Benefit Sanctioning

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2014 Westminster Hall

[Stephen Timms (East Ham) (Lab)]

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the debate, and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Paul Blomfield) on securing it. I also congratulate Sheffield Citizens Advice and Tim Arnold, who produced the report that was the basis of much of what my hon. Friend said. I welcome the thoughtful debate, with contributions on both sides expressing grave concern about what has been happening with benefit sanctions.

My hon. Friend made the point that sanctions have been part of the social security system since it was established. It is right that there should be sanctions for people in receipt of benefits who do things they should not. However, it is clear that the sanctions system has gone badly wrong, that in too many cases it is no longer fair and proportionate, and that terrible damage is resulting from that.

The hon. Member for Wycombe (Steve Baker) and my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery) both mentioned one of the most harrowing cases, involving the diabetic ex-soldier David Clapson, who died, as his sister said, “penniless, starving and alone”, because three weeks after his benefit was stopped for missing a jobcentre appointment his electricity card had run out and his refrigerator was not working, so he was not able to keep the insulin on which his life depended. He died as a result.

That is an extreme case and should not have happened. No one in the Chamber today became a politician to preside over such harrowing events. We need changes to prevent them. I want the Minister to tell us more about the implementation of the Oakley review, whose recommendations were designed to introduce such changes. Such things seem still to be happening at the moment.

Certainly a very large number of jobseekers now feel that jobcentre staff are there primarily not to help them but to catch them out and find grounds for sanctioning them. That has done terrible damage to the reputation of jobcentres. I am sure that the perception is often unfair, but it is very widely held because of the destructive preoccupation with sanctioning. At some point, a major programme of renewal for Jobcentre Plus will be needed. The Select Committee on Work and Pensions was right to make the case that as a first step jobcentres should be evaluated on the basis not of benefit off-flow, with all the perverse incentives that that has created, but of sustained job outcomes—the same measure used in the case of Work programme providers.

There has been some discussion in the debate about the contentious issue of targets for sanctions. I am sure that the Minister will reaffirm in a few minutes that there are no targets for sanctions, but it is clear that that is not how many Jobcentre Plus staff understand the position. Indeed, it is not too difficult to find out why they think that there are targets for the implementation of sanctions. The Minister provided a written answer on 15 October 2013 to my question on whether Jobcentre Plus advisers’ regular personal reviews included discussions of the number of benefit sanctions that they handed out. She confirmed:

“Jobcentre Plus uses advisers’ personal reviews to monitor performance, to inform these they use a variety of performance data, including sanctions referrals.”——[Official Report, 15 October 2013; Vol. 568, c. 647W.]

So regular reviews of Jobcentre Plus advisers feature the number of sanctions issued. That is part of the assessment. I am told that the expectation is that advisers should give out at least eight sanctions per month and that if they do not they are usually, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central mentioned, placed on a performance improvement plan, to help them pull their socks up and get them to give out more sanctions in the future. The Minister may be able to explain the difference between that arrangement and targets for sanctions. Clearly, in practice, targets are set for the application of sanctions by Jobcentre Plus staff, and if they do not meet the expectation they are in trouble.

Dr David Webster, of the university of Glasgow, has just published his latest briefing on benefit sanctions. He tells us that there were an estimated 1.03 million jobseeker’s allowance and employment and support allowance sanctions in the year to 30 June 2014, before reconsiderations and appeals, compared with 564,000 in the last 12 months of the previous Government; so the number of sanctions handed out has roughly doubled. Dr Webster says that JSA claimants are

“sanctioned at the rate of 6.92% per month before reconsiderations and appeals”.

Ministers sometimes say that the vast majority of benefit recipients are not sanctioned, but 7% of JSA claimants are sanctioned per month, and Dr Webster also says that about a quarter of JSA claimants get a sanction at some point during their claim. He also makes the point that ESA claimants were sanctioned at the rate of 1.16% per month in June 2014. Dr Webster comments—and this picks up on the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Sheila Gilmore)—

“The DWP has not provided any explanation for the increase in ESA sanctions.”

There has been a dramatic increase in the number of ESA claimants being sanctioned, and it is not clear why.

The number of sanctions is one thing; another issue is their severity. To try to get a handle on that I tabled a series of questions asking for the total amount of benefit withheld as a result of benefit sanctions in each of the past four years. The Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Fareham (Mr Hoban), gave a helpful answer on 25 March 2013, with a table showing

“the total amount of jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) withheld to the nearest £ million…as a result of fixed sanctions in each of the last four years up to 22 October 2012”.—[Official Report, 25 March 2013; Vol. 560, c. 986W.]

The table showed that in 2009-10—just before the election—£11 million was withheld. In 2010-11 the figure was £43 million, so it quadrupled after the election. In 2011-12 it was £45 million and in 2012-13, up to October 2012—so just for the first half of that financial year—it was £60 million. Therefore, taking the whole of 2012-13, benefit was being withheld at approximately 10 times the rate for the year before the general election.

I have since tried repeatedly to get an update on that figure, and the Minister yesterday provided a written answer in response to my latest attempt. She said:

“The Department has never estimated the amount of benefit withheld as a result of benefit sanctions.”

That clearly is not true, because her answer goes on to refer to the written answer of 25 March 2013, with its reference to the table—so the Department has previously provided an answer to my question. The Minister goes on to explain why her answer does not have a very helpful figure, but I am today tabling a further question to ask whether she will at least do the calculation again, so that we can see what has happened in the intervening period. I have also tried to find out with a written question how many jobseeker’s allowance claimants have been issued with a three-year benefit sanction. Some people have been sanctioned for three whole years—not four or six weeks, as we have heard—in each month since October 2012.