Dehumanising the unemployed: The tiny numbers behind the governments latest welfare reform plans

David Cameron has announced two plans for cracking down on welfare claimants in the past few days.

Yesterday was the turn of job seekers aged 18 - 21 who, he claimed, would be 'helped' by having to work for their unemployment benefits.

Young people will have to clean up graffiti or make meals for the elderly for 30 hours a week to receive £57.35 unemployment benefit. They will effectively be working for £1.91 an hour.

"That well-worn path - from the school gate, down to the jobcentre, and on to a life on benefits - has got to be rubbed away," Mr Cameron said.

But there are far fewer people on that 'well-worn path' to a life on benefits than you may imagine, and as David Cameron surely knows. A freedom of information request from 2013 showed there were only 1070 people who had been claiming JSA for more than ten years across the UK - just 0.07% of the total number of job seekers.

Likewise, all those obese people David Cameron was targeting over the weekend - latest government statistics reveal there are only 1780 people on disability benefits due to obesity.

With such small numbers involved these plans seem more about hardening public perceptions of welfare claimants than targeting entrenched social problems.

They do exactly what the Church of England warned against in their letter published today, they “stir up resentment against some identifiable ‘other’" and dehumanise the unemployed.

Unemployed and not claiming - number continues to rise

Chart by Inclusion

Unemployment statistics released this week reveal the number of unemployed people not receiving any benefits has risen by 37,000 over the past three months even while unemployment has fallen overall.

Labour Force Survey Unemployment
The Office for National Statistics latest figures showed unemployment fell by 63,000 in the three months up to November and currently stands at 1,958,000.

Claimant Count
The number of unemployed people claiming Jobseekers Allowance also fell. There are now 900,100 Jobseekers Allowance claimants - down 26,900 between October and November.

Unemployed but not claiming
But against this backdrop of falling unemployment one statistic continues to rise - the number of people who are not getting any state support.

As the graph above shows, the percentage of unemployed people who are not receiving Jobseekers Allowance is now 51.4%.

That means that of the 1,958,000 people currently looking for a job in this country, 1,005,000 of them are not receiving any benefits. Very little is known about how these people are managing.

Previous figures released by the ONS in September showed the number of people in this situation was 968,000 - so the number has risen by 37,000 people even while unemployment and the claimant count falls.

How unemployment sanctions are driving down the claimant count

Hundreds of thousands of sanction decisions last year resulted in unemployed people being knocked off the claimant count.

There were 319,401 decisions to stop a person’s Job seekers allowance (JSA) benefit for “not actively seeking employment” in 2013. The latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) shows there have been 125,094 of this type of sanction applied so far this year (January to June).

The DWP says the claimant count “includes all cases of claimants who are serving sanctions, provided the claimant continues to keep their claim live during the sanction period.”

However, this is not true for anyone sanctioned for “not actively seeking employment” as their claims are ended by the DWP.

Dr David Webster, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow said: “The most common reason for JSA sanctions is ‘not actively seeking work’, which does not mean what it says but that the claimant has not done exactly what they were told by their Jobcentre adviser, often for reasons beyond their control.”

To be considered “actively seeking employment” people must prove they are doing everything in the new claimant commitment.

Claimants have been told to apply for any jobs, including jobs they are not qualified for and would have no chance of getting in order to meet their claimant commitment.

Evidence submitted to the recent Oakley review into sanctions included many examples of people being unfairly sanctioned for this reason.

Examples include a single mother whose benefits (including her housing benefit) were stopped after it was decided she was "not actively seeking work." She was under a training programme with a major retailer at the time.

An unemployed man in Scotland was sanctioned for "not actively seeking work" while he was at the bedside of his three month old son who was seriously ill in hospital following kidney failure.

Dr Webster said: "The impact of the massive increase in this type of sanction under the Coalition has been multiplied by the huge increase in the length of penalty. Up to October 2012 the penalty was disentitlement, which lasted only until the claimant recomplied, which could be within a few days. Now there is always a 4-week loss of benefit for a first offence, and 13 weeks for a second."

The relentless rise of JSA benefit sanctions

Sanction referrals 2003 - 2013. Data compiled from DWP Stat-Xplore website

Data compiled from the DWP's (Department of Work and Pensions) Stat-Xplore website shows a dramatic rise in sanctions on unemployed people over the past decade.

There were over 900,000 sanctions issued in 2013, more than double the number applied in 2009 and almost four times the figure for 2004. The decision to cut off a claimants benefits is called an 'adverse' decision by the DWP.

Each case is referred to a 'decision maker' who decides whether a sanction should be applied or not.

'Non-adverse' decisions, where a person's case was referred but it was decided not to apply a sanction, rose sharply in 2009 - 2010, by just over 200,000. These cases have hovered around the half a million mark since 2010.

'Reserved' referrals, where the decision maker says a sanction should be applied, but where there is no current claim, have almost doubled from 53,026 in 2004 to 99,964 in 2012. There was a small drop in the number of these cases in 2013 to 95,087.

Cancelled sanction referrals

'Cancelled' referrals have rocketed. There were more than twelve times the number in 2013 than in 2004. Most of this rise has occurred during the past few years with almost five times the amount of cancelled referrals in 2013 as in 2010.

The DWP define a 'cancelled' referral like this:

"A cancelled referral results in no sanction decision being made. This can occur in specific circumstances for example, the sanction referral has been made in error, the claimant stops claiming before they actually committed the sanctionable failure, or information requested by the Decision Maker was not made available within a specific time period."

With such a wide definition it's hard to understand the dramatic spike in these cases. 

Dr David Webster, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, has done extensive research into sanctions and was able to shed some light on the issue.

Dr Webster said there has been no significant increase in cancellations of referrals by DWP's own staff. 

He said: "The rise in cancelled sanction referrals is almost entirely due to sanctions initiated by contractors, in the Work Programme and some other programmes such as Mandatory Work Activity and Work Experience." 

Dr Webster believes there are two reasons for the rise in cancelled referrals from contractors. The first being mistakes made in paperwork submitted to the DWP. 

The second reason, which Dr Webster believes to be more important, is that the DWP do not allow contractors to use their judgement when referring people for a sanction.

Dr Webster said: "Contractors are obliged to refer a claimant for sanction if they fail to meet any requirement at all, such as missing a single interview, even if the contractor well knows that there is a good reason."

This means that even if a person on the Work Programme has informed the relevant people they have a hospital appointment or a funeral and won't be able to make an appointment, they will still be referred for a sanction.

A DWP spokesman said: “Sanctions are only used as a last resort in a small percentage of cases and our built-in safeguards allow for sanctions to be cancelled where necessary.

“In these cases claimants will not lose out on their benefit payment”.

The DWP were asked to explain the increase in 'cancelled' decisions over the past few years but did not give a reason.
 

The data was compiled from the DWP Stat-Xplore website.

Sanctions – What are they?

In October 2012 the government made the rules stricter for people out of work and claiming benefits. Since the new rules came into effect more people than ever before have been sanctioned.


So, what does it mean if someone is ‘sanctioned’?

Basically it means your money is stopped. People out of work and looking for a job claim Job Seekers Allowance. This provides £72.40 a week to live on. 16 to 24 year olds receive less - £57.35 a week.

A sanction is when an unemployed person is deemed to have broken their Job Seekers Agreement. As a consequence their Job Seekers Allowance is stopped for a certain period of time.


How long for?

A sanction lasts for a minimum of four weeks. That means at least a month with no money whatsoever. If you are sanctioned twice in the same year it will be for a minimum of thirteen weeks – so three months with no money at all.

At the other end of the spectrum the longest amount of time a person can lose their money for is three years.

This useful chart gives an overview of the sanctions regime http://goo.gl/e97OAe


Why does this happen?

When someone starts claiming Job seekers allowance they sign an agreement. This document is either called a Job Seekers Agreement or a Claimant Commitment (the new ‘Claimant Commitment’ is being rolled out across the country now). If the Jobcentre decides you have broken one of the rules or not stuck to everything you signed up for they are likely to sanction you.

Here are some things a person can be sanctioned for:

Failing to apply for or accept a job that is offered

Failing to attend a compulsory training or employment scheme

Not applying for the required number of jobs

Not following a direction from a Jobcentre Plus adviser

Failing to attend, or arriving late for an appointment at the Jobcentre

Leaving a job voluntarily

The Invisible Unemployed

This chart from a report by Inclusion tells a story. Actually, it poses a lot of questions.

At the last count just under half of all unemployed people in the UK were not claiming benefits. That's almost one million people and it's going up all the time.

But where are these people? How are they surviving? And why are they not receiving any support?

As the chart above shows the number has been rising since the new sanctions regime started in 2012. Are sanctions to blame for the rising number of unemployed people missing from the claimant count?

These are questions I will be attempting to answer in the coming weeks and months.