Benefit sanctions are effective, employment minister says

The employment minister has defended the government’s policy of removing people’s benefit payments when they fail to meet certain conditions.

Giving evidence to MPs on the work and pensions select committee, Esther McVey said international evidence pointed to the effectiveness of benefit sanctions, but warned that “no system is perfect” and ideally nobody would need to be sanctioned.

McVey argued that the purpose of the government’s welfare changes had been to make the system more personalised and to “understand the need of the individual”. She said that once claimants were sanctioned it acted as a red flag and alerted the authorities that a person was vulnerable and in need of help.
Very few people are sanctioned, the employment minister said, with only 0.00057% of those referred given the maximum three-year sanction.

But the chair of the committee and MP for Aberdeen South, Dame Anne Begg, said it seemed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had no significant evidence that sanctions were working and that they affected a group of people who the minister admitted were particularly vulnerable. “Just because [the system is] working for the majority, if we are to accept your argument, doesn’t mean its working for that small group [who are sanctioned],” she said.

In June 2011, the coalition government introduced a series of welfare changes that included sanctions on benefits claimants who do not meet government conditions for actively seeking work, cutting their payments for a minimum of four weeks.

Previous evidence given to the work and pensions select committee, which is investigating the effects of benefit sanctions, has suggested that sanctions are leaving people without enough money to live on, forcing them to use food banks, and that the DWP has failed to do the necessary research into the effects of the measure in order to justify the policy.

When asked whether she thought a good welfare system necessarily required sanctions, McVey said: “It’s not just me saying that. It’s been said since time began and all the international evidence is saying that.”

Responding to a study from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which claimed that the majority of those who received benefit sanctions were not going into work, McVey said the researchers had used flawed logic, made “leaps in where they got the facts and figures, and they came to the conclusion they wanted to come to”.

The minister argued that according to a destination survey conducted by her department the number of people going into work after benefit sanctions was more like 70% and that people tended not to tell jobcentres when they had got a job, making the figures used by the researchers unreliable. The researchers suggested that their figure of 20% was probably too high because anecdotal evidence suggests that people working in jobcentres are encouraged to record those coming off benefits as having gone into employment.

“You seem to be very selective in the evidence you will accept,” Debbie Abrahams, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, said.

McVey said there were categorically no targets set on how many claimants should be sanctioned, contradicting previous evidence given to the committee. “All of the things that the honourable lady is looking for and trying to find do not exist”, she said.