The quietly devastating National Audit Office (NAO) report shreds five years of ministerial bluster, misinformation and spin about the purported virtues of benefit sanctions, arguably one of the most brutal, controversial and ineffectual social policies of recent times.

Sanctions are a punishment applied to benefit claimants adjudged to have infringed jobcentre rules. If claimants fail to turn up for appointments or to apply for enough jobs, officials effectively fine them by stopping their benefit payments for a minimum of four weeks (around £300). Between 2011 and 2015, almost one in four of all jobseeker’s allowance claimants were sanctioned. In 2015 alone, sanctions led to an estimated £132m in benefits being withheld from some of the UK’s poorest citizens.

Anti-poverty campaigners, food banks, academics and MPs have warned for years that sanctions were dangerous: they can lead to debt and rent arrears, depression, hunger, food bank use, survival crime, destitution and worse. Sanctions, they have pointed out, can be handed out capriciously or cynically to meet jobcentre targets. In some cases, such as that of diabetic former soldier David Clapson, found dead in his flat in 2013, starved and penniless, the potentially lethal consequences of benefit sanctions have seemed incontrovertible.

The Department for Work and Pensions has imperiously dismissed those warnings throughout. It has regularly assured us that sanctions “work”. They provide a deterrent effect to the half-hearted job seeker, and a kick up the backside to the lazy and feckless to make them “focus and get on”, the DWP insists. Sanctions, claimed the former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith in March, were “the reason why we now have the highest employment levels ever in the UK”.

The NAO reveals that those assertions were essentially baseless. The DWP had no clue whether sanctions worked, and zero interest in finding out. When the scope and severity of sanctions were increased in 2012, leading to a rapid rise in the number affected, it had no evidence to justify the change and no idea what the likely effect on claimants would be. It did not know the financial costs of sanctions or the wider knock-on impact on health services, let alone any potential benefits, and actively resisted any attempt by others to find out. Last year the DWP summarily rejected calls from both an all-party committee of MPs and its own social security advisory committee for a formal review of sanctions.

Most damning of all is the unravelling of the claim by ministers that sanctions are instrumental in getting people into work. This was a fragile claim to begin with: the DWP’s own advisers have pointed out that there is no evidence to support it. Employment companies running the DWP’s work programme warned last year that for most jobseekers, sanctions actually made getting a job harder.

The DWP cites flimsy international studies to support its claim that sanctions lead to jobs, but has never analysed its own data to discover how stopping benefits affects claimant behaviour or employment outcomes.



The NAO conducted its own preliminary analysis of DWP data and found that sanctioned claimants were as likely to stop claiming benefits altogether as they were to get a job. The effect on sick and disabled unemployed claimants was even more stark: the NAO found sanctions were likely to have discouraged them from working.



That the DWP’s benefit sanctions policy in recent years was created in a largely evidence-free zone, or that once it was in place, ministers misrepresented its effects (and were upbraided by the statistics watchdog), or that it sought to dismiss any criticism, however well founded, will surprise no one who has followed social security in the Duncan Smith era. The benefit cap is a similarly aggressive policy championed by ministers with a fervent faith out of all proportion with the evidence that it works.

The challenge for the current work and pensions secretary, Damian Green, who likes to suggest that he is cut from a different cloth from his controversial predecessor-but-one, is to show that he can listen to the NAO’s concerns. The first step, the NAO says, should be to institute a wide-ranging review of sanctions; the second, a genuine attempt to understand their wider impact. Green’s response should tell us whether he really offers any new insights, or simply more of the same.