Internal Enquiry to find no evidence finds no evidence.

An internal enquiry into itself by the Department of Work and Pensions  concerning media allegations that it was operating an covert undeclared “targets” policy concerning the number of “sanctions” – effectively decisions to remove benefits from jobseekers – to be issued by individual job centres and job centre workers has now published an internal report which completely exonerates Minister’s and senior DWP staff as the report states the enquiry uncovered no evidence of the practice. 

The report does however accept some jobcentre staff are sometimes given what might be wrongly construed as personal targets on issuing sanctions, but only after being disciplined for issuing insufficient sanctions. It explains that those jobcentre workers that do not issue as many sanctions as workers in their own or other job centres do have this failing brought to their attention with this embodied in a Personal Improvement Plan (PIP) - giving them ‘an idea’ about what might be expected in their local labour market and for their size of caseload as an aid to judging whether they are issuing sufficient sanctions – designed to focus their thinking on whether they wish to remain job centre employees rather than be job centre clients at the mercy of some job centre employee seeking any reason to issue a sanction and stop their benefits.

The report states that "We found no evidence of a secret national regime of targets, or widespread secret imposition of local regimes to that effect. There is no national use of league tables. We found no evidence people are being wrongly sanctioned as a consequence."  The report does however admit that due to a misunderstanding between the department and some jobcentre managers, certain job centre managers were operating under the totally mistaken impression that such targets did exist.

The report’s author acknowledges that some people might find it difficult to understand that the Personal Improvement Plans against which individual job centre workers performance are assessed, do not themselves constitute ‘target setting’ saying “That is a subtle difference that I suspect some [JC+] advisers can struggle with."

The author of the report also claims that recent media reports about the existence of sanctions targets concern a previous, now-abandoned, targets regime and staff having targets imposed on them but that now the internal enquiry has concluded the thing that DWP senior managers didn't know was happening and therefore couldn’t be happening has been stopped.