Is unemployment benefit sanctioning in the UK pushing people into precariousness?

Since 2011, the number of unemployment benefit claimants being sanctioned, whereby their benefit payments are temporarily stopped, has risen dramatically in the UK. This has coincided with the implementation of stricter benefit conditionality and a new sanctioning regime involving extended and more rapidly applied sanctions.  Concurrently, the number of individuals claiming unemployment benefit has steadily decreased across local authorities. While the decline in the number of claimants has been celebrated as a sign of job recovery, it has also been suggested that punitive sanctioning is impoverishing people by pushing them off unemployment benefits. Using monthly data across 375 local authorities from 2006 to 2013, we examined how rates of sanctioning within local authorities related to claimant rates and unemployment, and whether relationships changed in the new regime period. We found that increasing rates of sanctioning were associated with increasing rates of individuals leaving unemployment benefit for reasons other than work, and this relationship was stronger in the new regime period. Next, we examined how sanctioning rates related to food bank use across local authorities and found that, controlling for other population socioeconomic characteristics, the highest rates of food bank use were in areas with the highest rates of sanctioning. This evidence suggests that sanctioning is pushing people off state support into the precariate, which includes having to rely on charitable food provision. This has implications for the health and well-being of these groups, not least because charitable food provisioning is rarely able to ensure individuals’ food needs are met.