The workhouse aside, there’s never been a social security programme that delivered as much pain for so little gain as the “great sanctions campaign” imposed on unemployed people over the first half of this decade, reckons David Webster. The human and financial collateral damage from this most quixotic of policies – the idea that stopping someone’s benefit payments incentivises them to look for work – far outweighs the slender employment benefits it has delivered.

Webster, 72, an economist by training, retired senior local government official and now an honorary research fellow at the University of Glasgow, is arguably the country’s leading benefit sanctions expert. For the past five years he has meticulously tracked and analysed their use, scrutinising fuzzy official statistics and extravagant ministerial claims, and documenting the impact of sanctions in detailed quarterly briefings and academic papers. A longer, analytical history of sanctions is in preparation.

The sanctions campaign is now effectively over, he believes. Sanctions were ratcheted up under the coalition government, and peaked at over a million in 2013 in what looks now like an almost frenzied, indiscriminate programme. After a public outcry over the reported cruelties and abuses meted out by job centres, sanctions rates dropped. In 2016, they fell to under 350,000, partly as a result of rising employment. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is still wedded to the principle of sanctions, but Webster believes it now runs scared of bad publicity. It was no surprise, he says, that ministers have suspended the sanctions regime for unemployed Grenfell Tower residents: “Grenfell seems to have evoked public sympathy on a truly dramatic scale and the DWP doesn’t want to be on the wrong side of it. Of course, objectively, the distress suffered by Grenfell residents will often be no worse than that of tens of thousands of sanctioned claimants undergoing different types of crisis.”

Behind the growth of benefit sanctions was the idea that jobless individuals were essentially moribund and needed to be “activated” into work under threat of punishment. Traditionally a penalty for refusing the definite offer of a suitable job, they became from the 1990s onwards a punishment “for not doing something which the state thinks might help you get a job”. This notion gained traction under new Labour, but in 2010 the coalition’s work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, took it to another level, influenced by special advisers drawn from rightwing thinktanks. These were people, reckons Webster, “with no experience of social security issues and no idea about what poor people’s lives are like”.

The new regime forced claimants to sign commitments agreeing to spend at least 35 hours a week looking for work. The volume of jobs they applied for was monitored, regardless of suitability or outcome, and failure to meet these often arbitrary targets was punished, often capriciously. Long-term unemployed people placed on the government’s work programme were sanctioned in large numbers. Between 2010 and 2015 roughly a quarter of all jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) claimants saw their benefits stopped for between four weeks and three years, mainly for failing to actively seek work, or missing a jobcentre appointment. Former jobcentre staff alleged at a parliamentary inquiry that they had been threatened with disciplinary action if they failed to sanction enough claimants.

There may be fewer sanctions now but the consequences for many claimants remain catastrophic: destitution, hunger, illness, debt. Impoverishment stemming from a benefit sanction loomed large in the lonely death in 2013 of diabetic ex-soldier David Clapson. Academic research shows that where sanctions levels rise, so does food bank use. By 2015, it was hard to find anyone outside of the DWP who supported sanctions: even the private firms hired by ministers to get the long-term jobless into work declared that for the vast majority of their clients, sanctions were “more likely to hinder their journey into employment”.

Indeed, evidence of any positive effects for claimants and taxpayer has been elusive, says Webster. Shortly before he quit in 2016, Duncan Smith claimed that “sanctions are the reason why we now have the highest employment levels ever in the UK”. Such claims are baseless, says Webster. It is striking, he believes, that the DWP has refused to properly evaluate the policy, despite calls from MPs, the public spending watchdog and the minister’s own independent advisory committee. “They are scared of the evidence,” he reckons.

The National Audit Office (NAO) concluded last year that there was limited evidence sanctions actually worked. “What [the NAO] showed was that benefit sanctions in relation to JSA did increase the likelihood of people getting into a job but [it] also pointed out that the earnings weren’t good,” he says. “So the evidence was people were being pushed into jobs, but worse jobs than they would have got if they had taken their time.” It also found that sanctions caused disabled and chronically ill people who claimed employment support allowance (ESA) to spend less time in work, suggesting the effect was to discourage them from getting a job.

“You would think that if government was rational it would have suspended ESA sanctions immediately. But of course it hasn’t done anything of the sort.”

Webster argues that sanctions operate in what is essentially a secret penal system: “The question [it asks claimants] is: ‘Have you done what you are supposed to do? Have you broken the rules?’ It has become a judicial system. It’s not about entitlement, it is about whether you did or did not do what the state thinks you should have done. It’s become an inquiry into your behaviour.” While it is explicitly about punishing people – with higher penalties than those available in magistrates courts – there is no real public scrutiny. Sanction referrals and decisions are both controlled by the secretary of state, with no independent adjudication, hearing or legal representation prior to the decision.

Webster is aghast at “sinister” proposals – currently being trialled by DWP – to subject low-income workers to sanctions should they fail to work what the jobcentre decides are sufficient hours each week. The cyclical and irregular nature of much modern low-paid work means some people will be therefore permanently subject to sanctions. “The problem is if you introduce conditionality for low-paid work as well as unemployment it means some people are going to be living out their whole lives subject to this infantilising regime. You are never going to escape from it. What a terrible situation to put British citizens into.”

He believes there is a good prospect of reform, even if the present government would never dare to change the system (”to do so would open a can of worms and scatter them over the front pages for months”). The Labour party, he notes, is committed to scrap punitive sanctions. His own preference would be to revert to the pre-1986 system, scrapping the compulsory job search and training aspects. “This would not rule out employment support, far from it. It would mean that jobcentres, instead of policing benefit claims, would be offering employment support. Not such an outrageous thing to do.”

Curriculum vitae

Age: 72.

Lives: Glasgow.

Family: Married, grown-up son and daughter.

Education: John Fisher School, Purley; Queens’ College, Cambridge, BA economics; University of Glasgow, MBA and PhD on labour market impacts of deindustrialisation; fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Chartered Institute of Housing.

Career: 2003-present: honorary senior research fellow, Urban Studies, University of Glasgow; 1981-2010: housing strategy manager, Glasgow city council; 1978-81: associate lecturer in housing, Brunel University; 1976-80: principal research officer, Centre for Environmental Studies; 1972-76: statistician, London Boroughs Association; 1969-72: research officer, London School of Economics.

Public life: Former specialist adviser to House of Commons Environment, Education & Employment/Social Security and Scottish Affairs committees.

Interests: Family, playing the piano, exploring the countryside, politics, urban regeneration.