Sanctions impact

As everyone focuses on the bedroom tax, there is worrying evidence today of the impact of another part of the benefits system on vulnerable homeless people.

Tougher benefits sanctions were introduced in October 2012 for people on job seeker’s allowance. The period that benefit can be stopped increased from between one and 26 weeks to four weeks and three years. Changes for those on employment support allowance followed in December 2012.

The changes are part of steadily escalating conditionality requirements, including the claimant commitment that will be introduced in 100 job centres a month from October as part of the government’s conviction that ‘looking for work should be a full time job’. 

Claimants can be sanctioned for offences including ailing to attend a job interview or to participate in the work programme and refusing an employment or training scheme or leaving one voluntarily or through misconduct. The idea is that the sanctions will change people’s behaviour and make them more likely to find employment.

However, research out today Homeless Link finds that the new regime is disproportionately affecting homeless people: 31 per cent of those on JSA had been sanctioned compared to just 3 per cent of claimants overall.

The report said: ‘While the intention of sanctions is to incentivise claimants into work, our research shows that this is not happening for homeless people. Instead, sanctions are effectively punishing vulnerable people – who are trying to engage with finding work – for making mistakes. This is a high cost to pay for people who are least able to manage.’

The consequences can be extreme. The report found that some sanctioned homeless people are turning to petty crime while some are suffering increased anxiety that worsens existing mental health issues. Others are going into food poverty. When I tweeted about this yesterday, I was also told of young homeless people who have been sanctioned and ended up in hospital being treated for malnutrition.

As one service provider told Homeless Link: ‘We are working with some very vulnerable people at the outset and sanctions take people to another level of vulnerability.’

The housing consequences can be serious too despite the fact that claimants who are sanctioned are meant to continue receiving housing benefit. The report said that in practice homeless claimants do not know to notify the local authority of their circumstances and ended up losing their housing benefit too.

All but one of the 45 service providers who responded to the Homeless Link survey said that homeless people were falling into rent arrears as a result and 23 said that clients had been evicted because of sanctions.

Homelessness organisations face a loss of rental income and of service charge income too, with impacts on organisational income and on the workload of support workers.

If the findings are alarming enough for homeless people suffering from sanctions and the organisations trying to help them, they should also be deeply worrying for the Department for Work and Pensions because they suggest that sanctions are failing in their principal aim of incentivising people into work.

Among the recommendations, the report says that the DWP should take more account of the difficulties faced by people with complex needs and that guidance should make provision for exemptions or special terms for homeless people who need more support. Meanwhile clearer and more consistent information would help prevent people losing housing benefit as well as sanctioned benefits.

For homelessness service providers, the message is to give more encouragement and support to clients to inform Job Centre Plus of their circumstances and to make them aware of their responsibilities.

But is there an unspoken message for housing as a whole too? Beyond the bedroom tax, other less visible cuts in housing benefit continue to rise, especially for younger people, and homelessness is on the increase. And it’s not just cuts in housing benefit that can lead to consequences such as rent arrears and evictions. If and when the universal credit starts, with payment of the housing element direct to the claimant, any cut in any benefit will be mean potential rent arrears. This report highlights yet again the importance of maintaining direct payment for vulnerable claimants and having effective procedures in place.

While universal credit itself may not be seen for a while beyond a limited roll-out in a few job centres at a time, associated elements of the new system including a steadily tighter conditionality regime are still being introduced at the same time. Ten pilots on in-work conditionality, where up to a million working claimants could be sanctioned for not working enough hours, begin next month.