An upcoming review into benefit sanctions is to be overseen by Britain’s biggest scrounger Matthew Oakley the DWP have revealed today. Oakley is the Head of Economics & Social Policy at the right wing think tank the Policy Exchange, whose proposals have been behind many of Iain Duncan Smith’s brutal and bungled welfare reforms.
The scope of the upcoming review will largely focus on the information about sanctions given to claimants who face ever more draconian and farcical conditions for claiming benefits. It is unlikely to discuss the hundreds of thousands of people forced into absolute destitution by the current regime which is expected to sanction around a million claims this year.
Matthew Oakley has previously authored a paper on welfare reform which includes not only a demand for a greater use of sanctions for part workers, but astonishingly even pre-emptive benefit sanctions for people on fixed term contracts. Oakley believes that these workers should be stripped of any entitlement to benefits at all if Jobcentre staff decide that they weren’t doing enough to find work even before they lost their job.
So impressed was Iain Duncan Smith with this swivel-eyed nonsense that he gave Oakley a non-job on the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC) – the body whose job it is to scrutinise social security reforms.. This means he is now paid £256.80 a day of tax payer’s cash to provide so-called expert opinions on policies he helped create.
Prior to working at the Policy Exchange, Oakley was in another tax payer funded non-job at the Treasury where he worked on a white paper outlining proposals for Universal Credit. Now Iain Duncan Smith is to shovel yet more of our money into his grubby pockets by asking him to carry out what is laughingly called an ‘independent review’ of benefit sanctions.
Whilst over two million people are desperate for any job, Oakley now has three – and two of them at our expense. It’s jobs for the boys all round at the DWP for anyone prepared to throw away their dignity and cheer along Iain Duncan Smith’s endless crazy schemes.
Oakley is on twitter @PXEconomics if you fancy asking for your money back.
