Pressure to penalise claimants

FRESH evidence that job centre managers routinely put pressure on staff to impose financial penalties on benefit claimants has been submitted to the Commons work and pensions select committee inquiry into sanctions.

Documents produced by the PCS union at the committee’s request present a series of emails from Job Centre Plus managers which the union says show that staff who fail to instigate or approve enough sanctions are subject to performance reviews.

It says the emails reveal how staff are pressurised to meet sanctions targets, seemingly regardless of whether the penalty is appropriate. Staff who do not meet “expectations” are given a “must improve” rating by managers and in some cases are denied performance-based pay rises, it says.

A sanction involves the stopping of claimants’ benefit payments for at least four weeks – equivalent to almost £300 – as a penalty for breaching benefit rules and conditions, typically failure to look for work or attend jobcentre appointments.

The PCS disputes the Department of Work and Pensions’ (DWP) claim that sanctions targets do not exist and that sanctions are only imposed as a “last resort”.

The Union states:

This is a Kafka-esque situation in which the department denies any targets as it penalises its own staff for not meeting these targets

The PCS says that in one region individual job centres were given colour ratings of red (bad) or green (good) depending on whether they had met targets to sanction job seekers, incapacity benefit claimants, and recipients of income support.

Staff attending a regional briefing last month at which the ratings were unveiled were told that “off-flows” (the removal of claimants from the unemployment register) would help deliver savings to the welfare budget.

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ACCORDING to the union, staff were told the internal publication of the ratings helped offices “see how their performance translates into monetary savings for the country”.

Other emails purport to show how staff are encouraged to use the “hassle factor” to “frustrate claimants off benefits” by imposing increasingly onerous claimant commitments on customers - typically, stringent targets for job searches or the imposition of daily signing-on requirements.
In one email a Job centre manager queries why only two claimants failed to meet their commitments from the 916 interviewed that month, and suggests tighter conditions must be imposed if official sanctions level expectations are to be met.

The employment minister Esther McVey is likely to be asked about the allegations when she appears before the select committee on Wednesday morning.

The PCS evidence follows separate written submissions to the committee by two former jobcentre employees who alleged that officials set up “hit squads” to target benefit claimants for sanctions and put pressure on them to sign off the dole.

Latest official figures show that 918,000 claimants were sanctioned between April 2013 and March 2014 for apparently breaching benefits rules. Sanctions rates have risen sharply since 2010, and soared since tighter conditions were introduced in Autumn 2012.

Job centre staff who fail to make sufficient sanctions referrals are placed on Performance Improvement Plans, which can result in them losing out on annual pay awards, the union claims.
It says it has been inundated by staff complaining about the pressure to sanction claimants and meet sanctions targets, which it says are

Skewing the role of our members in jobcentres and polluting the relationship between jobcentre advisors and claimants

A spokesman for the DWP said there was “nothing new” in the claims. He added:

In return for their benefits, claimants are asked to do everything they can to look for work, and more than 70 per cent say they are more likely to follow the rules if they know they risk having their benefits stopped. 

With the record number of vacancies, it’s right that claimants are asked whether they are doing enough to find a job. There are no targets for sanctions.