Time to rethink these dysfunctional benefit sanctions

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/03/end-dysfunctional-benefit-sanctions-system

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The House of Commons work and pensions select committee has not merely shed light on the grotesque brutalities of the current benefit sanctions regime in the past few weeks, but established an unlikely consensus among rightwing thinktanks, the welfare-to-work industry and leftwing trade union leaders that the system is hugely flawed.

So far 19 expert witnesses – academics, charity workers and welfare advisers – have come before the inquiry. All agreed that some form of conditionality – rules by which claimants agree to actively seek work in exchange for social security support – is necessary in return for the payment of unemployment benefits. But all have also concurred, to varying degrees, that the current conditions (the tightest ever imposed in the UK) are both disproportionately punitive and, in terms of helping jobless people back to work, counterproductive.

More claimants than ever have been sanctioned – financial punishments for apparent breaches of the rules that result in benefits being stopped for anything between four weeks and three years – since the coalition ratcheted up conditionality in autumn 2012. In some areas, one in every 10 jobseekers have been sanctioned. That is a lot of punishment (an estimated £275m taken from the jobless in two years) – much of it, MPs heard, for trivial or non-existent infringements.

Sanctions, the committee heard, can devastate claimant health and wellbeing. They impoverish already poor people and drive them to food banks. They can leave claimants even further away from work.

Jobcentres, we heard, allegedly harrass vulnerable jobseekers, “tripping them up” so they can stop their benefits and hit management-imposed sanctions targets (or as the Department for Work and Pensions would have it, “expectations”).

A cross-party call for an independent review of the operation and effectiveness of sanctions, more far-reaching than Matthew Oakley’s official report for the government last year, seems a likely outcome, and would appear to have wide support. On the evidence so far, it would be an unusually insensitive government that resists this most modest of proposals.

Enter, then, the inquiry’s 20th witness, the work and pensions minister, Esther McVey, on Wednesday. McVey is a dogged defender of a government notorious for its incuriosity and ideological arrogance. Taking stock of whether a policy actually works, as opposed to whether it plays well with the Daily Mail, is not its strong point. No one will be surprised if McVey, flying in the face of available evidence, acclaims sanctions as a unalloyed success.

The MPs’ inquiry begs a wider question: what should a humane and effective social security system look like?

A genuinely reforming government would start perhaps, with the now sadly necessary medical injunction: “First, do no harm”. Second, it might read Secure and Ready by Will Horwitz, a paper which draws heavily on the experiences of benefit claimants to explain why they are let down so often.

Horwitz makes interesting points about structure and financing and the need for early action. But it is his attitudinal insights that resonate. The current system, Horwitz points out, proceeds on the assumption that claimants are trying to milk it (yet only 0.7% of the social security budget is lost to fraud).

It treats claimants as “autonomous, isolated units, responsive to price incentives,” rather than human beings mostly willing to work. As a result, it humiliates, causes stress and illness, stigmatises, destroys confidence, and leaves the most vulnerable people further away from work.

The current sanctions regime embodies and reinforces that system-wide dysfunctionality. If we want a social security – as opposed to a social insecurity – system, one that supports rather than punishes, that is built on trust not fear, any review must look beyond sanctions alone.