REAL LIVES Benefit sanctions HOUNDED OV


Benefit sanctions can seriously damage your health – even kill you


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This is 21st-century Britain where a sick man can be hounded to death and denied a safety net


Mavis Bond sister of sanctions’ victim


The word is ‘cruelty’.That’s the only way to describe how people on benefits are treated, says Unite Community activist Colin Hampton.


The current benefits regime seems to operate like a sinister game of Snakes and Ladders … without the ladders.


But it is anything but a game. People have died, people have committed suicide – directly as a result of arbitrary decisions taken by officials who are under huge pressure to treat claimants like criminals and get them off benefits.


Claimants can lose their entitlements for absurd reasons, such as turning up one minute late to a Jobcentre or missing an


appointment to attend a family funeral. Freedom of information requests have revealed that the department for work and pensions (DWP) is investigating the cases of 60 claimants who died shortly after having their benefits cut or withdrawn. It’s the first time the DWP has recognised that benefits sanctions – punishments by another word – can kill.


Take the tragic case of Stephen Lynham, 53, who suffered from anxiety and depression as well as high blood pressure, a heart condition and musculo-skeletal problems.


Colin Hampton, of the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre, tells how Stephen was found fit for work by the DWP’s ‘work capability assessment’.


16 uniteWORKS Spring 2015


Stephen challenged the decision and it went to ‘mandatory reconsideration’, an intermediate stage to try to stop cases going to tribunal appeals.


Stephen was in no condition to look for work so felt unable to sign on Jobseekers’ Allowance while he waited for a result. As a consequence he received nothing. Then the DWP lost his paperwork and nothing came of repeated phone calls and letters.


After 22 weeks the reconsideration process turned him down. He had lived on two small loans from the local discretionary fund and he used local food banks, but was not eating well. He was facing eviction and became ever more depressed.


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