My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 5 as well as in support of Amendment 4, moved by my noble friend Lord McKenzie
of Luton. Amendment 5 complements and amplifies Amendment 4. The point behind it is that the sanctions in scope of the review established in Clause 2 of the Bill represent approximately only a quarter of all JSA sanctions imposed over the relevant period.
If we are to understand how the sanctions regime is working, the review needs to set the narrower group of sanctions in scope of the Bill into the wider context of the operation of sanctions more generally. I have tried to make sense of the sanctions statistics, and it seems that there has been a massive increase since March 2010 in the number of fixed-length sanctions applied in relation to work-related programmes, and a smaller increase in other varied-length sanctions, albeit in both cases with some month to month fluctuations.
The review needs to help us understand what lies behind these statistics in the round. The sense that I am getting from voluntary organisations working in the field is that there is a growing concern about the general operation of sanctions. I am particularly grateful to CPAG and SPAN for the information they have sent me at very short notice.
I do not propose to pursue the question of whether or not jobcentre staff are being set sanction targets. My noble friend Lord McKenzie of Luton has already addressed that point admirably. However, I want to say something about the wider culture that is giving rise to such claims. It has been brought to my attention that some jobcentres are pursuing a practice of “botherability”, which includes bringing in claimants at weekends. CPAG sent me the example of a client of the CAB in the north of England.
The client is a lone parent with two children aged eight and six. The eight year-old has reduced hearing and gets low-care DLA. The client is claiming JSA, housing benefit and council tax benefit. She received a letter at the start of March 2013 calling her into the jobcentre for a compliance meeting a few days later, at 9.30 am on a Sunday, which was Mother’s Day. She asked for a different date but was told that her benefit could be sanctioned. She decided to go to the interview as she could not afford not to, but her two little girls were very disappointed as they were planning a treat for her on Mother’s Day morning. She has been on JSA for six months and says that she has jumped through all the hoops. Last week she said that she had applied for 22 jobs. She does not understand what she has done or not done that has necessitated a compliance interview, especially on Mother’s Day. She says she is pretty disgusted with the way that claimants are treated—can your Lordships blame her? I would be grateful for the Minister’s comments on such practices. Is he aware of them? Does he condone them?
It seems to me that whether or not formal targets are operating, such practices are indicative of an oppressive culture that is aimed at punishing claimants rather than helping them to find work. The point has been made to me that in assessing the overall impact of sanctions, we need to be looking not just at those cases where sanctions have been applied but where they have been threatened, sometimes inappropriately; in other words, when claimants have been led to believe that failing to do something is a sanctionable offence when it is not.
I wish to focus on the paragraphs of Amendment 4 that deal with mental health conditions, the effectiveness of hardship provisions and the application of the public sector equality duty. Mind has argued that the incentive structure represented by conditionality and sanctions in back-to-work support for people with mental health problems is a misplaced and counterproductive response to the barriers they face. It cites recent DWP research which found that some staff believe that conditionality and sanctions are not useful or appropriate for some groups of participants, including people with disabilities or addiction problems, and some staff acknowledge that the stress that can be caused can be counterproductive in terms of claimant engagement, which also has implications for paragraph (k), which concerns,
“the effectiveness of sanctions in changing claimant behaviour”.
Mind cites a number of service users who have been in contact. I will take just two examples. The first is:
“I got a nasty letter which said my benefit was at risk because I didn’t attend an appointment and I had to give a really good explanation within a week or my benefit would be cut. It quoted all these regulations I broke. I freaked out because I couldn’t understand what I hadn’t done … It turns out there was a mistake”.
Another example is:
“I was made very anxious and sleepless by what I perceived as threatening letters and terms from Jobcentre Plus and A4e. I became depressed because I could see that my hopes to return to work were being made unrealisable by this route”.
Let us put ourselves in the shoes of these people and imagine how stressful it must be for anyone, never mind someone with a mental health problem, to be treated in that way. Further examples can be found in evidence submitted by Citizens Advice Cymru to the ongoing Welsh Affairs Committee inquiry into the Work Programme. A number of them are where there was failure to take account of mental health problems as good cause for non-compliance—an issue to which we will return when debating Amendment 7.
A 20 year-old female sought advice from CAB in south Wales. She had missed four appointments and was sanctioned. She suffers from periodic depression and memory problems and relies on her social services support worker to remind her of appointments. On these occasions, the support worker failed to do so. She could not apply for a crisis loan as she had been sanctioned, and she has no money at all. She is also worried that she will lose her accommodation.
Citizens Advice Cymru has also raised concerns about the effectiveness of hardship provisions once a claimant has been sanctioned. It observed that,
“according to our evidence, claimants are almost always financially destitute after a sanction and have very few choices in terms of financial support”.
In their experience,
“unless claimants are deemed particularly ‘vulnerable’, they will not usually get hardship support and will be left to rely on charitable support instead—such as food vouchers. Further, most food parcel providers have a limit on how many parcels they can distribute to … one person within a given timeframe, so this support is very limited”.
More generally, the word is that people are increasingly turning to food banks because of sanctions, but again those can do no more than provide a temporary sticking plaster.
When we debated the Universal Credit Regulations my noble friend Lady Hollis and I raised a number of concerns about the new hardship provisions, which are much more restrictive than those that have operated previously. I asked the Minister why hardship payments will now be recoverable, thereby potentially causing further hardship, and how claimants were going to be expected to prove that they had ceased to incur expenditure not deemed to be on essential and basic needs by the department, as they will now be required to do. In his helpful letter to my noble friend Lord McKenzie, in which he responded to questions he had been unable to answer in the debate, the Minister answered neither of those questions so I would be grateful if he could do so now. It is pertinent to this discussion because he justified the new rule on what claimants would be allowed to spend their money on, on the grounds that it,
“ensures that there is protection in place for those who need it without undermining the deterrent effect of the sanction regime”.
As part of the review of the operation of sanctions under Clause 2, it would be helpful to have the evidence that hardship payments have been acting as such a deterrence.
I turn now to the final proposed subsection in Amendment 4, the application of the public sector equality duty. The importance of this issue was brought home to me by reading a report by Laura Dewar of SPAN. In it she observes:
“For single parents, and those organisations that represent their interests, it is unclear how DWP and Jobcentre Plus are complying with the new public sector equality duty. Jobcentre Plus have withdrawn the specialist help of Lone Parent Advisers to single parents, which was a provision that”,
the Equality and Human Rights Commission,
“originally cited as indicating Jobcentre Plus compliance with the gender equality duty”.
She also points to a lack of clarity as to how Work Programme providers are supposed to comply with the duty. The report goes on to argue:
“If the Work Programme is to address the needs of single parents and their children, as is required by the public sector equality duty, then their needs to be more consistent practice across providers. The monitoring and evaluation of the Work Programme needs to prioritise this. If not there is a danger that the Work Programme will not work for single parents and their disadvantage and inequality will be even more acute”.
For the same reasons, it is crucial that the review established under Clause 2 prioritises the application of the public sector equality duty. As it is a year since the report from which I quoted was written, I contacted Ms Dewar to see if she could update me. She replied immediately that she was very worried about sanctions. The briefing she wrote me, for which I am very grateful but to which I cannot do full justice, was disturbing. It does not purport to be a comprehensive study but the information she gives raises warning bells. In short, it concludes: that some lone parents are being sanctioned as a result of their caring responsibilities; that little account is being taken of the well-being of their children or of the application of the public sector
equality duty; that threats of sanctions are not helping these parents move into work; that jobseekers’ agreements do not always take account of flexibilities, can be inconsistently applied and can be unrealistic and hard for parents to comply with; and that parents are too often denied the necessary flexibility in the work they are expected to obtain.
SPAN is hearing of unreasonable jobseekers’ agreements—for instance, one that states the lone parent must work from the moment she drops off her child at school to the moment she picks her up, or a number where lone parents of young children are being required to seek full-time work because of a lack of availability of part-time work. She cites a posting on SPAN’s online forum:
“I am a single mum to a 8 yr old who is doing well at school and he loves his life. I would never burst his bubble but I am on a work programme and under the threat of a sanction where I am to lose all JSA for a set number of weeks (I am to be notified by post) as I've sent a reply stating why I think it's unfair. I feel so useless and overwhelmed by the whole situation and my confidence packed its bag and upped and left. The sanction is over a missed Thursday 9 am appointment. My next appointment is 3 pm on a Monday. My advisor is well aware”—