Benefit Sanctions

Debate between Mark Pritchard and Claudia Webbe

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Westminster Hall

[Claudia Webbe (Leicester East) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Pritchard. I thank the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) for securing this valuable and important debate.

The Government claim that evidence clearly shows that their sanctions regime is clear, fair and effective in getting people into work, so why are they hiding data from experts who want to study that effectiveness? Benefits sanctions are an utterly inhumane blunt instrument that have not been shown to be effective in their supposed aim. Instead, almost every study that has looked at the benefit sanctions regime seems to include the word “cruel”—indeed, it is “pointlessly cruel” according to a Select Committee report, and “cruel”, “inhumane” and “degrading” according to academics. That is what the experts conducting those studies have found.

The sanctions regime is enormously disproportionate and punitive: a complete withdrawal of support for missing a single jobcentre appointment. Examples of people sanctioned because of illness, a lack of wi-fi connectivity or other reasons outside their control are easy to find. That cruelty can be imposed with little effective scrutiny for up to three years. The organisation Feeding Britain reported that in Leicester, one woman with two children was sanctioned after she missed appointments as a result of going to Iraq to look after her sick father. It left her in a terrible state, with bills and rent arrears. Another referral over the summer had his appointment with his work coach rearranged because the work coach was not in. He was then sanctioned because whoever was standing in for the work coach rearranged the appointment to be earlier, and he missed it.

The UK is an international outlier in this cruelty. Indeed, the UK is unique among OECD nations in using sanctions to punish claimants. A Bristol University Press publication on the impact of sanctions shows that they are largely ineffective and often make people more likely to remain out of work. This consciously cruel regime is operating at record levels—more than double its pre-pandemic numbers—in the middle of a cost of living crisis, and a huge number of working people in my constituency of Leicester East are being sanctioned for not accepting zero-hours contracts to top up their incomes.

Of course, the more vulnerable a claimant, the greater the impact of this conscious cruelty. The Government cannot claim to be unaware of this, as they have been repeatedly warned by MPs, academics and advocate groups about the huge damage being done. Rethink Mental Illness recently called for an immediate halt to sanctions, with the group’s chief executive officer describing them as

“incredibly damaging to people’s mental health”

because of

“the massive financial and psychological impact”

of sanctions and of the fear that they might be imposed.

Speaking of the more than doubling of the number of sanctions, David Webster of the University of Glasgow said:

“A Universal Credit claimant is now more likely”—

in the midst of the worst cost of living crisis in living memory—

“to be under a sanction than to have Covid”,

which is a truly horrifying illustration. Dr Webster also accused the Government of withholding information about the scale of the crisis they have created. That is not a new phenomenon. As we have heard, in February the Government blocked access to data for academics who simply wanted simply to study whether benefit sanctions were driving up suicide rates, bringing a vital study that was already under way to an immediate halt. Even for the Conservative party, this is an astonishing level of disregard for people’s mental health and, indeed, for their lives. It is institutional cruelty.

It is time to end the culture of secrecy about the impacts and effectiveness of the Government’s benefit sanctions policy. Will the Minister commit the Government to releasing this data? It is an open secret that information already in the public domain showed that a staggering 43% of unemployed disability benefit claimants had attempted to take their own lives because of the horrors inflicted on them, and that was in 2018—long before the sanctions reached their current appalling high level.

Sanctions are indeed pointlessly cruel, inhumane and degrading. If the Government think that the facts show otherwise, why are they hiding them?

[Mark Pritchard (in the Chair)]

We now come to the Front Benchers, who have 10 minutes each. If the Minister is so minded, he might leave a minute for Chris Stephens to wind up.