Benefit Claimants Sanctions (Required Assessment) Bill

Debate between Mike Weir and Michael Tomlinson

2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 2nd December 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP)]

I normally say that I am very pleased to take part in a debate, but, unfortunately, I am not very pleased to do so today because we are having to discuss a terrible subject. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South (Mhairi Black) on the way she introduced this very important Bill. I cannot match her passion and, Madam Deputy Speaker, you will be glad to hear that I will not match her length, but I want to make a few points.

I listened very carefully to what the hon. and learned Member for South East Cambridgeshire (Lucy Frazer) said. Nobody on the SNP Benches disputes the fact that working is important—we all want everybody who is able to work to be in work, and that should be fundamental for everybody in every political party—but when she was talking about decision makers, she mentioned that we have a judicial system in which the judge does not know anything about the case. The fundamental difference is that such a person can go to court and present their case to the judge, but that is not possible in relation to decision makers in this process.

I want to comment on some of the remarks made by the hon. Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns). I have always found him to be a reasonable chap, but I was disappointed by what he said. He made a point—it is often made by Conservative Members—that taxpayers and benefit claimants are somehow different and neither the twain shall meet. He must realise that many benefits claimants were taxpayers and probably will be taxpayers again in the future. He quoted Beveridge, but these people have paid into the system for many years, and they often find themselves having to claim benefits because they have had an accident, they are ill or have a mental illness, or for many other reasons. It is totally wrong to look at the two as different: benefits claimants have been and will be taxpayers, and they are trying to get from the system what they are entitled to, but the hon. Gentleman does not seem to accept that.

[Michael Tomlinson]

I, too, heard the speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns). I understood that he was making a broader point about taxpayers. Will the hon. Member for Angus (Mike Weir) answer this question, please: what is his view on the principle of sanctions? Should there be sanctions at all, yes or no?

[Mike Weir]

We are not discussing the principle of sanctions today. We are discussing a Bill that sensibly seeks to mitigate the current system. Whether there should be sanctions at all is another debate for another day, but it is not what we are debating today. Many Government Members have spoken about mitigations in the system. It is true that people can get hardship payments, but it can take many weeks. Not only that, but the hardship payments are a percentage of what people would get from benefits. Despite what many people seem to think, benefits are hardly over-generous in the first instance. People who get by on benefits find that they cannot get by on hardship payments.

Parts of my constituency are relatively prosperous. Many people work in the North sea oil industry, for example. In the downturn in that industry, people lost well-paid jobs. Many of them came to me absolutely flabbergasted at the amount of money they got by signing on because they had believed for so many years the rubbish pushed by some of our media that all people on benefits live the life of Riley, which is absolute nonsense.

The point has been made that there is nothing new in the sanctions system, which is correct—sanctions have been part of the system since at least 1996—but what is new is the number of sanctions and how they are imposed. The system is deeply flawed, and SNP Members have long called for a full independent review of it. Even the National Audit Office found in its recent report that a shocking 24% of jobseeker’s allowance claimants received a sanction between 2010 and 2015 and that the rate of sanctions varies dramatically. That is not right and the Government must listen to the concerns about the damage that the application of benefit sanctions has on individuals and their families.

The report also states starkly:

“sanctions are not rare. A quarter of Jobseeker’s Allowance claimants receive them at some point”,

which blows apart the Government’s assertion that only a small minority receive them. Worse still, there is absolutely no consistency in the figures. The report finds that some Work programme providers made more than twice as many sanctions referrals as other providers within the same geographical area, even though claimants are randomly allocated, so that case load characteristics are identical for each provider. That would not happen in a fair system.

There should be no more than a minor variation if the system is used uniformly. Clearly it is not, which the Bill would address by adding a clear code of conduct. The point is that, wherever someone is subject to the system up and down the United Kingdom, the same principles would be applied, and it would not be left to individual variance from place to place. The NAO believes that the DWP does not use sanctions consistently, noting that sanctions referral rates

“have risen and fallen over time in ways that cannot be explained by changes in claimant compliance.”

The Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Paisley and Renfrewshire South has introduced would make a start on the process. Hon. Members accept that it does not do away with the sanctions regime. She is very intelligent and knows perfectly well that such a Bill would never get through the House in its current form. However, the Bill would go a long way to ensure that there is a coherent, unified process for all jobcentres and that advisers take a claimant’s personal circumstances into account before issuing sanctions. Advisers would be compelled to take into account whether a person is at risk of homelessness and whether they have caring responsibilities or a mental health condition that could be exacerbated if their benefits were sanctioned.

It is interesting to note that in March 2015 the Work and Pensions Committee published a report, “Benefit sanctions policy beyond the Oakley Review”, which recommended, among other things, that the Government take urgent steps to implement fully the outstanding recommendations of that report. To be scrupulously fair, the Government have taken some measures. They have trialled the yellow card system and we still wait to see what the outcome of that trial will be.