The rate of universal credit sanctions hit an all time high of 6.86% in October 2022, before falling slightly to 6.51% in November 2022, according to the latest DWP statistics.
DWP figures show that sanctions have risen by 4.16 percentage points in the last 12 months.
By far the highest number of sanctions is for failure to attend or participate in a mandatory interview. In the last year over 515,430 claimants were sanctioned for this reason, a total of 98.4% of all the sanctions dished out to UC full service claimants.
Benefits and Work members can download a 30 page guide to Ways to prevent and overturn ESA and UC sanctions from this page.
You can read the full sanctions statistics here.
Correction: the original headline of this article read '1 in 7' rather than 7% - our apologies.