The secret sanctions figures

The government is stopping payments to nearly three times as many jobseekers as their official figures suggest, according to new research by the Guardian newspaper.

And the numbers being sanctioned has more than doubled since the Tories took office in 2010.

The government normally claims only around one in 20 jobseekers  – 6 per cent – are hit by the sanctions regime. But the Guardian’s figures show that nearly one in six jobseekers – 16.68 per cent – have been hit by sanctions.

The Department for Work and Pensions, which operates the sanctions regime, uses monthly figures which downplay the impact of sanctions. What the monthly figures show are how many people are currently being hit by sanctions.

Sanctions work by stopping Jobseekers Allowance for between four weeks and three years for what are often trivial breaches of ever more complex rules and requirement.

The Guardian figures are based over a year, and are not just ‘snapshot’ figures of how many are being sanctioned in any particular month. These figures also show that while 7.7 per cent of jobseekers were sanctioned in 2010, that figure more than doubled to 16.68 per cent in 2014.

Unfair

A cross-party committee of MPs called the sanctions regime unfair and punitive. The sanctions regime has also been implicated in a number of suicides and a disproportionate number of people with mental health disabilities have been hit by sanctions.

The government refuses to publish the annual figures of the numbers hit by sanctions. It has also refused so far to comply with an instruction to publish the figures of the numbers of people who die after being sanctioned or having benefits stopped for other reasons.

Liane Groves, Unite Community coordinator said behind the statistics are real people who are suffering.

She told UNITElive:”When we talk about sanctions in statistics and numbers it’s important to remember what they actually mean. One in six jobseekers being sanctioned means one in six people’s money being stopped, money they’d budgeted and depended on. 

“We’re particularly concerned that during summer holidays, when kids aren’t getting lunch at school that there are more and more children going hungry. Cuts to welfare and increasing benefit sanctions, as we know, don’t help people into work but they do leave more children with empty bellies. 

“The sanctions regime is one that’s totally out of hand leaving people desperate and plunging them into sharp poverty, that’s why Unite Community is proudly at the forefront in the campaign against them.”