Benefit Sanctions

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Neil Gray

Wednesday 16th December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Neil Gray]

I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his diligence, especially after the put-down by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow Central: the hon. Gentleman was himself late for the debate and, had he been on social security support, he would have been sanctioned. I do not believe that many of us could survive for longer than a month or so without our own salary, never mind the £73 a week that other people have to live on. It does him no service to push this. As for our view of sanctions, we believe that there should be conditionality, absolutely, but not the punitive sanctioning that has increased exponentially under this Government and the previous one. That is our concern, not conditionality or sanctioning in general. I hope that answers the hon. Gentleman’s question.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan said, the sanctions regime is causing extreme hardship and is being operated in an arbitrary and unfair way. The Crisis report she quoted shows plainly what is happening to homeless people.

[Emily Thornberry]

Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that the rules were changed in 2012, resulting in the much greater use of sanctions than ever before?

[Neil Gray]

Yes, absolutely, the Labour spokesperson is right. There is clear, documented evidence of the rate of sanctioning for all social security benefits such as JSA and ESA having risen since the coalition Government came to power.

Homeless people are twice as likely as others to be sanctioned, which must shock us all. I hope that the Minister will advise us of what plans she has to extend the at-risk group to those with mental health conditions and to the homeless, as I called for two weeks ago. I hope she will provide some detail on that.

[Neil Gray]

Absolutely. Two weeks ago I called for that same review, and the Select Committee on Work and Pensions has done so as well. I hope that the Minister will respond. It is little wonder that mental health of people who have been sanctioned suffers—their confidence, their ability to find work and their ability to feed and water themselves and their family are all damaged. It is little wonder that we find evidence that people’s mental health is suffering. What benefit does sanctioning give to people seeking work? Very little, if any.

In the Minister’s response to my earlier debate, she stressed the importance of sanctioning to the social security system and to getting people into work. I hope that in her response today she will provide some evidence of the effectiveness of sanctions in pushing people into work. I am genuinely interested to hear what the Department has done to get evidence of how many people have returned to work within three or even six months of a social security sanction. I am interested because there is certainly plenty of evidence to show that the system is not working.

One example of evidence is the academic research conducted by Oxford University and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which my hon. Friend the Member for Banff and Buchan cited. They looked at official data on sanctioning rates, employment rates and benefit off-flow between 2005 and 2014 in 375 local authority areas—a pretty comprehensive and wide-ranging study. They found that for every 100 JSA claimants who received a sanction, 42.4 no longer claimed the benefit. That sounds great until we realise that only a fifth of them actually reported having found work. So for every 100 sanctions, we get 8.5 people into work. Also, from those 100 sanctions, 34 people no longer claim the benefit but are not in work. How many of them are self-denying the support to which they are entitled and which they need because they are so scunnered and fed up with the system?

Has the Department carried out a social impact study? Has any work been done with those who have been sanctioned to find out what their experiences were, their destinations after the sanction and the impact on their quality of life? The Government have been quick to dismiss any link between work capability assessments and suicides, in spite of the study from Oxford and Liverpool Universities linking 590 suicides to WCAs. The Government have also been quick to say that the sanctions regime plays an important part in the social security system. As far as I can see, however, neither statement has so far been supported with fact. I hope that the Minister will enlighten us today.

[Emily Thornberry]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware of another statistic? If people go on the Work programme, they are as likely to get sanctioned as to get a job.

[Neil Gray]

That is a highly depressing statistic for the Government to reflect on.

I hope that the Minister will give us more detail on the yellow card sanction or early warning system. We heard that it was to be trialled in the new year, but where will the trial be, how long will it last and under what terms will it take place? I asked the same questions two weeks ago and hope that the Minister can now advise us of the answers.

Finally, will the Minister agree to the full independent review of the sanctions regime called for by the Work and Pensions Committee and by my party? With half of all sanctions being overturned on appeal, a sizeable increase in sanctioning rates and documented evidence from Oxfam, the Poverty Alliance, Crisis and many others linking sanctions to increased food bank need, now is the time for the Government finally to realise the damage that they are causing to individuals and communities and to review the sanctions regime.

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

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Gillan.

I, too, did not expect to be back in Westminster Hall discussing benefit sanctions so soon after the previous debate. Nevertheless, I am grateful to the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) for securing the debate. I am also very grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow North East (Anne McLaughlin) for speaking from the heart, for speaking the truth and for speaking so powerfully.

The debate has given us another opportunity to hold the Government’s feet to the fire. As the official Opposition spokesperson, I tend to speak second to last, before the Minister, so I do not get a chance to come back at her. We are two weeks on from the previous debate, so I will anticipate to an extent what the Minister will say this time. Perhaps that will challenge her on some of the things that I suspect will be in her speech and she might be able to answer some of the questions.

I spent a long time looking at the Minister’s previous speech from two weeks ago. It was interesting, but a number of things seemed odd. She seemed to indicate that the Government had given up even trying to persuade us that their sanctions regime is helping people into work, because she said,

“we know from claimants that there is a positive impact on behaviour” —[Official Report, 2 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 174WH.]

and that, “sanctions make it…clear” to people that they must “follow the rules”, so they are not about jobs. As is obvious, following the rules in terms of looking for work is not the same as finding work. In fact, it has become increasingly clear that, in many cases, the rules are a set of arbitrary boxes to be ticked that are as likely to hamstring people looking for work as they are to help them.

Sanctions are a major concern in Scotland, as they are in the rest of the country, as today’s debate and the previous one show. I was struck by a case that came up at a recent hearing of the Scottish Parliament’s Welfare Reform Committee on sanctions. A man from the east end of Glasgow described his experience on the Work programme, which included being made to sit in an office from nine to five, cold calling local employers to ask whether they had any vacancies. Of course they did not, so he ended up with a string of rejections, which was deeply humiliating as well as being a complete waste of time. For the Minister to suggest that the rules are about tailoring to the needs and circumstances of the individual frankly contradicts all the evidence and experience, which is to the contrary.

The Minister spoke about the claimant commitment in our previous debate. It is worth saying a few words about that, not least because, by setting the conditions that jobseekers are expected to adhere to, it has become an inextricable part of the wider sanctions debate. What are the conditions? Like the sanctions regimes we have today, the claimant commitment was a bit of a wheeze, cooked up by the coalition Government in what seemed to be more of an effort to score political points than to help people find work. I read the two reports on universal credit published by the DWP a little over a week ago and one thing I found interesting was that only 37% of people surveyed by the Department felt that the claimant commitment set realistic expectations that would help them find jobs.

It is time for a proper evaluation of the claimant commitment. Although that was a key recommendation of the Work and Pensions Committee in its recent report on sanctions, the Government continue to refuse to do that or to give us a reason why. In her previous speech, the Minister referred to her Department’s efforts to “improve” the system by taking on board the recommendations of the two recent reports. One of them, which was by Matthew Oakley and published in July 2014, has been referred to, while the other is the Work and Pensions Committee’s report from March to which I just referred. She said that the Government have

“responded positively to the…Oakley review”,

and that they had

“accepted all 17 of the Oakley recommendations to improve the process”.—[Official Report, 2 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 176WH.]

I found that interesting, so I had a good look into that. However, I am afraid that the Minister has been gilding the lily.

The Government actually said that that they would accept the recommendations

“wherever possible, and subject to detailed feasibility and securing the necessary resources”—

weasel words.

Effectively, they are giving no commitment at all and the reality is that, 18 months after the Oakley report was published, some of its most important recommendations have gone exactly nowhere. Recommendation 11, for example, called on the Government to pilot a system of non-financial sanctions. That seems entirely sensible, particularly for those with a strong record of meeting the requirements placed on them and who, for example, may simply have had a wife in labour.

To give another example, recommendations 12 and 14 suggested that the Government end the absurd practice of Work programme providers being required to refer people for sanctions even if the providers themselves do not believe that there has been an offence. The Government rejected that common-sense suggestion and once again gave no reason. Therefore, the Minister claims to have “responded positively” to Oakley, and to have accepted his recommendations “in full”, but, having had a good look at the reality as opposed to the rhetoric, I do not see how they match up.

Similarly, the Minister did not tell us the whole story when she described the Government’s response to the Select Committee report. She said that its Chair had

“welcomed our response and, importantly, our willingness to engage with the Committee to ensure that the conditionality system works as it should.”—[Official Report, 2 December 2015; Vol. 603, c. 176WH.]

Let us have a look at that. By far the most important recommendation was for there to be a full, independent review of the entire system. Inexplicably, the Government refuse to do that and will not give us a reason.

Another of the Committee’s particularly important recommendations was for there to be a thorough evaluation of the new approach to in-work conditionality. We all need to be mindful of what the Government are doing and what they are about to do. They are currently piloting, within universal credit, an expansion of the conditionality regime. That pilot is very shadowy. We do not know where it is, who is being put through it or how many people are on it and, when we ask, the Government do not give us any answers. In-work conditionality means that someone is working, but they are not working enough, so, as far as I understand it—if I am wrong, I would love to hear from the Minister about exactly what is going on—they are told that, even though they are working, they must look for more work and, if they do not, they will get sanctioned. If that is right, we would like to know the details.

We welcomed the recommendation of a review, not least because in-work conditionality is completely untested and unprecedented—it is a new concept within any social security system. The Government’s response to the recommendation was good. I give the Minister full marks for her response. She stated:

“We agree that individuals on Universal Credit and in work will not be subject to the full range of work-related requirements and sanctions beyond existing pilots until we have fully considered the learning from those pilots.”

Great.

However—surprise, surprise—we heard from the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the autumn statement seemingly just a few weeks thereafter that the Government will

“extend the same support and conditionality we currently expect of those on jobseeker’s allowance to over 1 million more benefit claimants.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2015; Vol. 602, c. 1371.]

I do not know whether the Minister knew that. Who are those claimants? What are the Government doing on this? We have a shadowy pilot and we are told that it will be looked at properly before it is extended, but then the Chancellor of the Exchequer says that it will be expanded to another million people and we do not know what the circumstances are. This is completely new. The current sanctions regime is bad enough and if the Minister is now to expand that to those in work, we need to know why and how.

[Neil Gray]

Does the hon. Lady share my concern that the conditionality and sanctioning regimes are just a fig leaf for social security cuts?

[Emily Thornberry]

With great respect, I think that is a simplistic argument and that it goes further than that. Those who have been subjected to a large number of sanctions lose confidence and end up “economically inactive” and, when they are asked why they have become economically inactive, we find out that it is because they have been discouraged. For many people, that means sleeping on the sofa, asking mum for a loan and begging. Many people are falling out of the system and a large number of them are very young, but that allows the Prime Minister to get up at Prime Minister’s questions and say that the number of claimants is going down. It is more cynical than cuts. Cuts is bad enough, but that takes things further.

The Government have not made clear exactly what they will do, but our assumption is that the 1 million people must include those on universal credit. I respectfully suggest that the Government saying one thing to the Select Committee and then the exact opposite in the Chamber just four weeks later does not look like the Minister’s promise to have “engaged” with the Committee in any positive way.

More troubling still are the implications of that U-turn for the future of sanctions policy. The sanctions regime is broken, but the Government will not look at it or allow an independent review. They are bashing on regardless and now they want to increase it to include those in work. During the previous debate we seemed to be fairly close to reaching cross-party consensus on the fact that it is broken. The only differences that arose were in relation to the scale of the problem. It does need fixing.

For the Government more or less out of the blue to suggest that they intend to expand the scope of sanctions is quite extraordinary. I hope that, this afternoon, the Minister will answer some of the questions rightly asked by the Opposition to hold the Government to account, because it is silly for us to have to keep coming back time and again to Westminster Hall to ask them.