ephemerid wrote:
OK.
I've done a little trawl of the interweb thingy and I found this -
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/p ... 1154en/htmThere are clauses in the WRA listed there which supersede previous unrepealed legislation.
Basically, the wording of the WRA means that the Secretary of State can issue new regulations any time and for any benefit.
I gather there are some exceptions for Scotland and Northern Ireland.
I am inclined to think that if there was a chance that all sanctions are illegal, some public interest lawyers would have cottoned on by now - my view is that the WRA has removed the responsibility for the S of S to provide social security based on need, and now most out-of-work benefits are based on conditions only.
If that wasn't the case, there would be a reduced payment available for those who can't work due to illness, for example - with IB, if you were found capable of work but disagreed, you could opt to have a reduced payment on hardship grounds rather than sign on, but you can't do that now.
You can claim hardship payments, but they are only available under certain conditions and they are time-limited; if your JSA or ESA is sanctioned for a jobsearching doubt, you are not likely to qualify for hardship unless you have children. You will be expected to take the hit and ask for whatever local provision exists, and it might not be cash.
It is possible to apply for hardship if sanctioned, but it's subject to referral to a decision maker - the decisions are appealable, but as with everything else, all this will be subject to Clause 99.
Short Term Benefit Advances (the unadvertised replacement for Crisis Loans) are only payable to people who have an as yet unpaid claim for benefits, and who have to show that payment is delayed or that DWP has a reasonable expectation that benefit will be paid.
STBAs cannot be claimed by people who have been sanctioned, AFAIK, because that expectation does not exist.
Re, the £10 for food thing - I don't like the wording of that petition. I don't accept that people are "rightly or wrongly" being sanctioned for not meeting their responsibilities. We know that many people are being tricked into doing things that will cause them to be sanctioned, that many of the reasons given by DWP are spurious, and most of all that even when the doubts raised are legitimate the system is so draconian that people will be sanctioned at some point.
If this achieved the desired outcome, and everyone on sanctions got their tenner for food, how would it be paid? In vouchers? What?
It would be an excuse for DWP to impose more bloody sanctions, not clean up their act and do it fairly - and there's the foolish notion I have that people shouldn't be sanctioned for ridiculous impossible unachievable conditions anyway.
It's a bad idea. If the lady concerned seriously thinks that the WRA has not superseded existing legislation, then she should be petitioning on the theory that all sanctions are illegal, not mitigating their effects with this nonsense.
Give IDS an inch, and he'll take a hundred miles - if he thinks people will happily accept a sanction if they get a tenner instead, he'll just cut benefits further. That's why I get so pissed off with all these bloody people who say they can feed their families on tuppence ha'penny as though it was something you could sustain for more than a few weeks.
The problem with the sanctions regime is that there are far too many people involved. Whether you get one or not depends on who you see when you go to the jobcentre, what the latest target is (and it could be anything - not signing up for Universal Jobmatch one week, or refusal of employment the next), and what sort of mood the "adviser" happens to be in.
Then there's the WP providers - if they don't like you, or you won't do some daft thing they impose, they can refer for sanction. And they do - 250,000 referrals last year. DWP only actioned 100,000 of them, so the majority must have been pretty spurious.
The trouble is, the referral for sanction is made on the word of whoever, and it's up to the claimant to prove that the referral is wrong.
Could you tell me where I can find the blogs/article you refer to? I wouldn't mind reading what these folks are saying.
Thanks so much for this detailed reply, it confirms what I thought about the WRA, and remembered from hours of watching debates and following the whole thing, but it now seems a long time ago. I didn't know how to reference it, having not kept consistent links due to having been very unwell over the last 18 months, and not very together. I was sure that I had read about some, or most of what you mention at some point on the G in some pretty detailed posts by yourself and others in better days there.
I had seen this petition a few times, it landed on my page through several routes. I felt that the wording was very ambiguous and read as though ten pounds could be sufficient for a week. Which to my mind, given the cost of travel to pick up payments, and likelihood that utilities companies etc. could actually get to the money first if it was paid into a bank account, would not help, and could possibly worsen things, the amount is derisory.
I also thought the petition itself didn't have a hope of actually being taken seriously unless it was seen to help govt policy, i.e. make the situation worse for people on benefits. It was being discussed on DPAC over the weekend, and I posted onto the thread, giving my opinion, saying I broadly agreed that sanctions are heinous and public disapproval of them needs highlighting, but sorry I was unable to support the petition, giving my reasons why. The person who wrote the petition came online with an over the top response, and it was all downhill from there. I probably should have been more reflective and remembered that people may have conditions that might make flaky - I wasn't, and entered what I thought would be a lively discussion. I friended the lady at her own suggestion, but later when someone posted direct to me I replied, and she came back big time, lots of capital letters, and a mod stepped in to end the convo. The next morning it was gone. So the justification aspect is no longer visible, but it was to my mind quite extraordinary. I think one of the phrases was once we get 'them' to say that £10 is enough to live on then 'we' can hit them with the legislation. The guy in question is saying that this legislation can be used to chuck out sanctions at the discretion of the decision makers, and, if I remember rightly, that because people including JCP staff had not been informed of this then it is illegal and the sanctions can be overthrown. There is an authoritative air to his posts, but... well I actually don't know the legislation well enough myself, and it is certainly not visible in the petition, though both these people claim it is the inspiration for it. I felt that if it was true then that should be made clear. The petitioner thought that, if successful, the petition would change things and 'help starving people now'.Its end date is a year away.
My overall feeling was that it was misinformation, not something I would want to see laid on any activist group. We hear untruth, misrepresentation and distortion all the time, and a good petition needs to be clear. I was a bit bewildered because most petitions are reasonably well worded; this one has all the things you mentioned going against it plus a few. To publicly ask the government to validate the idea of £10 as being enough for basic food? For a week perhaps, in an emergency, beyond that it is inadequate and no recompense for loss of the income that the government says is what you need to live on. How could a petition like this help? There are people who would sign it because they believe in the scroungers rhetoric and would like to see benefits removed! I am not alone in expressing concerns, but it was going unchallenged. I was just the idiot who did... by asking how on earth £10 will buy 21 meals plus the bus fare to collect the money from the hole in the wall at JCP.
If you lived in a food desert the situation would be dire. The only people who could survive on this well would be those who have the means and know how to cook. I'm housebound mostly, unable to stand long enough to cook and going quietly crazy with not being able to function. I live on the edge of one of these places. Its been an eye opener. Not a fresh item in sight other than milk. And a few items of grossly overpriced frozen food. People will choose calories over content in these circumstances. Did it myself three years ago when some idiot 'lost' my entire records, and I wound up with two sons with adult appetites and £30 quid to manage everything - for eleven months. The only thing that kept us going was my knowledge of asian vegetarian food, but I was mobile then. By the time my benefits were reinstated I owed everyone everything, and surprise, on the whiff of the back payment due to me the kind utility companies insisted on me having new contracts for which I had to pay a large deposit in order for them to reinstate. Thats how it works at the bottom, as I have no doubt you know. We lived on lentils, rice, chappaties, and, until the rain decimated the garden, home grown veg. I can honestly tell you that I have had meals with more in them in the poorest homes of my mum's home country! Not least because there poor people surround their homes with fruit trees. None of these things are available in the food deserts. There are British versions, but loads of people don't know how to do that either. A lot of them have already pared things to the bone already. I have no idea how people could survive a winter like the last one on so little. Which is one of the reasons what people demand needs to be a lot better, like getting rid of the trivial reasons for sanctions for instance, a measure which would be far better. And getting Labour to withdraw LB's ridiculous statement on sanctions, and come out against using them except in the most flagrant situations.
Thanks again, for your reply. You never disappoint.
You can probably find some of this guys posts there, and link to his own stuff on the same subject. On the deleted thread it seemed as though there was something a bit unreal about his claims, but I was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt as I really did not know myself whether what he said was accurate.
Sorry for posting so late and it being long.
Sorry to hear that you have been so unwell. It is good to see you post more here though, it is a hard slog to find any decent posts on the G these days, and I go there less with each passing week. I can't tell you how many times I have been able to pass on good information to people who need it because you have made it available. I hope 'they' will be able to sort you out, health wise, once you have been able to cut through the confusion.