Quotas for Welfare Sanctions?

[Zaune]

The Guardian

The government has launched an inquiry after it was forced to admit that jobcentres have been setting targets and league tables to sanction benefit claimants despite assurances to parliament this week that no such targets were being set.

A leaked email shows staff being warned by managers that they will be disciplined unless they increase the number of claimants referred to a tougher benefit regime.

Ruth King, a jobcentre adviser manager, discloses in the email that she has received "the stricter benefit regime" figures for her area, adding: "As you can see Walthamstow are 95th in the league table out of only 109" – the number of jobcentres in London and the home counties. The employment minister, Mark Hoban, had assured MPs on Tuesday: "There are no league tables in place. We do not set targets for sanctions. I have made that point in previous discussions."

The league table could only have been drawn up through information provided by senior managers in the Department for Work and Pensions.

Hoban had told MPs that decisions on sanctioning claimants "need to be based on whether people have breached the agreements they have set out with the jobcentre, and there are no targets in place".

Faced with the email, the DWP said: "We are urgently investigating what happened in this case. If a manager has set a local target for applying sanctions this is against DWP policy and we will be taking steps to ensure these targets are removed immediately."

King says in her email: "Our district manager is not pleased … because senior managers are under pressure to improve our office output and move up the league he has to apply some pressure downwards." She continues: "Guys, we really need to up the game here. The 5% target is one thing – the fact that we are seeing over 300 people a week and only submitting six of them for possible doubts is simply not quite credible."

The email reveals that along with other area team managers King had until 15 February to show an improvement, adding that if she does not do so she will be subject to a performance improvement plan, the first stage of disciplinary action.

She says if she is threatened with disciplinary action to improve performance, she will have to threaten her own staff in the same way. She writes: "Obviously if I am on a PIP [performance improvement plan] to improve my team's Stricter Benefit Regime referral rate I will not have a choice but to consider implementing PIPs for those individuals who are clearly not delivering SBR within the team."

She also discloses that the jobcentre customers manager is looking for about 25 referrals a week. "We made six last week and so far this week have made four. There is a shortfall here."

The shadow work and pensions secretary, Liam Byrne, is due to raise the matter in parliament on Friday. He said: "This explosive letter lays bare the climate of fear in jobcentres as league tables and threats of disciplinary action are used to perpetrate a culture of sanctioning innocent people to hit targets. That is just plain wrong and must be stopped now. Either ministers have no grip on their department or they misled parliament. Either way they must now face the consequences."

The Labour MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, said: "We have to get to the bottom of this. It is quite horrible that jobcentre staff feel they have to set people up to fail."

The DWP maintained that this was an isolated case. Hoban said: "I'm clear there should be no chasing of targets because I believe we should be making the right and fair decisions."

In the email King sets out ways jobcentre staff can catch out claimants, saying: "You should consider every doubt – if you are unsure then please conference with me." Her advice includes: "Do not accept the same job search every week, do not accept 'I dropped off CV to shops like Asda or Sainsbury's', listen for telltale phrases 'I pick up the kids', 'I look after my neighbours children/my grandchildren' or just 'I am busy' – all of which suggest that the customer may not be fully available for work, even cases where a parent shares custody can be considered."

She says someone can be deemed not to be actively seeking employment, and therefore subject to sanction "if someone is going away from home, but is not willing to return to take up employment, not willing to leave details of how they can be contacted should a job become available or not looking for work whilst away".

Oh, come the fuck on. Not even Labour-In-Name-Only were this stupid.

[Crazedwraith]

This is sad but not surprising seeing all the other crap we've heard these people doing. The disabillity stuff comes to mind.

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

It gets better.

Fresh written proof has been leaked showing that jobcentre staff are being set targets to sanction benefit claimants, and warned they will face disciplinary action if they do not meet the targets.

The document, from the Malvern jobcentre newsletter, came as the head of the Department for Work and Pensions [DWP] estate, Neil Couling, insisted a previous leak to the Guardian showing targets was, he believed, "an isolated incident and not something that is widespread".

The government has agreed to hold a 12-month inquiry into the sanctions regime, but Labour is pressing for a quicker inquiry that looks at specific allegations.

The Malvern jobcentre newsletter states: "We are now into the new sanctions regime … and we are currently one of the worst performing offices with sanction benefit referrals and unless we improve we will put under special measures. That will mean staff from other offices and the performance team coming into Malvern and looking at all our processes to see how we can improve our SBR [stricter benefit regime] performance."

The newsletter adds that the jobcentre will have "little say" on subsequent recommendations and its staff may have their "personal individual performances" monitored to "achieve the end result".

"We do not want this," the newsletter goes on. "My plea to you is to identify SBR issues and refer to DMA [sanctioning] where appropriate." The document, passed to LabourList, adds that overall performance should be 5% of the "live load".

Yet in a letter received by many jobcentre staff on Monday , Couling denies there are national targets for applying sanctions and adds that "individual targets should not appear in performance agreements".

He says: "We do keep management information on the numbers of referrals but that is to monitor for anomalies, for example it might highlight where there are higher numbers of sanctions than one might expect. They are not league tables." He defends the tougher regime introduced in September, including greater requirements to provide regular evidence of efforts to seek work.

He states: "Sanctions and conditionality are important tools for advisers in helping people back to work. The international and national evidence shows they play an important role in making the system work effectively and people return to work more quickly and spend less time on benefits where public employment systems make use of sanctions.

"Where sanctions are appropriate they should, without hesitation, be used. So if you are an adviser you should not be surprised if, from time to time, your manager does challenge you about whether you are applying the sanctions regime appropriately. That is right and proper and that will continue. This challenge though does not constitute a target, nor is it evidence of one."

But Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "There is now clear evidence of a nationwide culture of targets, league tables and intimidation at the heart of the Department for Work and Pensions sanctions regime.

"Iain Duncan Smith's point-blank denial has been exposed as a complete falsehood. We will demand the independent review is set up immediately so it can begin the job of putting the DWP's house back in order."

Numerous jobcentre staff have contacted the Guardian since last Friday's story on targets for sanctions to claim such targets are part of the culture at their workplaces.

There may be a dispute about definitions that leads to the contrast between what is being said at national level, and what is reported at local level.

Couling told the Commons' public accounts committee (PAC) last week: "We do track sanctions. We are quite keen to avoid any misunderstandings that there are targets attached to these."

The Department for Work and Pensions permanent secretary, Robert Devereaux, also told the committee: "Imagine you are the manager in a particular office and you can see that many of your advisers are sanctioning at a particular rate and by and large it is 5%, 8% or something like that, and Fred in the corner is doing 2%.

"What you are down to is managers making judgments, but one of the things they would look at – this seems to me perfectly reasonable – is do you think it is easy to do a sanction? It is much easier to just let it wash. People must put themselves into a difficult place on the part of society to do a sanction, so all the manager is trying to do when looking at the rates at which people are sanctioned is to try to think whether that sounds reasonable."

Couling also said he did have management information on which offices did the most sanctions. But he said he did not use this information "to go round to other offices and say they should be at this level, or that".

Asked by the committee chair, Margaret Hodge, what he did use it for, Couling replied: "I do it mostly because people ask parliamentary questions about it, and if I don't have it I am told it is terrible that I don't have it. What I want to try to get across to people is that there is no right level"

Malvern is in the West Midlands and a good couple of hundred miles away from Walthamstow where the original leak happened. So that blows the "isolated incident" theory completely out of the water. The only question that's left now is whether this was the work of a number of JobCentres at the regional level trying to cut corners in the same unrelated manner, or if it was directly mandated by the DWP centrally on the sly. Given the record of the DWP on disability assessments and suchlike so far I'm leaning firmly towards the latter option, but this is the kind of thing that really needs a "smoking gun" showing that the people at the top either authorised it or knew that it was going on but did nothing before the big heads start to roll.

EDIT: If it is true that the DWP were mandating JobCentre quotas at the national level then Mark Hoban and possibly IDS are going to get fingered for lying to Parliament as well. Even in this day and age, that's one of the few acts of dishonesty that can still destroy a political career.

[Zaune]

Annnnd the Lords has just shot down an attempt to convene an official inquiry. Great.

[Crazedwraith]

Getting a 404 on that link. Looked it up and you missing an 's' off the end.

link

Dissappointing though. I thought the Lords usually had their heads on straight.

[Zaune]

Drat. Too late to edit, sorry.

[NecronLord]

As some of you may know, I work for the Jobcenter. To basically explain how there is no sanctions quota is simple: there's no sanctions quota.

What there is, is a league table, as mentioned here, and JC managers are ranked on how their office performs on that table. Naturally you give a middle manager a league table, he will do absolutely anything to his staff to get up the top of it so he'll get promoted.

Of course, staff in the local offices aren't even properly trained to administer(!) the new sanctions regime, which results in muggins here getting a huge pile of customers who've been sanctioned indefinately(!!) by accident (!!!) by local office staff.

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

Ah, I see. So it's a case of stupidity rather than malice then? Fair enough.

I suppose it begs the question, why on Earth bother with any kind of league table system in the first place? I can understand the DWP wanting data on how individual JobCentres perform, but putting that into a) a league table which is b) openly available to all JobCentre managers sounds like a recipe for an utter disaster the likes of which you (and the Guardian) described.

Of course this ties into the wider problem that has been identified ever since the benefit reform plans such as universal credit were announced. It's simply too big a change too quickly for administrative staff and claimants to process, and people are going to fall through the cracks. Not the greatest idea when there are quite literally lives at stake.

[Zaune]

Assuming of course that the Tories didn't deliberately set out to cause people to starve to death, commit suicide or get gunned down when they riot, of course. I'm afraid my willingness to give them the benefit of the doubt has been sorely taxed over the last few years.

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

I'm no friend of the Tories (in fact, if I had to describe my political views, it would be "tribally anti-Tory" as opposed to "tribally pro-anything") but even I think that's over-egging the pudding somewhat. Misguided ideology and manifest incompetence can be as deadly a combination as pure malice.

The more I think about this government, the more I think the parallels with the Labour government of 1974-79 are uncanny. A ruling party with a weak mandate and riven with internal factional troubles, an ailing economy that was popularly seen as being the last gasp of the dominant macroeconomic policies of the time and nationalist movements kicking up a fuss. All we need now is a triple-dip recession (not that I'm actively hoping it'll happen) and it'll be Healey going to the IMF for the 21st century. Hopefully this means that the Thatcher of the left will come to power soon and do to the financial sector what she did to the miners. A man can dream.

[NecronLord]

Ah, I see. So it's a case of stupidity rather than malice then? Fair enough.

I suppose it begs the question, why on Earth bother with any kind of league table system in the first place? I can understand the DWP wanting data on how individual JobCentres perform, but putting that into a) a league table which is b) openly available to all JobCentre managers sounds like a recipe for an utter disaster the likes of which you (and the Guardian) described.

Management by figures is universal, and I am expected to care about my personal, team, and office statistics, with actual delivery of benefits to the customer a secondary concern at best. Staff are micromanaged to a ridiculous degree.

[OneEyedTeddyMcGrew]

Management by figures is universal, and I am expected to care about my personal, team, and office statistics, with actual delivery of benefits to the customer a secondary concern at best. Staff are micromanaged to a ridiculous degree.

Oh, I know that. I've heard enough horror stories about the teaching profession in my time to know how pervasive and damaging it is. I guess I should fine myself several million points for attempting to apply common sense to such things.