Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

Given its #BudgetDay2023, it's important for voters to know that the #DWP has recently been ordered to release ‘sensitive’ research, commissioned in 2019, over concerns that sanctions have a NEGATIVE effect both on claimants’ health & finances.

theguardian.com/politics/2023/…

The internal DWP study was commissioned in 2019 after a cross party committee of MPs concluded that while there was NO evidence benefit sanctions incentivised people to get work, they did have a negative effect on claimants’ health & finances.

Benefit sanctions are in effect punishment fines whereby claimants’ benefits are docked for at least a month for supposed infringements, such as failing to search for jobs or missing a meeting with an employment coach.

The DWP study was meant to partly address an ongoing political row. Ministers claim sanctions focus the minds of claimants on work discipline, while academic evidence shows they are ineffective & much more likely to make people impoverished, unwell, & LESS likely to work.

While initially the DWP said it had “every intention” of publishing the research, ministers subsequently BLOCKED it, insisting it contained “details of a sensitive nature” and that it was in the “public interest” to keep the findings under wraps.

The decision was contested by sanctions expert David Webster of the University of Glasgow, who appealed to the information commissioner over a year ago after the DWP rejected his FOI request to see the sanctions research. The commissioner recommends disclosure of the research.

“The Commissioner considers that there is a particularly strong public interest in scrutiny and understanding of the information available to those deciding whether to continue with a controversial policy such as sanctioning benefits.”

In the #Budget2023 the government is about to “strengthen” its cruel & ineffective universal credit sanctions regime: for those without a health condition & claiming UC, sanctions will be applied more "rigorously" for those who do not meet strict work-search requirements.

Webster has said the Govt/DWP should make available its own internal evidence justifying such a policy. “It’s important the policy is evidence-based. A lot of benefit conditionality is based on assumptions that claimants are lazy. The evidence does not support that.”

The DWP research was commissioned by Amber Rudd. She also considered an independent review of sanctions but the Disability News Service reported this was scrapped by her successor, Thérèse Coffey, who also blocked research looking at the impact of sanctions on health.