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.

Figures published by the DWP in February 2015 show that in the two years to September 2014:

• 884,479 people were subject to 1.56 million sanctions leading to loss of benefit;

• 668,569 of these led to people going without any money for four weeks; 373,603 for three months; 7,044 for six months; and 2,048 sanctions for three years.

The sanctions regime has been blamed for a rise in the number of people sleeping rough and relying on food banks. Also in February 2015, the general union Unite began a nationwide campaign to stop benefit sanctions that it says are pushing people into poverty and punishing debt. This included a national day of action on 19 March.

TUC senior policy officer Richard Exell says that the Work Programme (see box page 38) has got more people into sanctions than it has got into jobs and that “it is making life a misery for hundreds of thousands of families.” There are 100,000 children now living in sanctioned families.