I warmly welcome the new clause which, as the Minister has said, was proposed and suggested in the discussions between him and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and me and my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne). It is something genuinely valuable to emerge from this debacle, which has been entirely of the Government’s own making. We do need to know what is going on with sanctions. The independent review, which is required by the new clause to be conducted over the coming year—I will comment in a moment on the further amendments proposed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Wythenshawe and Sale East (Paul Goggins)—could be crucial in getting to the bottom of what is going on. From the standpoint of anyone who is concerned about what is going on in our social security system, as very many people are, this is a valuable initiative.
The scale of the sanctions that are being imposed at the moment is extraordinary. My hon. Friend the Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) made that point in the earlier debate. He correctly suggested to the House that the number of sanctions being issued trebled in the two years between the period just before the general election and subsequently to more than half a million per year, and that number is still going up. The impact assessment tells us that the number of sanctions that has been issued under the defective—as we now know them to be—employment, skills and enterprise regulations is “between 221,000 and 259,000”; that those sanctions involved between 136,000 and 159,000 people and that their cumulative value is between £80 million and £99 million.
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The first thing that puzzles me is why the Government do not know how many sanctions have been issued. It seems pretty strange to me that all they can tell us is that somewhere between 221,000 and 259,000 have been issued. Surely the systems in the Minister’s Department are sufficiently robust to tell us how many there have been, rather than our being given that wide range—there is a difference of almost 40,000 between the low point and the high point. I am puzzled as to why the Department cannot tell us precisely how many sanctions have been issued. After all, we are not talking about minor matters: the average value is some hundreds of pounds, so it is not unreasonable to expect the Department to know precisely how many of these things it has handed out.
Looking at the figure of up to 160,000, I ask, why is the number so large? We are told in the impact assessment and other information on this Bill that 90% of the people on whom sanctions have been applied are on the Work programme. The figure that I quoted relates to the period before cases were stockpiled—the period
before 6 August last year. Up to last July, 877,880 people were referred to the Work programme, so slightly more than that will have been referred up until 6 August. Comparing those two figures suggests that 15% of those who have been referred to the Work programme have been sanctioned.
That is a surprisingly large figure—almost one in six of those referred to the programme have had a sanction imposed on them. It would be helpful to know, and I hope that the independent review will be able to tell us, what those sanctions are for exactly. Why is it that the requirements being imposed on people by the Work programme are apparently so unpopular? The numbers are bigger than in the past. Is it because the Work programme is much more irksome than previous provision, or is it because the system has become far more trigger-happy over sanctions? We need to know the answer to that question.
The sums involved are not small. Again, the impact assessment tells us that the average value of one of these sanctions—we should bear it in mind that we are talking about people who depend on benefit for their income, so we are not talking about well-off people—is between £600 and £800 in the case of mandatory work activity. That is a huge sum to take away from someone who depends on benefit for their livelihood.
What is becoming clear is that the proliferation of sanctions—the very large increase in the number of sanctions being imposed, and the increase in the size of the sanctions being levied—is one of the principal drivers in the growth of demand for food banks throughout the country. The chief executive of the Trussell Trust, the impressive organisation behind the explosive growth in Church-based food banks over the past few years—it is opening three new food banks per week and there are now well over 300 of them across the country—said in a statement that appeared in the press yesterday that in 2009-10 the trust had about 29,000 referrals of people to food banks, but in 2012-13 the figure will be almost 300,000. That is a tenfold rise in three years, and the number is still growing fast. The Trussell Trust reports that about 40% of referrals to food banks result from Jobcentre Plus mistakes or delays. It also makes the relevant point for this debate that Jobcentre Plus performance is clearly getting worse.
Beyond that Trussell Trust statement, people running food banks say that sanctions are a big driver. They say that people often have no idea why they are being sanctioned; all they know is that their money has stopped and, as they have none to buy food with, they have to go along to the food bank to get some help. According to the impact assessment for the Bill, the number of sanctions is up to 260,000, and the number of people affected is up to 160,000. Meanwhile, the number of people going to food banks is up from 30,000 three years ago to 300,000 now. The order of magnitude is comparable. The people running food banks often report that the increase in sanctions has been a very big driver in the growing recourse to food banks around the country over the last three years, and that certainly appears to me to be the case.