David Webster: ‘Benefit sanctions should be a thing of the past’

The economist and Glasgow research fellow on why stopping benefit payments is counterproductive and must not be rolled out more widely The workhouse aside, there’s never been a social security programme that delivered as much pain for so little gain as the “great sanctions campaign” imposed on unemployed people over the first half of this decade, reckons David Webster. The human and financial collateral damage from this most quixotic of policies – the idea that stopping s