Britain’s benefit sanctions is beyond cruel 

By Claudia Webbe MP

Punishing those in need doesn’t work from any perspective — that is why the Tory government is refusing to allow access to its own data. It is clear that we need a total overhaul of the system, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE MP

It’s almost five years since the Economic and Social Research Council, a government-funded public body, told the UN’s human rights body that the British government’s drive to extend and intensify benefit sanctions “systematically undermines the very idea of economic and social rights as a core component of national citizenship status and/or justifications for such rights on the basis of universal human needs,” making many benefit claimants unable to meet those basic needs for food, warmth and shelter.

The UN agreed, concluding that despite its denialism, the government was breaching the human rights of benefit claimants at every turn. The UN repeated its call as recently as November 2022.

Despite the clarity of the warnings, the government did nothing to improve its treatment of the most marginalised — in fact, since then the situation has only gone downhill. The number of people suffering sanctions hit record levels in 2022.

And the Conservative government is determined to drive that number higher still, threatening DWP staff with disciplinary action and even dismissal if they fail to sanction enough claimants.

The government still claims that evidence “clearly shows” that its sanctions regime is “clear, fair and effective” in getting people into work.

But if that was truly the case, why does it need to hide its data from experts who want to study that effectiveness?

In reality, the benefit sanctions are an utterly inhumane blunt instrument that has not shown to be effective in its supposed aim — and there is no study that disagrees.

Instead, almost every study that has looked at the benefit sanctions regime seems to find the word “cruel” — and indeed “pointlessly cruel,” according to a parliamentary select committee, and “cruel, inhuman and degrading,” according to academics — to be appropriate for the horrific reality that the experts conducting the study found.

Britain’s sanctions regime is enormously disproportionate and punitive — a complete withdrawal of support for missing a single jobcentre appointment, with examples easy to find of people sanctioned because of illness or other reasons outside their control.

And mindbogglingly, that cruelty can be imposed, with little effective scrutiny, for up to three years.

Britain is an international outlier in this cruelty. Data submitted to the work and pensions select committee in 2022 showed that Britain is unique among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nations in the use of sanctions to punish claimants — and the most recent study on the impact of sanctions shows that they are not only ineffective but indeed often make people more likely to remain out of work while the small minority that manages to find work find themselves shuttled from insecure job to insecure job that often pushes them even further into poverty because of the way the system deducts money from their benefits based on earnings that they may no longer be making.

This consciously cruel and punitive regime is operating at record levels — in 2022 more than double its pre-pandemic numbers — in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis that even huge numbers of people in regular work are struggling to cope with.

And of course, the more vulnerable a claimant, the greater the impact of this intentional cruelty will be.

The government cannot claim to be unaware of this — as noted, it has been repeatedly warned by MPs, academics, advocacy groups and the UN of the huge damage being done to those most vulnerable.

The damage is mushrooming at an almost unimaginable rate. Even while the pandemic continued, universal credit claimants were said to be more likely to be under a sanction than to have Covid — and all this is continuing in the middle of the worst cost-of-living crisis in living memory.

And while all this is happening, the government is actively impeding attempts to understand the scale of the damage and whether its policies actually achieve anything beyond inflicting suffering.

In February of 2022, the government blocked access to data for academics who wanted to study whether benefit sanctions were driving up suicide rates, bringing a vital study that was already under way to an immediate halt.

The government buried its own research and refused repeated requests — including Freedom of Information Act requests — for the data, claiming that the information was “sensitive” and, ridiculously, that it was in the public interest to hide it.

Even for the Conservative Party this is an astonishing level of disregard for people’s mental health and indeed for their lives — and the government is operating a shameless culture of secrecy about the impacts and effectiveness of their policies.

But information already in the public domain showed that a staggering 43 per cent of unemployed disability benefit claimants had attempted to take their own life because of the horrors inflicted on them — and that was in 2018, long before sanctions reached their current appalling high.

Clearly, if the data showed that benefit sanctions achieved what the government claims, then the Tories wouldn’t need or want to hide the information.

When I see the way benefit sanctions are applied in Leicester East, which has one of the worst median annual pay levels at £20,300 than most of the country, it becomes clear that the benefit sanctions are a tool of capitalism to preserve capital accumulation even when there are low-paying, poor-quality and insecure forms of wage labour.

Britain’s benefits system clearly needs a repair far more fundamental than merely a new coat of paint or brand name.

This country’s welfare system is shockingly weak — according to OECD data, British citizens see their income drop by 84 per cent if they become unemployed.

This is the second worst of all OECD nations and ahead of only Hungary — but even Hungary is far more generous than Britain for the first six months of unemployment.

Britain is acting as a rogue state in its treatment of its most vulnerable citizens, ignoring international norms and evidence that the benefit sanctions regime is doing enormous damage.

When the UN condemned the intentional impoverishment of millions by government policy as a breach of their human rights, the government responded by attacking the UN and its motives.

Our welfare system is meant to be a safety net to ensure that nobody in our society falls into extreme want or deprivation.

The extensive and draconian use of benefit sanctions and the policing of our labour market demonstrates that something is going badly wrong: rather than preventing hardship, benefit sanctions are being used as a blunt instrument to needlessly and without any cloak of dignity exacerbate poverty, hunger and starvation.

Benefit sanctions have become a stigma to further marginalise, cause injury and abandon Britain’s most vulnerable citizens.

Our priority as socialists must be to resist and transform this unjust system for the benefit of all.

Claudia Webbe MP is the member of Parliament for Leicester East. You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe