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JSA claimants welcome sanctions…
Daily Record reports that Neil Couling, work services director at the Department for Work and Pensions, told Holyrood’s Welfare Reform Committee that many people who face benefit sanctions “welcome the jolt” it can give them.
Mr Couling also states that he believes people use foodbanks to maximise their economic choices, not because they don’t have any food.
“People will tell you things in order to maximise their economic choices, in the same way people will tell you that ‘I am looking for work’, because they know the consequences, if they say ‘I am not looking for work’, then they get sanctioned.
“Similarly people will present to food banks - this may not be wilful deceit going on, this may be their belief about the situation. The food banks will then record that and that will be reported back as fact.”
To read more of this wonderfully perceptive man’s views, see Poor and jobless Scots welcome having benefits cut because ‘jolt gives them wake-up call they need’, DWP civil servant claims
Mr Couling said “my experience is that many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that the sanctions can give to them”.
So he regularly bumps into benefit claimants wandering around the corridors of Whitehall to get such feedback does he? Or chats to them in the trendy bars and restaurants dotted around Westminster where a round of drinks would probably wipe out your weekly Giro.
Maybe he met a few jobseekers when he was having to investigate claims about the use of targets for the numbers of JSA sanctions applied by Jobcentres?
Oh, and whilst we’re at it, don’t forget this is a civil servant who, to use the Private Eye vernacular, trousers somewhere between £90,000 and £94,999 a year in salary alone apparently….
official report of welfare reform committee meeting on sanctions and foodbanks to be published by 6.00pm today -
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/parliamentarybusiness/CurrentCommittees/46339.aspx
Officials who are so blatantly judgemental in their attitudes should be forced to live for 12 months under the same regime they are so happy to force on others! As for the idea that the use of food banks is an economic choice, he is right. The choice between eating and starving forced on people by the likes of Mr Couling!
“Similarly people will present to food banks - this may not be wilful deceit going on, this may be their belief about the situation. The food banks will then record that and that will be reported back as fact.”</i>
You almost have to admire him- there’s a sinister brilliance in the sheer balls of the man.
It isn’t often I really feel like resorting to violence but this is one of the exceptions.
A very good overview of poverty, malnutrition and the rise in foodbanks can be found here - Britain’s Food Poverty Problem
Sharply declining wages, rapid food price rises, growing fuel costs and deliberately-created deficits in the households of welfare dependent working families with children, have affected nutritional spending profoundly. IFS research shows the number of calories households have purchased has steadily decreased since the 2008 recession, while households have clearly been making substitutions in their shopping for cheaper, less nutritious calories, and more calorie dense foods.
Food banks are overwhelmingly reporting use by working people, not just the unemployed or ill and certainly not the marginalised people who until recently were the only people who needed food aid. The human body cannot function at full capacity without sufficient fuel, and the cost of this goes directly to businesses that employ people as their performance is undermined. This is as unsustainable as the use of emergency credit to plug household deficits.
And another by the same author which looks at the evolution of the Tressel Trust and their links back to the last Labour administration is here - Corroding the welfare state: a look inside the Big Society
The remarkable correlation between the expansion of the Trussell Trust food bank franchise and Britain’s austerity-driven welfare reform has raised eyebrows. Just a cursory examination of the Trussell Trust, and other programmes to emerge under the Big Society banner, shows an aggressive and corrosive model of social policy development designed to enable a return to a dangerous pre-welfare state society.
This social enterprise model has dispensed with the need for evidence, research, or input from those working within or using the services it seeks to replace. Building on decades of privatisation and moving us into a new more aggressive phase, the model is being driven blindly by an echo chamber of political parties, think tanks and media in the name of an economic and social policy consensus that died with the banking crisis. These organisations are placing themselves at the heart of future policy discussion and the reconfiguration of public sector training across health, education and social care.
Great article on a related theme, here.
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/care/blaming-the-poor/7003409.blog
Great article on a related theme, here.
http://www.insidehousing.co.uk/care/blaming-the-poor/7003409.blog
Yes, very timely and incisive comment, thanks Paul.
Let them eat cake.
Everyone knows the poor are responsible for their poverty. Indeed, most of them actively enjoy being poor. And if you give them baths they’ll fill them with coal. Or whippets.
I honestly sometimes wonder if I’ve woken up in a parallel universe…
Everyone knows the poor are responsible for their poverty. Indeed, most of them actively enjoy being poor. And if you give them baths they’ll fill them with coal. Or whippets.
I think you’ve nailed it
[ Edited: 1 May 2014 at 10:53 am by YP Adviser ]minutes of evidence session now published .... see today’s rightsnet news ....
asked whether jobcentres across the country have been inundated with thank you cards from people who have received sanctions, Mr Couling replied ‘Yes - that is not so remarkable’.
Inundated!
“Yes - that is not so remarkable”.
Will he provide the evidence to back this up and then define the word inundated.
His comments are up there with your mum or dad saying “this is going to hurt me more than it’ll hurt you” before going on to give you a good hiding.
[ Edited: 1 May 2014 at 11:53 am by nevip ]I’m literally lost for words. I had assumed that Shawn was joking with the statement but HE ACTUALLY SAID IT.
Mr Couling stated that Jobcentres are being sent thankyou cards by JSA claimants who have been sanctioned….not just sent cards but he agreed that they are being inundated.
This is beyond satire, beyond reason, beyond belief.
Yes. I seem to have fallen down the rabbit hole again.