The Department for Work and Pensions has been ordered to release “sensitive” research into whether fining benefit claimants is effective in getting them to take a job or work more hours.
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 and 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 over sanctions. Ministers have claimed sanctions focus the minds of claimants on work discipline, while the weight of academic evidence shows they are ineffective and much more likely to make people impoverished, unwell and 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 freedom of information request to see the sanctions research.
The commissioner has now issued a ruling, concluding that the balance of public interest lies in the 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.”
The government is about to “strengthen” its universal credit sanctions regime, briefing that it will step up training for jobcentre officials to help them to apply sanctions effectively, and automate other parts of the sanctions process.
Webster told the Guardian that if the DWP was looking to step up sanctions it 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 under former work and pensions secretary 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.
A DWP spokesperson said: “We are aware of this decision notice [from the information commissioner’s office] and are considering our next steps.”
