Government drops scheme to stop people being wrongly stripped of their benefits because it is a ‘burden’

‘Yellow card’ reform was intended to prevent benefits being removed for trivial reasons – inflicting hunger and homelessness on vulnerable people

A “yellow card” scheme to cut the number of people pushed into poverty after being wrongly stripped of their benefits has been dumped.

The reform – giving claimants 14 days to challenge a decision to dock their benefits – would impose too much of a “burden”, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said, after a trial.

Campaigners have long pushed for the change, warning that benefits are being removed for trivial reasons, forcing hungry people to go to food banks and even making them homeless.

But Alok Sharma, the employment minister, said the 13 per cent of claimants who accepted the invitation to challenge a decision to sanction them was too low to justify “the additional burden”.

Furthermore, only around half of those could provide evidence that led to the DWP agreeing not to impose the benefit cut.

The Independent revealed in March that a decision on whether to extend the yellow card scheme had been shelved by the DWP – a stance confirmed today in a written statement to MPs.

It was criticised by Frank Field, the chairman of the Commons Work and Pensions Committee, who has highlighted the distress that benefit sanctions are still causing.

“The government’s initial data on the early impact of the yellow card trial looked encouraging,” he told The Independent.

“They suggested that the scheme was protecting hundreds of people in the trial area from being wrongly sanctioned. Applied to the country as a whole, that layer of protection would have covered many thousands of very vulnerable people.”

The ditching of the yellow card scheme comes as the number of sanctions starts to rise again, driven by an explosion in the number of punishments imposed on claimants of universal credit.

Mr Sharma said the 2016 trial, in parts of Scotland involved 6,500 claimants – which would mean almost 850 challenged a decision to dock their benefits.

However, he wrote: “Given the low proportion of cases in which claimants provided further evidence and the even lower proportion of cases where decision outcomes were changed, we do not consider that the benefits of the approach are sufficient to justify the extra time and cost it adds to the process.”

The minister did say he was “exploring the feasibility of an alternative process” to try to reduce the number of people being sanctioned.

However, he gave no details, which would “be made available once we have progressed with the design work”.

Mr Field added: “What ministers decide on next will be crucial in determining how many of those people will be pushed to the brink of destitution in the years ahead.

“Justice demands that measures like these are looked at seriously, with a view to testing them as soon as possible.”

One constituent of Mr Field, the MP for Birkenhead, was recently docked benefits for missing an appointment to receive universal credit because he was in an operating theatre at the time.

In another similarly alarming case, a man in the Merseyside constituency was sanctioned for missing a job centre appointment while he was in A&E.

Typically, if conditions are not met, benefits are docked for four weeks, which can mean a loss of £300 for a claimant over the age of 25 – but a sanction can last for three months, or even a year.

In a damning report in 2016, the National Audit Office castigated the DWP for failing to monitor people whose benefits had been docked and suggested the system costs more money than it saved.

A DWP spokesperson told The Independent: “We want everyone to get the right support that they need, and we ran this trial to give people an extra fortnight to submit any evidence about why they didn’t do what they had agreed to in return for benefits to avoid a possible sanction. Only a very small minority of people took us up on the offer and came forward with extra evidence. Overall, giving people extra time did not increase their likelihood of providing evidence.”