Social Security: Claimants

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Wednesday 30th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

I congratulate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle on her first question. I hope they will not all be as painful in future as this one. I cannot make that commitment. As is said in the report, the reality is that sanctions work. There is a lot of external evidence of sanctions having a substantial impact on employment uptake, whether you are looking at the evidence from Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark or Germany. Our own survey shows that people on both JSA and ESA are more likely to accept the rules of the system with the sanction system behind it.

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that if the National Audit Office is about anything it is about looking for value for money? Will he confirm that one of the important findings of the NAO is that in the fiscal year 2015 there were, for example, DWP sanction benefits savings, so called, just shy of £100 million net of hardship payments? However, the NAO came to the conclusion that the department had done no overall assessment of any kind of the downstream consequential impacts on other public services, so it is impossible to know whether the prosecution of sanctions as currently carried out by the department is effective value for money.

[Lord Freud]

I am in a difficult position because we are about to make our response to the NAO report, which is a formal process, so I do not have that response. Clearly the NAO concentrates on value for money. It wants more evidence and the department will be looking at providing it with some of that evidence in reply.