Written evidence submitted by Scottish Unemployed Workers Network (SAN0071)

We are a campaigning and mutual help organisation that has been running for three years. We have recently completed a report on benefit sanctions in Dundee including 91 case studies. This submission is based on material collected for this report and our wider experience of interacting with and helping people outside the jobcentre and through other contacts.

Main points:

• Sanctions need to be looked at alongside wider welfare changes
• These constitute an attack on claimants’ dignity and self esteem
• This has no justification economically or for claimants’ work prospects
• Sanctions have serious knock-on consequences and also make it harder for claimants to look for work
• There are glaring abuses within the sanctions regime - but the regime needs to be abandoned in its entirety
• We call for a return to the principle of giving assistance to those who need it ‘without humiliation or abuse’

1. Sanctions have not emerged in isolation. They are part of a new approach to the unemployed that seems to have nothing realistically to do with helping people find work. Claimants are treated with derision and suspicion, and are kept in constant fear of losing their basic subsistence. We have spoken with people who have stopped signing on at all, preferring to rely on family and borrowed money than face the fortnightly humiliation to claim what is rightfully theirs. We have also talked with people who have been made physically ill by the ordeal of the jobcentre. And it is common to see people of all ages reduced to tears, including men and women in their fifties or sixties who have worked all their lives. Depriving people of their dignity and self-esteem is not only unconscionable; it is also poor preparation for applying for jobs successfully.

2. Unemployment benefit has always included provisions for claimants to lose their benefits if they are shown not to be looking for work, but in the post-war welfare state this was usually a last resort. There is no evidence that decent jobs are remaining unfilled, so the motivation for putting claimants under these new pressures can have nothing to do with economic efficiency. Claimants who have not signed on before, or not for a long time, express astonishment at the lack of genuine help given to find work; and we have seen little evidence that the tasks that claimants are mandated to fulfil have relevance to their work prospects. In fact, in commandeering people’s time, this system treats claimants like criminals punished with community work, only with longer sentences. ‘Work experience’ ignores existing skills and is often menial and onerous, such as chopping wood. Job application requirements force claimants to respond to numerous posts for which they are not suited, wasting their time and that of the potential employers. Help with CVs, which some people do genuinely need, is often poorly delivered and not geared to individual requirements. But failure to follow a mandated activity to the letter can result in withdrawal of essential support; and the climate of fear leads claimants to commit to ever more demanding programmes of activities, so setting themselves up for failure and penury. All of which raises the question of what it is this system is designed to achieve.

3. Our work with benefit claimants has exposed numerous abuses within the system, and we outline these below, but first we must stress that sorting these is not enough. The sanction regime itself is an abuse of the principles of social security that define a decent society. There can be very few instances when someone deserves to be deprived of the means to survive. (Suggestions for non-financial sanctions are also unacceptable as these deprive people of their time and dignity for no ostensible purpose.)

4. Many of the people sanctioned have complicated and difficult lives even beyond their lack of paid work. Often this includes physical and mental ill health, which is only compounded by the stress of losing their benefits. Stress and lack of resources also impact on family relationships. The knock-on consequences of sanctions can be devastating. One man we spoke with who was sanctioned for being fifteen minutes late ended up homeless, attacked when sleeping rough, and unable to see his child. With such a crudely devised and functionally ambiguous system, cases of this kind are inevitable- especially given the undoubted pressures on jobcentre staff to achieve sanction productivity. Having next to no money also makes it very difficult to look for work effectively.

5. The problems with sanctions will be not solved by tinkering at the edges, as suggested by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent report. In fact this report could prove doubly dangerous in its failure to challenge the raison d’être for this punitive system and in its proposals for institutionalising food-banks, which would create a two tier welfare system.  The current sanctions regime was never really about helping people get work and should be scrapped. The benefit system has never been perfect, but we should remind ourselves of the aims outlined by the Secretary of State for Scotland at the second reading of the National Assistance Bill on 24 November 1947: ‘the establishment of work or maintenance in this country as the moral principle governing the treatment of people who are in need. Under this Measure, those who get assistance get it without humiliation or abuse.’[1]

Our Dundee report showed that in a very significant number of cases the fault that had led to the sanction had been down to the authorities and not the claimant. Most strikingly, many people had been sanctioned for missing meetings for which they never received an appointment letter or for which the letter was sent out too late. Triage, a local Work Programme provider, appeared to be especially culpable here, but the Jobcentre was also implicated. One of the claimants affected told us he had been arrested after having to resort to shop lifting. There were further instances of Triage wrongly claiming that appointments had been missed, and many examples of benefits stopped due to clear administrative errors - such as lost forms - made by the Jobcentre or DWP. Another fault, committed by both the Jobcentre and Work Programme providers, is failure to pass on a crucial message after a claimant has made contact to explain why they can’t make an appointment and has been assured that this will be OK. There are examples of claimants not knowing whether they have been sanctioned or not, or not knowing the reason why they have been sanctioned or for how long, and there are numerous examples of people not being told that they can apply for Hardship Payments or that they have the right to appeal. Sanctioned claimants were also not being told that they need to contact the council to ensure that their Housing Benefit is still being paid. This is supposed not to be affected by sanctions, but the DWP simply informs the Housing Benefit office that the claimant is no longer receiving Jobseeker’s Allowance, without giving the reason. (Conversely, people were being told that they had to sign up to Universal Jobmatch, although this is not mandatory without a specific Jobseeker’s Direction, and - contrary to data protection law - that they had to allow the DWP full access to their Universal Jobmatch account.) Reasons for sanctions include the patently absurd - being unable to sign on through being at a job interview or on work experience – and also a very large number of examples that demonstrate the cruel inflexibility of the system and its failure to accommodate the restrictions and traumas of people’s actual lives. These last include sanctions for missed appointments due to illness or bereavement - even a hospital stay and a father’s funeral.

Stipulations for job searches and job applications fail to take account of mental or physical ill health or child care. No allowance was given for a dyslexic claimant who had to have help filling in his job-search diary, or for those without computers or computer skills who were still expected to complete on-line searches and had to rely on finding a computer and assistance in their local library. Another claimant was sanctioned for leaving a job due to bullying.

Even when sanctions can be attributed to a fault made by the claimant, the outcomes tend to be out of all proportion to the error committed. The actions expected of claimants vary hugely, and apparently arbitrarily. Even the smallest misdemeanour, such as mislaying the job-search diary or being a few minutes late for an appointment, can be enough to deprive a person of basic subsistence.

Benefits are supposedly set so as to cover minimum living costs, though unemployment benefit has always fallen short of this, and recently the Council of Europe’s European Committee of Social Rights concluded that JSA levels are not in conformity with the European Social Charter due to being ‘manifestly inadequate’.[2] When someone is sanctioned they can (if they know about them) apply for even more minimal Hardship Payments. These are discretionary and the rates vary, as our case studies show. As benefits barely cover living costs, Hardship Payments are not enough to cover basic needs. People on benefits have had no chance to put anything aside for a rainy day, but no Hardship Payments are made for the first two weeks unless the claimant is classed as ‘vulnerable’. Having no other means of support doesn’t count. Qualifications for vulnerability have been neatly defined and include phrases such as ‘the claimant or partner’s health would decline more than that of a normal healthy adult’. The regulations do not consider how someone might live for two weeks on no money, though if they were to do so they might think that the health of even a normal healthy adult could decline quite a lot in that time.

11 December 2014