Minister Confronted with Grieving Relative after Brazen Performance at Benefits Sanction Inquiry.

Patrick Butler commented on Tuesday,

The House of Commons work and pensions select committee has not merely shed light on the grotesque brutalities of the current benefit sanctions regime in the past few weeks, but established an unlikely consensus among rightwing thinktanks, the welfare-to-work industry and leftwing trade union leaders that the system is hugely flawed.

So far 19 expert witnesses – academics, charity workers and welfare advisers – have come before the inquiry. All agreed that some form of conditionality – rules by which claimants agree to actively seek work in exchange for social security support – is necessary in return for the payment of unemployment benefits. But all have also concurred, to varying degrees, that the current conditions (the tightest ever imposed in the UK) are both disproportionately punitive and, in terms of helping jobless people back to work, counterproductive.

Rt Hon Esther Mcvey, Minister of State, and Chris Hayes, Director, Labour Market and International Affairs, Department for Work and Pensions gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee yesterday:

You can watch it here, Parliament TV.

And…

Grieving relative confronts DWP minister Esther McVey after benefit sanctions inquiry (New Statesman)

The sister of a diabetic who died after having his benefits cut wept after hearing the minister say there is state support for vulnerable people.

Esther McVey, the Employment Minister, was handed an image of David Clapson – the man found dead in his flat from diabetic ketoacidosis, two weeks after his benefits were suspended – following a select committee inquiry into benefits sanctions this afternoon.

In the emotional confrontation, Clapson’s younger sister, Gill Thomspon, presented the image to McVey and said: “A diabetic cannot wait two weeks.” A reference to the amount of time a Jobseeker’s Allowance claimant, when sanctioned, has to wait to receive a hardship payment.

When Thompson discovered her brother’s body in July 2013, she found his electricity had been cut off, meaning the fridge where he stored his insulin was no longer working. Speaking to the Guardian in 2014, Thompson said: “I don’t think anyone should die like that in this country, alone, hungry and penniless . . . They must know that sanctioning people with diabetes is very dangerous. I am upset with the system; they are treating everyone as statistics and numbers.”

This is worth noting, for its sheer effrontery,

Tensions escalated during the hearing, and at one point the committee member Paul Maynard, a Tory MP, appeared distressed by the opposition’s questioning of McVey and threatened to leave the committee hearing.

The Guardian Reports,

The employment minister has defended the government’s policy of removing people’s benefit payments when they fail to meet certain conditions.

Giving evidence to MPs on the work and pensions select committee, Esther McVey said international evidence pointed to the effectiveness of benefit sanctions, but warned that “no system is perfect” and ideally nobody would need to be sanctioned.

McVey argued that the purpose of the government’s welfare changes had been to make the system more personalised and to “understand the need of the individual”. She said that once claimants were sanctioned it acted as a red flag and alerted the authorities that a person was vulnerable and in need of help.
Very few people are sanctioned, the employment minister said, with only 0.00057% of those referred given the maximum three-year sanction.
Time to rethink these dysfunctional benefit sanctions

But the chair of the committee and MP for Aberdeen South, Dame Anne Begg, said it seemed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had no significant evidence that sanctions were working and that they affected a group of people who the minister admitted were particularly vulnerable. “Just because [the system is] working for the majority, if we are to accept your argument, doesn’t mean its working for that small group [who are sanctioned],” she said.

In June 2011, the coalition government introduced a series of welfare changes that included sanctions on benefits claimants who do not meet government conditions for actively seeking work, cutting their payments for a minimum of four weeks.

Esther McVey arrives at 10 Downing Street Esther McVey, who said only 0.00057% of those referred were given the maximum three-year sanction. Photograph: Reuters

Previous evidence given to the work and pensions select committee, which is investigating the effects of benefit sanctions, has suggested that sanctions are leaving people without enough money to live on, forcing them to use food banks, and that the DWP has failed to do the necessary research into the effects of the measure in order to justify the policy.

When asked whether she thought a good welfare system necessarily required sanctions, McVey said: “It’s not just me saying that. It’s been said since time began and all the international evidence is saying that.”

Responding to a study from the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which claimed that the majority of those who received benefit sanctions were not going into work, McVey said the researchers had used flawed logic, made “leaps in where they got the facts and figures, and they came to the conclusion they wanted to come to”.

The minister argued that according to a destination survey conducted by her department the number of people going into work after benefit sanctions was more like 70% and that people tended not to tell jobcentres when they had got a job, making the figures used by the researchers unreliable. The researchers suggested that their figure of 20% was probably too high because anecdotal evidence suggests that people working in jobcentres are encouraged to record those coming off benefits as having gone into employment.

“You seem to be very selective in the evidence you will accept,” Debbie Abrahams, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, said.

McVey said there were categorically no targets set on how many claimants should be sanctioned, contradicting previous evidence given to the committee. “All of the things that the honourable lady is looking for and trying to find do not exist”, she said.

What a very, very honourable lady.

Welfare Cap will “increase accountability” Iain Duncan Smith.

The BBC reports,

MPs have overwhelmingly backed plans to introduce an overall cap on the amount the UK spends on welfare each year.

Welfare spending, excluding the state pension and some unemployment benefits, will be capped next year at £119.5bn.

The idea, put forward by Chancellor George Osborne in last week’s Budget, would in future see limits set at the beginning of each Parliament.

With Labour supporting the idea, the measure was approved in the House of Commons by 520 to 22 votes.

However, eleven Labour backbenchers defied their leadership by voting against the plan.

The rebels included former shadow ministers Diane Abbott and Tom Watson.

The cap will include spending on the vast majority of benefits, including pension credits, severe disablement allowance, incapacity benefits, child benefit, both maternity and paternity pay, universal credit and housing benefit.

It is not necessary to listen to the gibberish on the television by government supporters, saying basically, if I tell you three times it’s true.

Here is why Labour should have opposed the ‘cap’.

James Bloodworth Guardian.

As announced in last week’s budget, the government’s cap on welfare spending is set to be £119.5bn in 2015/16, increasing to £126.7bn by 2018/19.

Most of the spending that falls under the welfare cap is made up of the state pensions (£80bn), tax credits (£25bn) and housing benefit (£23bn). Significantly, jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) and the housing benefit that gets paid automatically to JSA claimants are not part of the cap.

The coalition has introduced the cap and Labour is expected to support the measure in the House of Commons today, with only a handful of Labour MPs expected to rebel.

However the problem is that, according to credible analysis, governments will struggle to keep to the cap due to the nature of the benefits that fall within it. This will mean, therefore, that those who receive benefits that fall under the cap will likely see cuts to their benefits at some point in the future.

The big question, then, is whether the potential cuts will hit those who can most afford to take them rather than those who are struggling. The evidence suggests that this won’t happen under the welfare cap. In fact, as the excellent Chris Goulden of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has pointed out, there is more spending on the richest households that is not in the welfare cap than is within the cap, and vice versa with the poorest households.

In other words, if you are poor the benefits you receive are more likely to be encompassed by the cap than if you are well off, as the graph shows.

How the welfare cap will affect household incomes.

The graph demonstrates, in Goulden’s words, that for the richest households:

“there is more spending that is not in the welfare cap (albeit virtually all state pension) than is within the cap. Overall, 30% of spending from within the welfare cap is on the richest half of society but 40% of the protected spend”.

On the other hand, for the poorest tenth the average annual incomes from benefits are £1,081 from tax credits, £874 from housing benefit and £509 from pension credit.

This means that, in using the welfare cap to protect things like the state pension for the rich but not the pension credit (which predominantly helps the poor), the chancellor is once again doing “more for those who already have, and not those on low incomes and most in need of help”, as Goulden puts it.

The welfare cap may be politically difficult for Labour to oppose, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a regressive measure that hits the poor hardest.

bour sh0uld have opposed the cap,

 

This is the List of  Honour  of those Labour MPs who voted against the cap.

Diane Abbott

Ronnie Campbell

Katy Clark

Michael Connarty

Jeremy Corbyn

Kelvin Hopkins

Glenda Jackson

John McDonnell

George Mudie

Linda Riordan

Dennis Skinner

Tom Watson

Mike Wood