Benefit Sanctions

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Anne McLaughlin

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Anne McLaughlin]

I represent Glasgow North East, which has the 17th highest rate of unemployment in the whole of these islands, so my constituents have got very little to cheer about today, although I hear that the Prime Minister was most gleeful about the fact that we have managed to cut unemployment a little overall.

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

Is the hon. Lady aware that, although more people are in work than a year ago, the number of hours that we are working as a country has gone down, which indicates the sort of jobs that people are getting?

[Anne McLaughlin]

Yes, I am aware of that, and I thank the hon. Lady for highlighting it.

I grew in the shipbuilding town of Greenock in Port Glasgow. I often tell a story about when I was at Port Glasgow high school—I am not going to tell Members what year it was. Every Monday morning in my first year at high school we had a 15-minute registration class, and the teacher would ask, “How did you get on at the weekend?” I remember a long, long period in which several people in my class—it felt like dozens, but it could not have been—said, “My dad got made redundant”, “My dad was a fitter, and he’s lost his job”, “My father was a welder” or “My mother worked in the canteen.” Not many women in those days were time-served tradespeople. For so many of my classmates, both their parents lost their jobs. For many of them, the last time they could remember their parents working was when they were 12, so they have very little memory of working parents. Where there is generational unemployment in an area in which expectations are low, surely our job is to raise people’s expectations; give them confidence and self-belief; work with them, not against them; give them additional support, not less support; and certainly not punish them.

Let me turn to what I believe lies behind the Government’s sanctions agenda. I will start with what they say lies behind it. They say it is to teach claimants that they cannot expect something for nothing. I will refer to a few of my constituents, and perhaps the Minister will tell me what each of them was supposed to learn. Sara was late—not very late—for an interview and was sanctioned. She was late because there was an accident on the road and her bus was stuck in traffic. It was not her fault. What is she to learn from that?

Another constituent was told that she had to go to an interview at the jobcentre. She was given a week’s notice, and they said, “We want you to come next Wednesday at 3 pm.” She said, “But I pick up my six-year-old from school at 3 pm.” “Well, that’s just tough”—her parents lived 100 miles away—“You either come to the interview or we sanction your benefits.” What is she to learn from that? Should she have abandoned her child at the school playground or take her child out of school? That is what she did, and her child missed an hour’s education.

I have two constituents—a couple—who live in Roystonhill. The wife went into labour—not the party; she was having a baby. [Laughter.] I do not know why I said that. The husband unsurprisingly went with her. He had no credit to phone and say that he would not be signing on that day, so he went the next day. They were sanctioned for six weeks. Welcome to the world, tiny baby; your parents are getting no money for six weeks, and not even a single milk token. What is that couple to learn from that sanction? Did they learn that the husband should have abandoned his wife and left her to it? Before anybody starts thinking that they were long-term unemployed, let me say that their daughter is two and they are both working now. They were both working up until six months before she had the baby. They are not people who do not want to work. They learned nothing from that experience, except that the Government do not care about them.

I have a constituent who has mental health problems and a visual impairment. He has severe panic attacks. A condition of his ESA is that he attends an office in the city centre either once a month or once a week. It takes him hours because he gets lost and distressed. He was asked, “What is it you do when you get there?” He said, “I just sign a bit of paper and leave.” Why? What is the point of that?