Tag Archives: Department for Work and Pensions

How unemployment sanctions are driving down the claimant count

Hundreds of thousands of sanction decisions last year have resulted in unemployed people being knocked off the claimant count.

There were almost 320,000 decisions to stop a person’s Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA) benefit for “not actively seeking employment” in 2013.

And in the first six months of 2014 a further 125,000 sanctions have been applied, according to the latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

The DWP says the claimant count “includes all cases of claimants who are serving sanctions, provided the claimant continues to keep their claim live during the sanction period.”

However, this is not true for anyone sanctioned for “not actively seeking employment,” as their claims are ended by the DWP.

Dr David Webster, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow said:

“The most common reason for JSA sanctions is ‘not actively seeking work’, which does not mean what it says but that the claimant has not done exactly what they were told by their Jobcentre adviser, often for reasons beyond their control.”

The claimant commitment

To be considered “actively seeking employment” people must prove they are doing everything in the new claimant commitment.

Claimants have been told to apply for any jobs, including jobs they are not qualified for and would have no chance of getting in order to meet their claimant commitment.

Evidence submitted to the recent Oakley review into sanctions included many examples of people being unfairly sanctioned for this reason.

Examples include:

  • A single mother whose benefits (including her housing benefit) were stopped after it was decided she was “not actively seeking work.” She was under a training programme with a major retailer at the time.
  • An unemployed man in Scotland was sanctioned for “not actively seeking work” while he was at the bedside of his three month old son who was seriously ill in hospital following kidney failure.

Dr Webster said:

“The impact of the massive increase in this type of sanction under the Coalition has been multiplied by the huge increase in the length of penalty.

“Up to October 2012 the penalty was disentitlement, which lasted only until the claimant recomplied, which could be within a few days. Now there is always a 4-week loss of benefit for a first offence, and 13 weeks for a second.”

A version of this article was first published on NatalieLeal.blogspot.co.uk

Benefit sanctions data to be released for first time on DWP stats site

dwp stat_explore

The Department for Work and Pensions statistics site Stat-Xplore will publish data on sanctions  for the first time next month Continue reading Benefit sanctions data to be released for first time on DWP stats site

How to compile a news feed on welfare issues (or any other) – part 1: what’s going on?

Earlier this week we published our list of 19 places to follow welfare developments. In the first of a three-part serieswe explain how to get your own list of useful feeds into one page, and share it with others.

Step 1: Use a ‘personalisable homepage’ news reader like Netvibes or Feedly

There are a number of services that allow you to follow multiple sources of news at the same time – often called ‘news readers’ or ‘RSS readers’. I used Netvibes for compile this list, because you can share those lists with other people, but you may have another preference (Feedly and Flipboard are also nice, but currently don’t have the same option). The video below is just one of many providing an introduction to Netvibes:

Follow the instructions above on creating an account with Netvibes and adding feeds.

If you want your feeds page to be seen by others

If you want your feeds to be public, however, you’ll need to enable the public dashboard first. To do this: Continue reading How to compile a news feed on welfare issues (or any other) – part 1: what’s going on?

19 places to get updates on welfare reform

If you want to keep track of what’s happening in welfare reform we’ve compiled this list of some of the most useful – and varied – sources on everything from the bedroom tax to child poverty.

We’ve also put together a dashboard if you want to follow these on a single easy-to-check webpage. You can follow a public version here, or add it to Netvibes here.

Here’s who we’ve added – can you think of others?

1. The Guardian – topic: welfare

The Guardian is the UK newspaper that invests the most in covering welfare issues.

Their website allows you to follow specific topics such as ‘benefits‘ (within the Society section), as well as individual journalists, such as Patrick ButlerBut we’ve picked the general ‘politics – welfare’ topic first because it sometimes includes stories written by other journalists that aren’t classified under either of the other. 

This story on Nick Clegg’s criticism of child benefit policy, for example, comes under ‘child benefit’ rather than ‘benefits’, and is written by a politics reporter – but it does still come under the welfare topic.

2. Inside Housing: news

With so little specialist coverage in the press, specialist magazines are often a better place to look for welfare-related news. Continue reading 19 places to get updates on welfare reform

Useful posts to Sept 6: welfare reforms mauled;whose upturn? dreading UC

These are some welfare links we found interesting during the first week of September.

Get the data: organogram of Job Centre Plus

Job Centre organogram

The Department for Work and Pensions has published data about posts in Job Centre Plus. The organogram shows the title, hierarchy and salary of positions in the company.

The PDF shown above (click to see full size) is also available here.

A guide to data sets, explaining the meaning of ‘salary cost of reports’ can be found here.

If you find the data useful, or need any further help, please get in touch.

Get the data: organogram and staff pay

DWP organogram

The Department for Work and Pensions has published data about Senior Civil Service posts, including the title, hierarchy and salary. Information is given on a variety of sectors such as Job Centre Plus, disability, employment, welfare and Directgov.

The organogram (PDF) shown above is also available here.

A guide to data sets, explaining the meaning of ‘salary cost of reports’ can be found here.

If you find the data useful, or need any further help, please get in touch.

Factcheck: 900,000 dropped benefit claims “rather than complete assessment”?

ESA: Work Capability Assessments
ESA: Work Capability Assessments – total vs dropped

On Saturday a number of media outlets reported Government claims that nearly 900,000 people dropped benefit claims “rather than undergo a tough new medical test“. Reports in The Telegraph, Express, Daily Mail, MSN and Wales Online, based on a Press Association story, however, fail to dig deeper into the claims.

How accurate are they? Steve Walker has looked at the data, following a pointer from Declan Gaffney, and found the pattern of ‘dropped claims’ doesn’t support the headlines. HMI Welfare has re-checked and re-presented it, along with some documentary context. Here are the key findings: Continue reading Factcheck: 900,000 dropped benefit claims “rather than complete assessment”?