DWP agrees to trial warnings before imposing a sanction

over on the news service of the pcs union

24 May 2018

DWP has announced plans to trial giving claimants a written warning, instead of a sanction, for a first sanctionable failure to attend a Work-Search Review.

PCS welcomes any measure that reduces the punitive impact of the government’s sanctions policies and a system of warnings before imposing sanctions is a positive step. It is a small sign that even this government is starting to accept that the current sanctions regime is too harsh.

Unfortunately at present DWP is only proposing a small scale test of issuing warnings. PCS believes that, as a minimum, DWP should introduce warnings before any sanctions are issued across the UK.

https://www.pcs.org.uk/news/dwp-agrees-to-trial-warnings-before-imposing-a-sanction

Admin wrote:DWP has announced plans to trial giving claimants a written warning, instead of a sanction, for a first sanctionable failure to attend a Work-Search Review.

Well that's confusing. The current system for WSR is that a written warning is given on the first FTA and a sanction applied if there is a second FTA. There's a special form they are supposed to give to you on your first FTA as a warning. So what's new in this trial? Seems to me that it's just propaganda to make it look like they're compromising when in fact they're doing nothing.

@Brutus, I think the difference is that this trial is specific to work search reviews but the other full trial they did was for warnings for any sanctionable offence.