Kenny MacAskill – 2022 Speech on Benefit Sanctions

The speech made by Kenny MacAskill, the Alba MP for East Lothian, in Westminster Hall, the House of Commons, on 13 December 2022.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow South West (Chris Stephens) on introducing this important issue that it is very appropriate to debate at this time. I will start by saying what this debate is not about. It is not about benefit fraud, in case the Daily Mail or others thought it was. That is rare—far rarer than tax avoidance—but it is dealt with by criminal prosecution, and rightly so because it is about public funds.

Equally, I do not believe that anyone is suggesting that there should be no sanctions. What is required is an appropriate form of sanctions in every walk of life, whether in a social club or a political party. If someone transgresses, there have to be repercussions. If we breach the rules here, we can rightly face sanctions. I am a former chair of the judicial panel of the Scottish Football Association; even in sport, if someone breaks the laws through misconduct on or off the park, they will rightly face some challenge. The issue is that the extent of it is far too great, certainly at a time of huge austerity.

More importantly, it is about the reasonableness and proportionality of sanctions. Players do not get banned sine die for two minor yellow cards in a football match, yet people are facing something that would almost bring them to the end of their life. Equally, it is about the circumstances in which these sanctions are being imposed. There has to be some understanding of the individual we are dealing with and the circumstances in which they are living, as opposed to having draconian measures.

It is well over 40 years since I graduated in law. I did welfare law as part of my law degree. At that stage, it was national insurance and supplementary benefit. Even then, when supplementary benefit was brought in in the Beveridge plan, it was set at a level that was the very minimum upon which someone could live. But our circumstances have changed since then. Not simply have we gone through mass unemployment; we have moved towards a gig economy and people in vulnerable occupations. We have moved away from the national insurance supplementary benefit scheme to universal credit. That has caused challenges and difficulties, but it seems that the moral compass has been lost. We have lost any element of compassion. Looking back, sanctions did apply to national insurance and supplementary benefit, but they were proportional, reasonable and certainly not to the extent that we have today.

Three issues follow from that. As has been mentioned by the hon. Member for Glasgow South West and others, punishment is being exacted upon those who work in the Department for Work and Pensions. They are threatened with punishment, and potentially with dismissal, if they do not get their number of sanctions up. That is simply unacceptable. This should be not a target-driven system, but a welfare state and a welfare system. It should be about the individual and the circumstances, not any spurious targets.

We know from PCS and other whistleblowers that many people worry that if they do not enforce a sanction against an individual, they will face consequences. That is simply unacceptable. That is not simply from the PCS; we know it from welfare rights officers. Any welfare rights officer in any constituency will tell a similar tale. It even goes beyond that. We see it in fiction on television and cinema screens. It is a few years now since “I, Daniel Blake” came out—an award-winning movie that highlighted the difficulties and, indeed, tragedy of the sanctions scheme. It is a few years past now, but the circumstances remain. I am fortunate to have been a friend of that film’s writer for over 40 years, and I know that although the movie was fictional, it was based on fact. As we would meet and discuss, he would tell me about the meetings he had had with people at food banks, trade union representatives and welfare representatives. He told me stories, such as that of the woman who had a miscarriage, who was unable to get to her appointment with the DWP and who was sanctioned, or the young father who rushed to the hospital to be at the birth of his child, whose sister phoned the DWP to say, “He cannot come; he’s gone to see the birth of his child. Surely that will be okay.” No, it wasn’t, because when he next turned up, he found himself sanctioned.

Those stories are not fiction: they are fact, and that is simply unacceptable. That is why it was not Paul Laverty but Ken Loach, who filmed the movie, who described our benefits system as “institutionalised cruelty”. The sanctions system is institutionalised cruelty, because we are taking the most vulnerable people—those who have the least income at a time of inclement weather, rising costs and enforced austerity, when work can be hard to find as unemployment figures are going up—and treating them harshly.

It is not even as if it works. As other Members have mentioned, many of these people, if not most of them, have significant challenges, whether with mental health, educational difficulties, or—as shown in “I, Daniel Blake”—simply being able to access IT. In some instances, it can be the inability to access the equipment; in other instances, it can be a generational gap. I am challenged by IT systems, and people of my age who do not have access to those systems will be even more challenged. Sanctions do not help those people; what they require is more of a mentoring scheme.

In summary, what we have to do and what the Minister must try to move towards is a system that by all means contains sanctions for those who fundamentally breach it, because that is unacceptable to those who pay their taxes and abide by the law, but where an individual is challenged, they have to be supported. Where an individual has reasonable, proportionate circumstances and an explanation, they most certainly should not be punished, and we most certainly should not see people being treated harshly as a result of a tick-box system to get the figures up. That is fundamentally wrong. It would not apply in most private businesses, and it certainly should not apply in a welfare state.