Once upon a time beleaguered Work and Pensions boss Iain Duncan Smith opined, in religious terms, of his road to Damascus experience at the Glasgow Easterhouse estate that there was extreme poverty in the UK. It was this revelation that catapulted so-called compassionate conservatism into the mainstream of Conservative politics.

Whether his tears were real only he knows but working from the promise that sincerity of motive can be seen in what a person does then it seems they were nothing but crocodile tears. As the despised Bedroom Tax shows there is nothing compassionate about the ConDem social welfare policy – there is a conscious move to penalise poverty itself with fines imposed irrespective of whether there are smaller houses available to move into. The result: people with no control over the situation being forced into debt and event homelessness, sometimes, shamefully, aided and abetted by Labour Councils.

Today the Guardian reports on a yet another whistleblower pulling dark the manipulative ploys of senior managers in implementing the sanctions regime:

An anonymous whistleblower, a former job centre worker who was employed in the Greater Manchester area, told local Labour MP Debbie Abrahams and the Guardian that on one occasion the entire staff at a job centre were warned they would be disciplined unless they increased the number of claimants coming off the register, or raised the number threatened with the loss of their benefit entitlement. The complainant’s concerns were subsequently aired at the select committee by Abrahams, but in an interview before the work and pensions secretary’s appearance, the former employee told the Guardian that the system of benefit sanctions is very subtle. “They say to you that not enough people are coming off the claimant register and that if you do not get more people off the register you may be subject to an internal disciplinary assessment – a personal improvement plan. “If you ask managers how many people you are supposed to get off the register, they say more and more continuously. It is your job to make the claimant’s life difficult, they say. It creates a target culture.” The former employee also says that a Department of Work and Pensions internal whistleblowers system is not working since the complaints by staff are being handed to the senior district managers responsible for demanding job centres do more to drive claimants off the register … Speaking to the Guardian, the whistleblower said: “I tried to raise these matters on many occasions both face-to-face and in writing with management, but each time I was rebuffed and my concerns ignored. “But the truth is that benefit claimants are being deliberately set up to fail in order to achieve sanction quotas without regard for natural justice or their welfare. Staff are being asked to behave in a manner that is against the department’s values of integrity and honesty.”

Iain Duncan Smith, as ever, equivocated but asserted there were no targets in place. Given the Conservative Party’s previous bad form, including the censure from the ONS for misusing official benefit statistics and my own extensive conservations with Job centre PCS reps – I know who I believe, and it is not Iain Duncan Smith.

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