Far from rethinking sanctions, IDS plans to extend them

By publishing today’s report on benefit sanctions it feels as if the Department for Work and Pensions Select Committee has caught up with what the churches, campaigning organisations, and benefit claimants have been saying for a long time.

The current sanctions regime is punitive, unfair, and in some tragic cases, lethal. But far from rethinking sanctions, Iain Duncan Smith has plans to extend them to the working poor.

One report after another has shown how sanctions do very little to increase people’s chances of getting a job (though they may remove them from the unemployment figures), drive up the need for foodbanks and often target the most disadvantaged claimants.

The words ‘inhumane’ and 'un-Christian’ have been used, and it is difficult to see any reason why sanctions should not be scrapped altogether, rather than having further enquiries whilst people continue to suffer.

Officially, the DWP expects sanctions to cause a deterioration in the health of the claimant. This is surely a violation of human rights? One hopes that in the UK we would not consider it acceptable if convicted criminals were starved as a punishment, so why should we accept it as punishment for being late for a Jobcentre appointment?

Now that the truth about sanctions is so clear, there’s an urgent need to make the public aware that, far from rethinking sanctions, as the churches and others have asked, under Universal Credit, sanctions will be applied not only to the unemployed, sick and disabled, but also to the working poor.

As Welfare Weekly reported last November,"Iain Duncan Smith told the Work and Pensions Select Committee that trials were being carried out in parts of the North-West of England, on removing benefits from part-time workers who refuse to take on extra hours."

And in February 2015, Nigel Keohane of the Social Market Foundation explained "the government is introducing ‘in-work conditionality', which will seek to push people to earn more through taking on more hours at the same job, an additional part-time job or higher hourly wages. This is a leap in the dark and policy remains very sketchy."

The policy is indeed sketchy, as is much about Universal Credit, but in 2014, Inside Housing reported, "Under the present system housing benefit is paid direct to landlords and sanctions can only be applied to out-of-work benefits, such as jobseeker’s allowance or employment support allowance.

"However, the Department for Work and Pensions has confirmed to Inside Housing that under the government’s flagship welfare reform, where a tenant is working less than 35 hours a week at minimum wage and is not eligible for JSA or ESA, the housing element can be sanctioned instead."

So we will have scenarios where a part time worker, who may be combining a job with caring responsibilities, will come under pressure from the DWP to increase their hours, or get another job, and face sanctions if they fail to do so.

This expansion of the sanctions system clearly has the potential to cause hardship and disruption on an even bigger scale than we have hitherto seen. It needs to be challenged before it gets that far.

----

© Bernadette Meaden has written about political, religious and social issues for some years, and is strongly influenced by Christian Socialism, liberation theology and the Catholic Worker movement. She is an Ekklesia associate and regular contributor. You can follow her on Twitter: @BernaMeaden