Frances Ryan writes:
I am not sure how we reached the point where we need an inquiry to establish that stopping a person’s benefits to the level that they can’t feed themselves or their children may be wrong.
But here we are, it seems.
The recent MPs’ inquiry into the coalition’s benefits sanction system released its findings on Tuesday – a catalogue of cruelty with footnotes to add details of the claimants who have been starved.
The report is damning. As it should be.
We have watched a system develop in which it is normal for ordinary men and women to be thrown by their own government into financial and psychological crisis.
The scale is staggering. More than 1 million jobseekers had their unemployment benefits stopped last year – and, as the report states, the government has failed to prove this is not “purely punitive”.
Who exactly are we punishing?
A disabled, single mother described to the committee the day she was sanctioned for missing an appointment because a flare-up of her hip condition meant she was physically unable to walk or drive.
Despite explaining this to The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), she was told she’d receive no money for four weeks. The sanction remained in place for almost three months.
None of this occurred by magic. The examples the report lists are not anomalies or accidents of a flawed system with good intentions.
They are the human consequences of this government’s active decision to bring in “tougher” measures. Measures such as significantly increasing the amount of money they were able to take from sanctioned disabled and chronically ill people.
And quadrupling how long they could stop the benefits of a jobseeker making a mild error (in 2012, the minimum sanction was increased to four weeks, rather than one).
The DWP did not even bother to “first [test] their likely impacts on claimants”, the report notes.
Still, ministers do not have to look far. Food bank queues are hard to miss.
Even for the 23-year-old pregnant woman who, MPs heard, walked two miles to a food bank after her benefits were stopped.
She was receiving employment and support allowance for mental health problems following the stillborn birth of her first baby eight months earlier.
She had missed one work-focused interview because on that day she had found it too difficult to leave her flat. That is enough, apparently, to leave a mentally ill, pregnant woman without food.
Emergency hardship payments are meant to pick up some of the pieces of sanctions – a sort of sub-net when the safety net has been cut.
Except the rub is that claimants of jobseeker’s allowance are not allowed one until the 15th day of being sanctioned. So they are left to feed themselves with nothing for two weeks.
This is not being done to the middle classes with savings in the bank. Or those with power who are used to navigating a complex system.
It is being done to the people who are already struggling – where a hardship fund exists but the application process is designed to be too difficult for vulnerable people to understand.
Or, as the report states, making it so “the people potentially most in need of the hardship system were the least likely to be able to access it”.
One clinically depressed man had his benefits sanctioned when he didn’t attend an assessment for work capability because he didn’t have the bus fare to get there.
His older sister told the committee that her brother found it “impossible to cope with normal life” and “couldn’t open the mail”. He was given no benefits for 16 months.
That the DWP is investigating 49 deaths of people in this system – including those “where suicide is associated with DWP activity” – seems almost predictable against that backdrop.
The government was not able to provide details to the committee of anything it had done to alter how the DWP responds to claimants dying – or even to confirm how many of the dead had been subject to a benefit sanction.
The MPs’ call that an “independent review of benefit sanctions is urgently needed” seems almost polite for what is going on here. People are literally starving and their crime is that they dare to be poor and unemployed.
It is no surprise that the report concludes there is limited evidence that benefit sanctions actually help people find work.
A jobseeker system that has sanctions at its centre is founded on the lie that the unemployed are too lazy to look for work unless they are threatened. The DWP acts as if it is training disobedient dogs.
Stopping the money people need in order to eat is not the purpose of government.
The benefit sanctions regime should be scrapped – but let’s not stop there. The culture that created them needs shredding to pieces.
I am not sure how we reached the point where we need an inquiry to establish that stopping a person’s benefits to the level that they can’t feed themselves or their children may be wrong.
But here we are, it seems.
The recent MPs’ inquiry into the coalition’s benefits sanction system released its findings on Tuesday – a catalogue of cruelty with footnotes to add details of the claimants who have been starved.
The report is damning. As it should be.
We have watched a system develop in which it is normal for ordinary men and women to be thrown by their own government into financial and psychological crisis.
The scale is staggering. More than 1 million jobseekers had their unemployment benefits stopped last year – and, as the report states, the government has failed to prove this is not “purely punitive”.
Who exactly are we punishing?
A disabled, single mother described to the committee the day she was sanctioned for missing an appointment because a flare-up of her hip condition meant she was physically unable to walk or drive.
Despite explaining this to The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), she was told she’d receive no money for four weeks. The sanction remained in place for almost three months.
None of this occurred by magic. The examples the report lists are not anomalies or accidents of a flawed system with good intentions.
They are the human consequences of this government’s active decision to bring in “tougher” measures. Measures such as significantly increasing the amount of money they were able to take from sanctioned disabled and chronically ill people.
And quadrupling how long they could stop the benefits of a jobseeker making a mild error (in 2012, the minimum sanction was increased to four weeks, rather than one).
The DWP did not even bother to “first [test] their likely impacts on claimants”, the report notes.
Still, ministers do not have to look far. Food bank queues are hard to miss.
Even for the 23-year-old pregnant woman who, MPs heard, walked two miles to a food bank after her benefits were stopped.
She was receiving employment and support allowance for mental health problems following the stillborn birth of her first baby eight months earlier.
She had missed one work-focused interview because on that day she had found it too difficult to leave her flat. That is enough, apparently, to leave a mentally ill, pregnant woman without food.
Emergency hardship payments are meant to pick up some of the pieces of sanctions – a sort of sub-net when the safety net has been cut.
Except the rub is that claimants of jobseeker’s allowance are not allowed one until the 15th day of being sanctioned. So they are left to feed themselves with nothing for two weeks.
This is not being done to the middle classes with savings in the bank. Or those with power who are used to navigating a complex system.
It is being done to the people who are already struggling – where a hardship fund exists but the application process is designed to be too difficult for vulnerable people to understand.
Or, as the report states, making it so “the people potentially most in need of the hardship system were the least likely to be able to access it”.
One clinically depressed man had his benefits sanctioned when he didn’t attend an assessment for work capability because he didn’t have the bus fare to get there.
His older sister told the committee that her brother found it “impossible to cope with normal life” and “couldn’t open the mail”. He was given no benefits for 16 months.
That the DWP is investigating 49 deaths of people in this system – including those “where suicide is associated with DWP activity” – seems almost predictable against that backdrop.
The government was not able to provide details to the committee of anything it had done to alter how the DWP responds to claimants dying – or even to confirm how many of the dead had been subject to a benefit sanction.
The MPs’ call that an “independent review of benefit sanctions is urgently needed” seems almost polite for what is going on here. People are literally starving and their crime is that they dare to be poor and unemployed.
It is no surprise that the report concludes there is limited evidence that benefit sanctions actually help people find work.
A jobseeker system that has sanctions at its centre is founded on the lie that the unemployed are too lazy to look for work unless they are threatened. The DWP acts as if it is training disobedient dogs.
Stopping the money people need in order to eat is not the purpose of government.
The benefit sanctions regime should be scrapped – but let’s not stop there. The culture that created them needs shredding to pieces.
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