This is the edited text of a speech I made on Thursday in the House of Commons, in a debate I initiated on the many cases of sanctions being wrongfully applied to benefit recipients, calling on the Government to review the targeting, severity and impact of such sanctions.

The process of sanctioning benefit recipients is now being used on an enormous scale—almost 1 million sanctions a year. Even the right-wing Policy Exchange think-tank acknowledged in a report published last month that about 68,000 benefit claimants each year are having their welfare payments stopped unfairly. Given that the penalty for the first infringement is the loss of benefit for four weeks, for the second the loss of benefits for three months and for the third the loss of benefits for three years, the number of people being driven into destitution by administrative diktat is enormous. Even the Policy Exchange admits that 8% of that number should never have been sanctioned.

I presume that everyone accepts that fall-back sanctions have to be applied in extreme cases where there is deliberate and real non co-operation with the obligation to try to find work and where no good reasons have been found for such behaviour. Those sanctions should be proportionate and reasonable and not exercised punitively or with a view to achieving targets or objectives—whatever we call them—for removing people from the unemployment list. Continue reading →