People with disabilities and carers


If you have a disability or are a carer, you will be deemed to have good reason for giving up a job or not accepting a job offer if the travelling time would be unreasonable given your caring responsibilities or your health. In the first 13 weeks of your JSA claim you would have good reason for not accepting a job offer if the travelling time to work is more than one hour each way. After 13 weeks you would only have good reason if the travelling time was more than one and a half hours each way.


If your benefit payment is stopped, and you don’t have enough money to live on, you may be able to get a hardship payment. This is a reduced amount of JSA that is available to claimants after a two-week wait — despite the official DWP Decision Maker’s Guide acknowledging that this wait will often damage the claimant’s health.


In October 2015, the SNP MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh presented the Benefits Sanctions Regime Bill to the House of Commons, proposing automatic hardship payments of no less than 60% of the claimant’s total entitlement. At the time of writing, the Bill’s second reading had again been pushed back to the end of April 2016. 


Figures published by the DWP in November 2015 show that altogether, there have been 749,900 JSA and about 14,500 ESA hardship payments awards between 2012 and 2015. Dr David Webster of the University of Glasgow (an Honorary Senior Research Fellow involved in researching the current sanctions regime) notes: “Since people only get a payment if they are completely cleaned out of resources, this indicates a massive scale of destitution.” 


So far, no official data published on sanctions within the new Universal Credit regime has been published. In March 2016, general Unite union held a Day of Action against sanctions with demonstrations outside job centres across the UK and Ireland. It says that more than half a million people have had their benefits suddenly stopped by sanctions in the last 12 months, with many “plunged into poverty, unable to heat their homes or even eat”. 


It says the sanctions are cruel and handed out for ridiculous reasons such as: 


• arriving minutes late to a meeting;


• not applying for jobs when waiting to start a new job; and


• missing an appointment on the day of the funeral of a close family member.


A PCS spokesperson told LRD that a two-week notice of sanctions falls short of amounting to a 14-day warning recently introduced before sanctions are imposed. Instead it gives an additional period of time for people to argue as to why they should not be sanctioned.