Benefit Sanctions

Margaret Ferrier Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Westminster Hall

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

It is an honour to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) for securing this important debate.

The Government continue to claim that the claimant commitment ensures that requirements for claimants are reasonable, but their own research shows that around half of claimants say that the commitment contains actions that do not take account or consideration of their personal circumstances, are unrealistic or simply do not increase their chances of finding work. The Government are ignoring Work and Pensions Committee recommendations, and I hope the Minister will be more receptive today and note my concern that those recommendations do not appear to have been adequately considered.

Sanctions remove all of a claimant’s jobseeker’s allowance and all of the personal allowance component of ESA, leaving people in a position of utter destitution. Hardship payments are supposed to be available to people who have been sanctioned. However, unless they are deemed vulnerable—a very tight definition that does not even consider homelessness as a sign of vulnerability—they cannot apply for two weeks.

I can put myself in the shoes of those who fall foul of the sanctions regime. If I were reliant on benefits to survive, I would probably have little or no savings. I honestly do not know how I would survive for two weeks with no income. Even if I were successful in my hardship application, I would receive only 60% of my sanctioned benefit. I have concerns that the current system has the potential to push otherwise law-abiding people to criminality in order to survive. It is abhorrent for people to face destitution, and it is thoroughly heartless of the Government to continue with such a ruthless system. I welcome the private Member’s Bill promoted by my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh), which seeks to introduce automatic hardship payments for sanctioned claimants and to remedy some of the problems in the current system.

The sanctions regime is also incredibly unfair on front-line staff in jobcentres. I am aware of a recent incident at a jobcentre in my constituency that resulted in staff having to phone the police. The reason for the incident was that a person who had been sanctioned and, as I understand it, not adequately notified of the sanction, visited the jobcentre to protest, and the situation escalated. That does not seem to be an isolated incident. From what I can tell, there is a broken process in place.

In summary, I would like responses from the Minister to the following questions. Can figures for the number of people arrested during their sanction period for shoplifting offences be provided? What is the reasoning behind the two-week hardship rule, and has it been recently reassessed? What consideration has been given to the private Member’s Bill on automatic hardship funding and to the practices of notification of sanctions for all those affected?