. This is because there are outliers in the datasets which cause the mean values to be skewed, resulting in them not being accurate representations of the data. The median values for sanction lengths are therefore more representative of the central values in the data.

Data issues of UC benefit sanction duration and rate statistics

The following issues have been identified in our data for the UC sanction rate and are under investigation.

There are a small number of cases missing from the Universal Credit caseload dataset. The sanction rate uses the UC caseload data to calculate both the number of UC claimants undergoing a sanction (numerator), and the number of claimants in conditionality regimes that can be sanctioned (denominator). While there is a small impact to the UC caseload, there is no material impact to the sanction rate. However, users should apply some degree of caution when considering underlying figures for numbers of sanctions or caseload counts.

There is a processing issue with a portion of the conditionality regime data affecting a small number of claimants in the statistical datasets. This issue causes some of the affected claimants to be recorded as being in a different conditionality regime in the statistics to what they were actually in on the reference date. The number of claimants in conditionality regimes that can be sanctioned is used in the denominator for the sanction rate. It is not thought that this has a material impact on the sanction rate.

Change to the Methodology

The above commentary documents the methodology in use since February 2024. This improved methodology was introduced to better align the statistics with policy and operational practice and make better use of the available data.

A brief summary of the differences between the February 2024 methodology and earlier methodologies is provided in the following table.

Measure	February 2024 methodology	Earlier methodology	Reason for change
Duration being measured	Individual sanction	Period of reduction in payment from one or more sanctions	More accurate reflection of policy and better use of available data
Sanction start date	Non-compliance date, or – Start of assessment period (AP) of later AP in which decision is made, or – Immediately after completion of exiting sanction being imposed	Payment date (7 days after end of AP) for 1st AP in which reduction is made, or – Immediately after completion of existing sanction being imposed	More accurate reflection of policy and better use of available data
Assessment Period with sanction applied but no reduction in UC payment	Sanction continues to be counted in rate. Period of no reduction in payment is included in duration	Sanction spell would end and not restart until there is another reduction in payment from a sanction. Not counted in sanction rate	More accurate reflection of policy

The effect of these changes is to:

• count most sanctions earlier by 1 month as sanctions are now counted in the assessment period in which they occur and not from the payment date after the end of the assessment period
• count more people being sanctioned by including those with no payment reduction who were excluded from earlier methodologies thus the sanction rate will be higher than previously. There is no change to the number of claimants being sanctioned
• change duration lengths as sanctions are not being joined together to form a continuous spell or split up to separate spells where there is no reduction in payment

JSA and ESA

Data Sources

Data for JSA and ESA sanction statistics are obtained from the following administrative systems:

• JSA and ESA sanctions come from the Decision Making and Appeals System (DMAS)
• JSA and ESA benefit payments information comes from General Matching Service (GMS)
• JSA and ESA flows on and off benefit comes from National Benefit Database (NBD)

Methodology

The statistics for JSA and ESA use payment data to identify payment drops that result from sanctions. The start date of the sanction was identified as the date of the first reduced payment from a sanction, and the end date was identified as the date where there was a pause or stop in deductions, or the claimant flowed off benefit.

Durations and rates analysis presented for JSA and ESA contains information regarding sanctions that have already ended by the time of analysis. This is because a claimant’s payment might drop for a number of reasons, and not only as a result of a sanction (for example, the claimant might have a change in circumstances which results in their payment being reduced).

Due to this, the methodology used for calculating sanction durations and rates only includes payment drops which are followed by a subsequent payment increase (or followed by the claimant flowing off benefit). This helps to prevent the methodology from falsely counting a sanction, where a claimant’s payment has been reduced for any reason other than them being sanctioned. As a result, sanctions that are still ongoing at the time of analysis are excluded from calculations.

JSA and ESA sanctions decisions data does not include information on benefit payments, and therefore work was required to match sanction decisions to payments drops by linking data. This was achieved by matching the decisions to sanction to the National Benefit Database (NBD) to look for dates that the claimants flow on and off benefit.

The benefit payment drop data from General Matching Service (GMS) scans was merged on to the sanctions decisions data. This enabled us to determine the amount of benefit paid every week. Drops and increases in benefit are identified from the payment data and linked to a sanction decision. The claim start and end dates were also combined with the data.

When linking a sanction decision to a payment on GMS, we looked four months either side of the sanction decision to identify the corresponding payment change/drop. This enabled us to determine the start and end date for a sanction, and hence the sanction duration.

The underlying data for durations can be accessed through Benefit sanctions statistics supporting tables.

Comparisons between the statistics

Due to the different methodologies between UC and JSA, ESA comparisons between these benefits should not be made.

Definitions and terminology within the statistics

Sanction

A decision to apply a reduction in payment if a claimant has not met the requirements of their claimant commitment Sanction duration

In UC, the number of days where a reduction can be applied to a standard allowance. In legacy benefits, the length of a sanction as determined by the period of a reduction in benefit payment.

Standard Allowance (UC)

In UC, claimants are entitled to a Standard Allowance. This is the basic UC benefit amount dependent on age and single/couple status before any extra elements are added on such as support for children or disability and housing costs.

Assessment period

The monthly period over which the amount of claimants entitlement to UC is assessed and paid.

Non-compliance date

The date in which the claimant does not meet the requirements of their claimant commitment for their UC claim.

Decision date

The date in which a decision maker approves the sanction to be applied.

Disallowance

The claim to benefit is ended, and claimants have to re-apply for the benefit (JSA only).

Intermediate Sanction

In JSA, a claimant will receive a disallowance to benefit for intermediate level sanctions. The reasons for an intermediate sanction are: Not Actively Seeking Employment, and Not Being Available for Work.

WRAG – Work-Related Activity Group for ESA

Claimants in this group are expected to prepare for work, as opposed to those in the Support Group who have no requirements placed upon them.

Revisions to the statistics

DWP have a policy for planned revisions describing how we will handle revisions and give confidence that all revisions will be handled in a transparent manner. For sanction statistics, to reflect any updates to the figures, the full historic statistical series is refreshed each time the figures are released.

Status of the statistics

Official statistics

These statistics are designated official statistics.

We have reviewed the Official Statistics in Development label on the Benefit Sanctions Statistics, following the reinstated duration measures and rate methodology improvements. We have determined that the UC data and sanctions methodology is now stable and fit for purpose, and as such we are removing the “in development” label. As of 14 May 2024, these statistics will be published under the “Official Statistics” label.

We will continue to progress developments to meet user needs through the DWP Statistical Work Programme.

Quality Statement

Our statistical practice is regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR).

OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.

You are welcome to contact us directly at epass.team@dwp.gov.uk with any comments about how we meet these standards.

Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing regulation@statistics.gov.uk or via the OSR website.

In June 2023 the Benefit Sanction Statistics (BSS) publication underwent an OSR compliance check. This details our work to comply with the code of practice and our continued development to maintain our compliance.

The BSS are published quarterly in February, May, August and November. Statistical outputs are produced in a timely manner and dates of release are pre-announced in accordance with the Code of Practice. Should pre-announced dates of release need to be changed, or any issues occur impacting the coverage of the bulletin or delays to any aspect of the bulletin, we will provide an explanation on the statistics at DWP page. Information on pre-release access is published on the statistics at DWP page.

BSS are published through a range of dissemination methods including Stat-Xplore which is an online tool that lets you create and download customised statistical tables, and view the results in interactive charts. Methodologies, processes, and practices are documented, and documentation is kept up to date and made available publicly where appropriate. This documentation is regularly reviewed to follow any emerging best practice or to learn from experience. Currently the BSS is conducting a quality assurance report of Administrative Datasets used in the production of the BSS statistics, once complete this will be published.

Information on suspensions of data and measures can be found in the latest release of the BSS publication. Recent and ongoing development of the BSS statistics can be found on the DWP statistical work programme. Limitations of our statistics are also publicly published in this document within the methodology and limitations section.

Feedback

We welcome feedback

To give feedback on the Universal Credit Sanctions Official Statistics email: epass.team@dwp.gov.uk

Or write to:

Tracy Hills
Development Team Client Statistics
Digital
Data and Analytics
Room BP5201
Benton Park View
Longbenton
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
NE98 1YX

Useful links

Read the most recent and previous quarterly statistical summaries.

Read the JSA and ESA, UC & IS sanction statistics, including the links to the most recent statistics in data tables.

Use Stat-Xplore to tabulate any of the information available on sanctions.

Read the publication strategy for sanctions statistics.

Read all the statistics available from DWP.

Read a schedule for upcoming DWP statistical releases.