Sanctioning of Benefit Recipients

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Lavery (Wansbeck) (Lab)]

I wonder whether it is a sign of the times that more Members sat in the Chamber to debate badgers than are present to debate the poor and the vulnerable.

I will begin by placing on the record my belief that personal responsibility and compliance are extremely important for individuals seeking employment. However, the current regime seeks to penalise those who offer responsibility but are, for various reasons, disproportionately sanctioned. In many cases, that means abject poverty not just for them, but for the people around them. I am totally convinced that this period in our history will be looked at by generations to come with horror. It is possible that people will think that MPs acted in a barbaric fashion. We are living through an era in which being disabled, poor or disfranchised basically attracts state punishment rather than help. That is a sad indictment of these times.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful point. Is it not incumbent on Members to look on those who are vulnerable and on the margins with respect and to offer them support rather than condemnation and punishment?

[Ian Lavery]

Absolutely. This year is the 180th anniversary of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. The Poor Law contained some incredibly harsh ideas, but they seem to have found fertile ground and taken seed among a new generation of coalition MPs. The Act was based on a royal commission that was largely the work of Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick and that took some extreme yet strikingly familiar views. One was that poverty was essentially caused by the individual, rather than by the economic and social conditions. It was therefore claimed that the pauper claimed relief regardless of his merits; that large families got the most, which encouraged irresponsible marriages; that women claimed relief for illegitimate children, which encouraged immorality; and that labourers had no incentive to work. It was recommended that workhouse conditions should be less desirable than those of an independent labourer of the lowest class. It was a fight to the bottom. There was no attempt 180 years ago to improve the working conditions of the lowest class. They wanted people to work in a worse position, below even that of the lowest of the working class. That attitude pervades today. Mark Twain once said:

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

Have we really regressed almost 200 years socially?

Undoubtedly, welfare reform is causing misery for people up and down the country. It is an ideological crusade to shrink the state, led by people who I believe simply do not care about what happens to the individuals or the consequences for communities as a whole. The approach of the Department for Work and Pensions to sanctions has been characterised by the chaotic approach to universal credit and the personal independence payment. Statistics showing that nearly 60% of decisions on sanctions have been overturned have now been removed from the DWP website. This is a regime that is targeting the most vulnerable people in our society—the very people, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Oldham West and Royton (Mr Meacher) correctly says, we should be helping.

Even in the worst cases of non-compliance with the DWP rules, who actually suffers when sanctions are applied? When crimes under the law are committed, it is the perpetrator who is punished, but when DWP rules are broken, the people around that person are also punished. No thought is given to the family, the partner or anybody else associated with the individual being sanctioned. It may well be that it is one person who is sanctioned, but it results in a broad swipe at everyone in a household, family or circle of friends who have the obligation of the state transferred to them. The situation has been described as torture by hunger. Should this be happening in a civilised society? Should we be engaging in sanctioning people and forcing them to go to food banks? These are people who generally need assistance in life. The reality is that for every person sanctioned for the things the right-wing press prints on its front pages, there are thousands more who are forced into degradation as the victims of circumstance, officious advisers and cruel policy.

Let me describe one or two cases. A man in my constituency visited my offices in desperate need. He had been sanctioned after missing an appointment with a work training provider. He had a problem with his heart and he had had to visit hospital—he was sanctioned for being in hospital. The sanction was later overturned, but not before he was driven almost to starvation and the local food bank after visiting my office in a desperate state. All he had eaten for three days was field mushrooms and eggs borrowed from a neighbour. I am not sure that anyone in this House wants to see that sort of thing happen. As politicians, that is not what we are here to do.

The benefits of a man from the south-east who had been blind since birth were stopped because he was not replying to letters. The DWP was failing to send him letters in Braille or any other accessible format. He did not reply because he did not even know he had them. This man had worked for most of his life, but because of the DWP’s error he was forced to turn to a payday loan to survive. The chaotic system forced him into hunger and poverty.

So out of control is the situation that a website now documents the cruel, arbitrary and ridiculous reasons why people have had their benefits stopped. I urge hon. Members to look at it, but I have some examples:

“You get a job interview. It’s at the same time as your job centre appointment, so you reschedule the job centre. You attend your rearranged appointment and then get a letter saying your benefits will be stopped because going to a job interview isn’t a good enough reason to miss an appointment.”

Another example is:

“You get a job that starts in two weeks time. You don’t look for work while you are waiting for the job to start. You’re sanctioned.”

How ridiculous and how absurd is this system?

“You apply for three jobs one week and three jobs the following Sunday and Monday. Because the job centre week starts on a Tuesday it treats this as applying for six jobs in one week and none the following week. You are sanctioned for 13 weeks for failing to apply for three jobs each week.”

It is an outrageous situation.

There is of course a clear link between benefit delays or changes and people turning to food banks. As many hon. Members have mentioned, more than 650,000 people now use food banks, and there is a strong link between that and benefit sanctioning. Serious questions need to be asked about whether people are being deliberately sanctioned to massage the employment figures, because at any one time 100,000 people may be in the churn of those sanctioned. At such a time, they are not figures in the unemployment statistics; they are cases in a fiddling of the unemployment statistics. The Minister may wish to target that point.

In my last minute, I want to mention the pressure on staff in DWP offices. The failure to impose enough sanctions means that many of them receive performance improvement plans or notices to improve, which might ultimately result in their losing their employment.

In conclusion, as a society, we will be judged harshly by history for punishing the poor, the disabled and the vulnerable, as well as for not doing enough to stop the determined drive of Government Members to drag us back to the Poor Law of 1834, the shameful establishing of IDS UK—in dire straits.