Benefit Claimants Sanctions (Required Assessment) Bill

Michael Tomlinson Excerpts

Friday 2nd December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mhairi Black (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (SNP)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

Before I start to explain the Bill, I want to thank the people and organisations that have been incredibly helpful and supportive: the Child Poverty Action Group; the Scottish Association for Mental Health; Gingerbread; Citizens Advice Scotland; PCS; the House of Commons Library staff, who have done a power of work on this; and all the researchers in the SNP team. I also thank my colleagues for coming out to support me today. I give a particularly big thank you to Tanya, one of the researchers. She is an absolute belter of a person, and I really appreciate everything she has done.

To understand the logic behind the Bill, we need to appreciate that people feel anxious. They are terrified of the process that they will have to endure if they lose their job. We can debate whether that fear and anxiety is legitimate, but the reality is that people are scared.

We need to examine the current process that people have to endure. If a claimant is deemed to have failed to meet a condition of jobseeker’s allowance—failing to attend an interview, being unavailable for work or leaving a job voluntarily—they are subject to benefit sanctions, meaning that their benefits are stopped for period.

The final decision on whether to sanction is made not by Jobcentre Plus work coaches or Work programme providers, but by Department for Work and Pensions decision makers. If a work coach or adviser believes that the claimant has not fulfilled their requirement, a “doubt” can be raised and referred to a decision maker in a sanction referral. That mysterious decision maker is unknown to the claimant and uncontactable. Normally, if we have an issue or are dissatisfied, we phone a number or speak to a manager, but a claimant referred for a sanction has no number to phone the decision maker to explain why they failed to meet a requirement. There is no means of finding out who this person is who ultimately has their livelihood in their hands, which only adds to the unhealthy, insecure atmosphere that drives so much anxiety and pessimism. The decision maker should attempt to obtain evidence from the claimant, as well as from the work coach, and make a decision on whether to apply a sanction based on a “balance of probabilities”—whatever that means.

[Michael Tomlinson (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Lady on securing this debate and getting a large number of people here on a Friday morning. I have had a careful look at her Bill. Is she advocating getting rid of conditions or sanctions entirely? That is the tone of her speech, which is in contrast to the detail of her Bill.

[Mhairi Black]

I am happy to give the hon. Gentleman my copy of the Bill, because he will see that that is not what I am trying to do. It is quite hard to pass a private Member’s Bill, so while my colleagues and I would want to get rid of the sanctions regime altogether because we disagree with it, I am trying to use this Bill to make a small, genuine change that the Government can hopefully get on board with. I am not trying to be controversial.

--- Later in debate ---

[Conor Burns]

First, I say to the hon. Gentleman that I did not say that benefits are not a right; benefits are a right, and a right that I fully respect and uphold. Secondly, on the point that we have heard many times—we had Opposition day debates on it when I was a bag carrier in the Treasury—as he knows, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, when he was Financial Secretary to the Treasury, reconfigured HMRC by focusing on more regional offices, so that we can have greater impact in the collection powers of HMRC and the focus it has on ensuring that the tax collected is the tax owed.

[Michael Tomlinson]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend and constituency neighbour for giving way. He mentions the Beveridge report. I am reminded by my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) that it is from 1942, but in fact the sanctions regime goes back to 1911 and the setting up of the first unemployment benefits regime.