Tag: sanctions

David Webster has sent through his latest report on sanctions, and as usual I’m using the blog to host a copy.  Be warned that it’s  a big file (2.3 Mb).    David summarises the salient points as follows:  ” I have pointed out how misleading was the DWP’s press release covering the statistics …  There is also coverage of the important House of Commons Work & Pensions Committee report, which mustn’t get lost in the new parliament, and of the embarrassments of three Tory politicians in relation to sanctions where they have been dropped in it by their political colleagues. Also Universal Credit – although the total number on the benefit remains trivial in relation to the UC universe, it is not now actually trivial as far as JSA is concerned, because the single people who are the focus of the pilots are disproportionately likely to be jobseekers.”

I’d pick out a simple point. Between Oct 2012 and and December 2014, “930,287 individuals received 1,663,215 JSA sanctions, after challenges.” Hundreds of thousands of people are being sanctioned. There are already fewer than 800,000 JSA claimants remaining – and now the government is proposing to abolish JSA for 18-21 year olds. At this rate, it can’t be long before most unemployed people are turned away without benefit.

From the Daily Telegraph, 5th March 2015:

Iain Duncan Smith: Taking people off benefits is ‘compassionate’. 

… for too long it has been assumed that compassion is “soft” …  There is nothing compassionate about increasing dependency by spending more of taxpayers’ money …    No – Conservative compassion is about getting someone back to work, taking the tough choices to move someone clear of the benefits system.

David Webster has asked me to post his latest report on sanctions.  He writes:

This release includes the first analysis of the new system of Mandatory Reconsideration. MR has been widely misunderstood. It has fundamentally changed the whole appeal process. It has greatly reduced the number of challenges to sanctions and has killed off appeals to independent Tribunals, completely in the case of ESA and almost completely for JSA. Overall the proportion of JSA sanctions overturned has stayed the same, but the proportion of ESA sanctions overturned has fallen from 35% to 20%. It seems quite likely that this is due to ESA claimants not being able to cope with the phone calls that are now made to them at home as part of the Mandatory Reconsideration process.

Ministers claim that only a ‘tiny minority’ of JSA claimants are sanctioned, but FoI response 2014-4972 shows that almost one fifth (18.4%) of claimants in 2013/14 were sanctioned, after reviews/reconsiderations and appeals. The proportion before challenges will have been about one fifth. Of the individuals sanctioned in the year to June 2014, almost one third (30.9% ) were sanctioned more than once in the year.

There were an estimated 895,000 JSA and ESA sanctions in the year to September 2014, before challenges. As a percentage of claimants, JSA sanctions have stabilised at around double the level inherited by the Coalition.

The estimated amount of money lost to claimants through JSA sanctions imposed in 2013/14 is in the region of £328m, with almost £5m lost to ESA claimants. This is without including the money lost to people driven off benefits altogether.

I spent some time on Friday listening to the Work and Pensions Committee’s session on sanctions.  The second panel, in particular, has been reported as being highly critical of benefits sanctions; if anything, they were not critical enough.  It was accepted that conditionality was necessary, because some conditionality is intrinsic to unemployment benefits.  Much was made of the absence of evidence to support the sanctions regime, which seems to imply as an argument that if it turned out that sanctions were effective in moving people to work, they would be justified.

There are three problems with these arguments.  The first is a conceptual confusion between conditionality and sanctions.   There have to be conditions, because there have to be eligibility criteria; that is not the same as saying that people have to incur punishment as a spur to activity.

Second, there have been sanctions in place, in one form or another, for over a hundred years, and it would be a poor show if we couldn’t say anything about that experience.  We know, or should know,  that patterns of employment and unemployment in that time are not related to anything happening in benefits; it’s the state of the economy that matters.  Previous penalties (the four week rule and the hike to 26 weeks) had no visible effect on employment; there was some reason to think  that stopping benefits under the four week rule led to crime, but that’s another story.  We know that when people were faced with the lighter sanctions regime, 90% returned to work within a year, and that now, under a stricter sanctions regime, 80% do.    And we know how sanctions are being operated – as reports from CPAG and Mind amply demonstrate, they are arbitrary, harsh and penal.   This is not a lack of evidence; it is a lack of evidence to make any case for sanctions, and that is not the same thing.

The third problem is that this all misses the point: this is a moral argument, not an evidential one.  The people who think they are a bad idea generally think that benefits are there to protect people.  The people who think that sanctions are a good idea believe that a strict penal policy is ethically desirable, because benefits should be the last port of call rather than the first and there should be a deterrent.   If sanctions work in most cases, or if they don’t work, does it really matter to those positions?

 

I mentioned last month that I’d been doing some work about sanctions, to help the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations.  The House of Commons Work and  Pensions Committee has asked for evidence about the issues of sanctions not considered by the Oakley review.  SFHA’s evidence is here.

David Webster has sent me his latest briefing on sanctions.  David’s key points are:

•  Total numbers of JSA sanctions have started to fall back, reflecting the decline in claimant unemployment.  They have stabilised at the unprecedentedly high levels of about 7% of claimants per month before reconsiderations and appeals, and 6% after.
• ESA sanctions have risen to all-time highs, reaching an estimated 1.16% of claimants per month before
  reconsiderations and appeals, and 0.97% after.  The big surge in ESA sanctions has been entirely due to ‘failure to participate in work related activity’.
• Since October 2012, 833,628 individuals have received an average of 1.73 sanctions each.
• The DWP has still published no figures on Mandatory Reconsiderations, introduced on 28 October 2013. Mandatory Reconsideration appears to have caused an almost total collapse in appeals to Tribunals.  There were only 23 Tribunal decisions on JSA and ESA sanctions in the three months April to June, compared to a normal monthly rate of over 1,000.
• The Work Programme continues to deliver more sanctions than job outcomes.

I’m doing some related work to help the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations consider the issues around sanctions, but more of that in due course.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has produced a helpful overview of evidence on conditionality in the benefits system.  While there is much evidence to suggest that conditionality cuts the number of people on benefits, there is not so much evidence to show that it increases engagement in the labour market, with the possible exception of low paid, precarious jobs.

David Webster has also pubished a detailed report on the Oakly report on sanctions:  I’ve posted it here.

I’m on my way back from a discussion with housing providers.  Our main subject  was Employment and Support Allowance, but sanctions are a subject that comes up continually – not least because misclassification and administrative mistakes often end up with claimants being sanctioned for non-compliance.   Among the examples of sanctions raised by the agencies, there were

• a woman refused access to the Job Centre because she had a baby with her (no children are allowed) and sanctioned because she was unable to get in for the interview
• a claimant with poor mental health declared fit for work, and sanctioned immediately afterward because he wasn’t able to remember anything he’d done about it, and
• a homeless, pregnant woman whose benefit was stopped because she changed her address.  (‘I thought there must be more to it than that’, the adviser told me, ‘so I rang up to find out.  Yes, the person in the call centre said, it was because she changed her address.’)

Any benefit system has to have conditions.  But, the workers were saying, there is an imbalance here.  Any default by claimants is dealt with immediately.  Bad decisions are difficult to challenge and slow to change.

A sentence in a rather dull report by the Social Security Advisory Committee caught my eye:  “Sanctions  can  have  positive  impacts,  ensuring  that  claimants  meet  the responsibilities associated with their social security entitlement, and acting as a  disincentive  to  voluntary  unemployment.”  There may be arguments for sanctions, which have been part of social provision since the Reformation  – they are essentially about compliance and fairness – but I am not sure there is much reason to think that there is a “positive impact”.   The whole point of sanctions is, surely, that they are punishments, and punishments are supposed to have a negative impact – that’s how they work.

The usual arguments for punishment are retribution – wrongdoers should have evil visited upon them – and deterrence – it will stop the offence happening again.  But there is a further argument: that punishment can be character-forming.   I was hit with the tawse in my primary school, and one routine treatment of offenders in my junior school was to bend over so that the teacher could whack us on the backside with a chair leg.  Autres temps, autres moeurs.  When the SSAC  reviewed the issue in 2006, the nearest they came to showing any change was the comment from half of the unemployed respondents who had been sanctioned that they would now be more likely to look for work.    That may show that the sinners have repented, but equally it might tell us more about the answers people learn to give when they have been punished.  Neil Couling, of the DWP, told a Holyrood committee in April that “many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that a sanction can give them”. Take six of the best and say, “Thank you sir”.