Campaigners won’t rest until IDS faces the ultimate sanction – Ros Wynne Jones

The Mirror's Real Britain columnist enjoyed watching the Work and Pensions Secretary wriggling like a worm on a hook - but wants him to pay with his job

Campaigners: Jayne Linnney and Debbie Sayers

This April, two disabled women launched a petition – to bring the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, to account for his use of dodgy statistics.

More than 100,000 people signed within days – and the phrase Iain’s Dodgy Stats was coined.

This week the two women – Jayne Linney and Debbie Sayers, who both live with fibromyalgia – finally had their day at the Select Committee.

As IDS was subjected to two hours of grilling by MPs, Jayne watched him wriggle, backtrack and blame Tory Chairman Grant Schapps and Labour’s “moaning”.

But he never managed to explain how he had lost £40million of taxpayers’ money on Universal Credit, or how he had got his figures so wrong that he has twice been censured by the Statistics Authority.

After IDS had evaded attempts to get him appear before the Committee, even to have the minister confronted about his errors was an important result.

His appearance made national headlines.

“Just to get him there was a major victory,” Jayne said yesterday. “Because of our petition he couldn’t just hide away.

"The figures he uses matter – they can be used to take away people’s benefits and make disabled people’s lives harder. He has to be held to account.”

Having followed Jayne and Debbie’s extraordinary struggle to force the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to confront his mistakes, and witnessed them handing in their petition to Parliament, it felt an important moment to sit with Jayne and see him questioned.

But Jayne and other campaigners know it’s still not enough.

“We still need answers,” Jayne says. “For those of us who are living through his department’s mistakes and cruelties, it’s not enough for him to wriggle out of it.

“We can’t afford to live, and he just sits there and seems to be getting away with everything.”

With bleak irony, IDS presides over a department where the slightest mistake made by some of the country’s most vulnerable people lands them with a vicious “sanction” – where their benefits are suspended.

People write to this column week in week out who have been punished under a sanction system that is now way out of control.

A common scenario – Joe Bloggs doesn’t receive a letter, misses an appointment (or receives simultaneous appointments and can’t attend both), is sanctioned for missing an appointment – receives no benefits, heads to a foodbank.

If Franz Kafka hadn’t died in 1924, he’d have written a novel about it.

Evasive: Iain Duncan Smith answers questions in front of the committee

And guess who wins from the new “tougher” sanctions regime? Iain Duncan Smith. Because Joe Bloggs doesn’t appear on the benefit-claiming figures for that month.

Some 580,000 sanctions were handed down between October 2012 and June 2013, an increase of 11% since tougher sanctions. All great for DWP benefit figures.

The department claims sanctions are a last resort and that there are no targets. But at Monday’s Select Committee, Labour MP Debbie Abrahams told IDS she had spoken to a whistle blower who said there were targets – and that claimants were being “set up to fail”.

In IDS’s case, at least, it appears there will be no sanction. Even when the Select Committee heard that as well as the lost £40million, a further £91million worth of software code would be obsolete in just five years. And despite the fact that the Office for Budget Responsibility says there will only be a handful of claimants on Universal Credit by 2014-15, rather than the originally forecast 1.7 million, and just 400,000 claiming the benefit in 2015-16 rather than 4.5million.

IDS’s defence of himself on Radio 4’s Today programme struck a new low.

“I’m not really going to give any figures out but I know that, because the point is we’ve given a figure at the end of it and we never really wanted to dwell on figures because you move in changes, but yes, I do accept, of course, that this plan is different to the original plan.”

Had IDS appeared back in April, it would have been far less painful. Back then, the loss of £40million of taxpayers’ money on Universal Credit was only a blink in an IT contractor’s eye.

It was also before IDS made his claim about 8,000 people going back to work because of the benefit cap. A claim that led to the UK Statistics Authority to say IDS had “broken the code of practice for official statistics”.

As it was, on Monday he was like a lost swimmer surrounded by sharks. But there was no sack, and no sanction.

He won’t have to pay the taxpayer back for the money he has wasted. He won’t even have to apologise for the people’s lives ruined in the process of his ill-judged, cruel and incompetent welfare reforms. He will never have to creep quietly into the foodbanks his policies are lining with clients.

“Meanwhile, people are dying because of IDS’s department and their policies and mistakes,” Jayne Linney says.

“We haven’t got 18 months to wait for an election. I don’t want to think what the figures will be by then of how people are living, and even how many of us will be left. We’ll keep up the fight and keep campaigning. It doesn’t end here.”

And yet another example of how he gets it wrong every time...

More trouble came for IDS this week when the Court of Appeal upheld an earlier ruling that the Work Capability Assessment (the one that says if you are ‘fit for work’) puts people with learning disabilities, mental health problems and autism at a disadvantage.

Yet another nail in the coffin of the deeply flawed WCA – currently failing disabled people across the UK.

Mirror