Sanctioning of Benefit Recipients

Michael Meacher Excerpts

Thursday 3rd April 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Michael Meacher (Oldham West and Royton) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House notes that there have been many cases of sanctions being wrongfully applied to benefit recipients; and call on the Government to review the targeting, severity and impact of such sanctions.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting me this debate. The process of sanctioning benefit recipients is now being used on an enormous scale—almost 1 million sanctions a year. Even the right-wing Policy Exchange think-tank acknowledged in a report published last month that about 68,000 benefit claimants each year are having their welfare payments stopped unfairly. Given that the penalty for the first infringement is the loss of benefit for four weeks, for the second the loss of benefits for three months and for the third the loss of benefits for three years, the number of people being driven into destitution by administrative diktat is enormous. Even the Policy Exchange admits that 8% of that number should never have been sanctioned.

I presume that everyone accepts that fall-back sanctions have to be applied in extreme cases where there is deliberate and real non co-operation with the obligation to try to find work and where no good reasons have been found for such behaviour. Those sanctions should be proportionate and reasonable and not exercised punitively or with a view to achieving targets or objectives—whatever we call them—for removing people from the unemployment list.

From the evidence that I have collected from my constituency surgery, Citizens Advice, YMCA, the excellent Work and Pensions Committee report on this issue and the Library, it is abundantly clear that the standards that the DWP likes to claim always apply in sanctioning cases far too often certainly do not. I wish to cite a number of cases drawn directly from those sources.

A security guard at a jobcentre turned away a man with learning disabilities who had arrived 20 minutes early to sign on. The man then returned two minutes late to sign on and had his JSA sanctioned for 4 weeks.

A man was sanctioned for four weeks because he had not known about an appointment as the letter had been sent to an address that he had left a year ago, even though Jobcentre Plus was aware of his current address.

A woman claiming employment and support allowance had been diagnosed with cervical cancer and had given the back-to-work scheme provider a list of her hospital appointments. She was sanctioned for failing to attend an appointment on the middle day of her three-day hospital stay. The woman had two daughters but her ESA was reduced to £28 a week. She asked for reconsideration, but had heard nothing five weeks later.

A woman was sanctioned for failing to attend provider-led training when the receptionist had rung to tell her not to come in because the trainer was ill. She was subsequently told that she should have attended to sign the attendance register.

A woman whose ESA was sanctioned had her benefit reduced from £195 to less than £50 per fortnight because she missed a back-to-work scheme appointment owing to illness. Her sister had rung two days beforehand to say that she could not attend and arranged another date, when she did attend.

An epileptic man had his JSA sanctioned for four weeks because he did not attend a back-to-work scheme meeting as his two-year old daughter was taken ill and he was her sole carer that day. He rang the provider in advance, but was told this would still have to be noted as “did not attend”. During the four-week sanction he suffered hunger, hardship, stress and an increase in epileptic attacks, but he was not told about hardship payments or food banks or how to appeal the sanction decision.

Lastly, a man in Yorkshire and Humber was sanctioned for allegedly failing to attend back-to-work scheme events. He had in fact attended, and the provider had no record of any failures. His hardship request was not processed, his housing benefit was stopped, and he fell into rent arrears and had no money for food, gas or electricity.

These are not isolated or exceptional cases.

[Sir Peter Bottomley (Worthing West) (Con)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman allow me?

[Mr Meacher]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman because I respect his concern about these matters, but I will not give way again because we are short of time, with the Government having put on two statements before this debate.

[Sir Peter Bottomley]

Is there any rational reason why in any of those cases the Jobcentre or others should not have reversed the decision if it was clear that the wrong decision had been taken? Why is it necessary to go through a full appeals system when clearly human inspection can say this is wrong?

[Mr Meacher]

I very much agree with that. Jobcentres Plus have the right to “reconsider”, which is a euphemistic term, and they sometimes do, but I agree that appeals often take three or more months, and are extremely bureaucratic, long-winded and difficult. Far more effort should be put in before the decision is taken to sanction, so that we get sensible decisions and long appeal procedures are not required.

Before I turn to what should be done to change policies and procedures that are patently not working properly, I want to make two wider points. First, everyone who can do so should seek work. The overwhelming majority of the jobless are desperate to find work. However, when 2.4 million people are on the dole queues today and there are only 558,000 vacancies, three out of every four simply cannot find a job whatever they do. A report in the Financial Times this week says that there are 3 million under-employed people who would be keen to work full time if only the jobs were available. The real problem in Britain today is not people failing to try to get work, but the Chancellor’s obsessional austerity policies that contract the economy and fail to provide the job opportunities that people are desperately looking for.

I do not object to the use of sanctions in the tiny number of cases in which they might be needed as long as they are proportionate and reasonable. However, I do object to the hounding of some of the most vulnerable people in our society, often for trivial, ill-considered or utterly unjustified reasons, and driving them into destitution when those who caused the financial crash and the longest recession in this country for 140 years get no sanction at all. It is a classic case of one law for the rich and another for the poor.

What should be done? Plenty. Sanctioning is being used on far too large a scale. The practice is not only unduly harsh and, obviously, causes severe hardship, but is often counter-productive. The YMCA cites three people’s comments about its effects. One says:

“I was unable to look for work as much as I could before”.

Another says:

“It stopped me from searching for work as I had no money to get to different employers”.

A third person says:

“My focus turned to survival rather than gaining employment”.

Citizens Advice makes the crucial observation—I think this was the point that the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) was making—that front-line advisers do not have sufficient time to get to know a claimant and understand their needs. That explains why there are so many reports of cases such as that of a person with no computer skills being required to apply for work online, a person with no driving licence who is required to apply for a job for which driving is essential, and a wheelchair user who is required to apply for a job that is physically demanding.

Benefit off-flow—a horrible bureaucratic phrase that treats human beings like counters—is, perversely, the key performance measure used by Jobcentre Plus. Disallowances—that is the euphemism used by the Department for Work and Pensions—are included in the off-flow data for people coming off the unemployment list, so staff have an in-built incentive to use them to achieve what they perceive their management expect of them.

Much more could be done to prevent situations that cause sanctioning from arising in the first place because it is clear that in a great many cases people simply do not understand what is required of them. Regrettably, there is a toxic yet pervasive culture in Jobcentre Plus of “Sanction first; think later”, as is shown by the shockingly large number of sanctions against young people—there were 39,000 last year—that are subsequently overturned or, to use that wonderfully euphemistic word, “reconsidered”. Serious, thoughtful effort is needed to do everything possible to secure compliance, with which we all agree, without a sanction being necessary. There should be more common-sense discretion and much less of a rush to action: action should be taken only as a last resort.

Much more attention should be paid to the impact of sanctioning on claimants. An Oxfam report published last May estimated that 500,000 people were reliant on food aid—I suspect that that figure has now nearly doubled—and that more than half of people who turned to food banks did so as a direct result of having their benefit payments delayed, reduced or withdrawn altogether. In 21st-century Britain, can forcing hundreds of thousands of people onto food aid, which is usually associated with third-world countries, conceivably be justified when the root cause of the problem is the Chancellor’s failure to grow the economy and create jobs because of his obsession with prolonged austerity? I think not, which is why I submit to the House that there is an urgent need, as my motion demands,

“to review the targeting, severity and impact”

of sanctioning as it is currently applied.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Meacher]

The Minister talks, in his very earnest way, about the claimant commitment. He does not seem to realise that there is a complete disconnect between how the system is supposed to work and how it is actually working on the ground. We are not talking about a few isolated or exceptional examples. I quoted dozens of cases, as did hon. Members on both sides of the Chamber. He needs to take account of the realities, not a dream of what he would like to be real.

The Minister picked up on my remarks about the Chancellor. The most effective way to cut the deficit is not through prolonged austerity and sanctioning, but by expanding the economy and job creation. That is exactly what has been done in the United States, which is now 5% above pre-crash levels. Here, we are 1.5% below pre-crash levels.

The hon. Member for Birmingham, Yardley (John Hemming) made useful points about the appeal procedure taking far too long and being far too costly. There should be an attempt to combine it with the procedure for universal credit.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aberdeen South (Dame Anne Begg), the Chair of the Select Committee, talked about the very high numbers, contrary to the impression given by the Minister, of people being sanctioned. Some 5%—about 60,000 people—are still being sanctioned per month. The causes of sanctions are often unquestionably trivial, wrong and lacking common-sense discretion. She spoke about the need for another survey—not just the Oakley survey on how the system works—to consider the impact on claimants and whether they are more likely to seek work.

The hon. Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) made the important point that sanctions should be used only as a last resort. That is clearly not the case at the present time.

My hon. Friend the Member for Makerfield (Yvonne Fovargue) rightly said that people are impoverished by sanctions and less able to find work, and that they often do not understand the process being imposed on them. DWP staff should be incentivised not for the numbers they sanction, but for the numbers they get back into work.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Julie Hilling) made an eloquent case about how people are not helped to find work, and that finding work becomes harder as a result of sanctions. She gave examples of how sanctions are often applied unfairly, as did the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford), who spoke of the system not being fit for purpose, particularly in rural areas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) made a powerful speech, as always, which made a comparison with how sanctions work and the less eligibility principle of the Victorian poor law. He thought that no attention is being given to the impact on the victim, which is bad enough, but what about the family, the partner and the children who are being made to suffer?

My right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) made a very effective case for comprehensive reform. For all these reasons, I am extremely unconvinced by the Minister’s reply. However hard he was trying to convince us that his heart is in the right place, the results on the ground do not merit that. For all those reasons, I hope the whole House agrees that we need another review. We need a review that considers the impact, severity and targeting of sanctioning, and we need a reduction in the number of cases where it is used.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House notes that there have been many cases of sanctions being wrongfully applied to benefit recipients; and calls on the Government to review the targeting, severity and impact of such sanctions.