Benefit Claimants Sanctions (Required Assessment) Bill

John Nicolson Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 2nd December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Debbie Abrahams (Oldham East and Saddleworth) (Lab)]

After the previous speech, which I will come on to, I welcome the opportunity to use a slightly different tone in this debate—certainly when it comes to the evidence. I start by offering warm congratulations to the hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) on bringing the Bill forward. She rightly deserves credit for her work, and her conciliatory tone is to be commended. She is absolutely right that, as the hon. Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) was saying, this debate is about continuing the listening process and trying to improve a flawed system. The Bill does just that.

The hon. Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South outlined her personal views, but she put them to one side and, like so many Members, spoke about the car crashes that are happening in the sanctions system. I want to provide two examples that I received just last night and this morning—that is how frequently such things are happening. Nearly a million people were sanctioned last year. It is not an insignificant number. The two cases are exactly the same. Both people were due to go in for surgery just days before a work capability assessment and were signed off for eight weeks. When they asked whether they had to go to the assessment, they were told that they did or else they would be sanctioned. It is absolute nonsense. This sort of thing is going on up and down the country, and I will come on to some other examples.

The hon. Lady was right to highlight the unfortunate narrative that was indicative of the Government until fairly recently. The shirker/scrounger language set a tone and tried to shift the public’s perception.

[John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Lady share my enormous concern—it sounds as though she does—with that scrounger tone? My father was the manager of the largest social security office in Scotland, and he always said that the problem was not people claiming what they were not entitled to; it was all the people who did not claim what they were entitled to because of the sense of shame and the narrative propagated by Government Members.

[Debbie Abrahams]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Reflecting his father’s experience, many jobcentre advisers have been saying similar things and that they are absolutely horrified by what they are experiencing.