‘No one I’ve ever met was helped back to work by sanctions’

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/01/ministers-invented-helpful-benefit-sanctions

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While it has rightly attracted widespread criticism, the fact that Iain Duncan Smith’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had to turn to fiction to find positive accounts of benefit sanctions is altogether unsurprising. In researching experiences of welfare reform over the past five years, I have not once come across a claimant for whom being sanctioned made a return to paid employment more likely, as in “Sarah’s story” which featured in the now withdrawn benefits leaflet.

Instead, jobseekers I have spoken to, like Adrian, describe how being sanctioned makes looking for work only more difficult: “I can’t wash my clothes because I’ve no money for the launderette. I can’t have a bath because I’ve no hot water. I’ve got holes in my shoes but the jobcentre say they won’t help me get new ones until I’ve secured a definite job interview. But you can’t go to a job interview looking like a tramp,” he told me.

Adrian has experienced numerous sanctions, which have been triggered by being late for appointments, but also failing to follow confusing job directions and being unable to attend the jobcentre because of being at an interview. This clashes with the DWP’s “Zac’s story”, which created the impression of a bureaucratic system that is sympathetic. For Adrian, rather than providing a spur to work on his employability, sanctions only create additional, sometimes competing, demands. “On a sanction, you find yourself stuck in between looking for work and looking for food. Some days, I’m walking miles just to get some food to get me enough energy to look for work,” he says.

Related: DWP admits inventing quotes from fake 'benefits claimants' for sanctions leaflet

Despite many years volunteering in a homeless hostel, Adrian needs sustained and personalised support to secure employment, support that has never been forthcoming. Benefit sanctions are premised on the assumption that people require incentives (and more often) threats to make the welfare-to-work transition. This is not borne out by research evidence that most claimants are strongly motivated to secure employment, where it is a realistic option.

The constant threat of sanctions adds to the uncertainty and insecurity that represents the new status quo for out-of-work benefit claimants in Britain today. For single parent Susan, the fear of being sanctioned features as an ever-present backdrop to her life, leaving her nervous about how she and her daughter might cope under a sanction. The DWP’s fictional material completely glosses over the hardship and distress that sanctions can cause not just to the claimant but also to their wider family. Chloe, a single parent, was sanctioned shortly after being moved on to jobseeker’s allowance when her daughter started school. She says she cried for two weeks. “I couldn’t cope. Four weeks with no money is pretty alarming when you’ve got kids, bills and a house to run.”

Partly as a result of her sanction, Chloe’s mental health deteriorated, and she moved on to the disability benefit, employment and support allowance. In this way, being sanctioned pushed her further away from paid employment, the opposite of the government’s intentions.

Too often, the government’s welfare policy-making appears rooted in ideology and presumption, neglecting, and in this case seemingly deliberately fabricating, the evidence. If it really wanted to support claimants off benefits and into paid work, it should listen to the experiences of individual benefit claimants which might suggest a very different set of policies.