week. If this was two weeks, the estimate would rise only to about £6m. There are far fewer ESA than JSA sanctions, and, setting aside the ‘time to compliance’ element, they are much shorter. Details of all the calculations are available from the author. These calculations relate to the direct effect of sanctions in taking money from claimants. But sanctions also have the effect of driving people off benefits altogether. Numerical estimates of JSA claimants leaving the count due to sanctions have been made by a team from Oxford University (Loopstra et al. 2014). CESI has pointed out that the proportion of unemployed young people (excluding students) not claiming JSA was 53.6% in January 2015 and had risen by over 20 percentage points since October 2012, with the sanctions regime (which was toughened in that month) an obvious possible factor. This reduction equates to about 100,000 claimants, and means a saving to the government (at the youth JSA rate) of around another £300m per year. Of course it is not only young people who are driven off benefits. Overall, it seems likely that the sanctions regime is saving the Coalition the best part of a billion pounds a year, and will be seen by ministers as making a substantial contribution to their targets for reducing social security spending. SANCTIONS - DEVELOPMENTS House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee Inquiry into Sanctions The Work and Pensions Committee Inquiry into Benefit Sanctions Policy beyond the Oakley Review has received over 160 written submissions, which are available at . These submissions are an immensely valuable source of evidence on the sanctions regime, and include material from DWP ‘whistleblowers’, sanctioned claimants themselves, and a remarkable supplementary submission from the Public and Commercial Services union (SAN0161) reproducing a range of documents showing malpractice within Jobcentre Plus. The Committee has held oral evidence sessions and transcripts are available at The report should be published in March. House of Commons Debates An adjournment debate on the amount of money withheld from claimants by sanctions promoted by the Opposition Employment spokesman Stephen Timms MP was held on 18 December. The transcript is available at A debate on Benefit Claimants in the North East was held on 7 January and a Westminster Hall debate on UK Poverty on 4 February. In both of these sanctions featured prominently. New reports on sanctions
Baptist of Great Britain, Church Action on Poverty, The Church in Wales, Church of Scotland, Methodist Church, United Reformed Church (2015) Time to rethink benefit sanctions, March, available at http://www.jointpublicissues.org.uk/resources/rethinksanctions/ DWP (2014) Mandatory Reconsiderations, requests and decisions to October 2014, Britain: Experimental Official Statistics, 17 December, available at , with tables available at Loopstra, Rachel, Aaron Reeves, Martin McKee & David Stuckler (2015) Do punitive approaches to unemployment benefit recipients increase welfare exit and employment? A cross-area analysis of UK sanctioning reforms, Oxford University Department of Sociology, Sociology Working Paper No. 2015-01, January, at http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/sanction120115-2.pdf MacLeod, Mary Anne (2015) Making the Connections: A study of emergency food aid in Scotland, Glasgow, The Poverty Alliance, January Scottish Unemployed Workers Network (2014) Sanctioned Voices: A report on the impact of the DWP sanctions regime as implemented in Dundee Job Centre, compiled by volunteers for the Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network, December, available at Webster, D. (2013) ‘Jobseeker’s Allowance Sanctions and Disallowances’, Working 233, Autumn, 6-7.