A tough line on beneficiaries follows a National election victory just as night follows day. Soon after comes the evidence that it doesn’t work, writes Max Rashbrooke.

When asked earlier this week what happens to welfare recipients who have their benefit removed, social development minister Louise Upston said she wasn’t sure. There is, though, evidence from the past, because New Zealanders have been here before, and have kept the receipts.

A tough line on beneficiaries, after all, follows a National election victory just as night follows day. In 1991, Ruth Richardson slashed benefits by around one-fifth of their value. In the next National government, John Key’s welfare minister, Paula Bennett, sanctioned tens of thousands of beneficiaries – cutting their payments, essentially – in an attempt to force them off welfare and into paid work. Over 80,000 were sanctioned between July 2013 and September 2014 alone.

Bennett was not especially interested in finding out what happened to people afterwards. But others, fortunately, were. When Victoria University master’s student Alicia Sudden interviewed beneficiaries in 2016, she encountered many who found Work and Income’s punitive approach degrading. One said it “made me feel anxious that I would be doing something wrong all the time”. Another woman had her benefit cut for missing a Work and Income appointment because she had had to see her doctor urgently.  

Many of those Sudden interviewed had come off the benefit but returned relatively quickly. And this finding was borne out by a large-scale 2018 report on the impact of Bennett’s reforms. More people had moved from welfare to work in 2013-14 than in 2010-11, before the reforms, but that was “mostly due to the improved labour market”, the report found.

It also showed that, of those leaving the benefit, nearly half – 45% – were back on it 18 months later. Many had moved into low-paid, precarious work, or seasonal jobs, or study for low-level qualifications – and found themselves rapidly back on the benefit. Churn, in short, was high, even in a booming labour market. 

Other research has questioned the assumption that people’s lives will automatically be improved by paid work. Evidence reviewed by the 2019 Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) found that although, in general, employment improved beneficiaries’ mental health, low-paid and stressful work could have the opposite effect. Over the ditch, researchers on the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey have come to more or less the same conclusion: certain kinds of work are worse than being on a benefit.

Along similar lines, research by another Victoria University master’s student, Leah Haines, found in 2021 that the wellbeing of poorer mothers “is not systematically improved by employment”. Nor is this wholly surprising, given that childcare is often inadequate, the shift into work creates costs (for new clothing and transport needs, for instance) not covered by wages or government support, and jobs can be inflexible or precarious.

Also harmful are the widespread sanctions applied in welfare crackdowns, typically involving a benefit being cut by 50% or 100% for a set period of time when recipients fail to meet certain criteria. All welfare systems, unless they hand out no-strings-attached cash, will involve sanctions at some point. But there is a contrast between Labour’s limited use of them as a last resort and National’s more full-throated, first-resort approach. The latest crackdown does, admittedly, introduce softer sanctions – having Work and Income manage beneficiaries’ incomes, or compulsory community service – that can be used before benefits are cut partly or wholly. But it nonetheless envisages more punishment as a general principle.

Back in 2019, WEAG noted that increased sanctions had “compound[ed] social harm and disconnectedness” for parents. Overseas research comes to similar conclusions. A 2015 British report on the Conservative Party’s extensive sanctions found that “removing benefits increases hardship, destitution and foodbank use as well as damaging physical and mental health”. This extends to the children of beneficiaries, who – whatever one thinks of beneficiaries themselves – are obviously innocent in all this.

And while inflicting such damage, sanctions don’t even achieve their goal of speeding the transition from welfare to sustainable work. A 2016 review of the then-current evidence, by Britain’s National Audit Office, found that sanctioned beneficiaries may be “more likely to get work, but the effect can be short-lived, lead to lower wages and increase the number of people moving off benefits into inactivity”. (“Inactivity” is often code for “giving up on the system entirely”.) 

A more recent British report found that a sanction “leads the average claimant to exit less quickly into PAYE [regular work] earnings and to earn less upon exiting”. This is supported by 2022 Dutch research showing that threatening beneficiaries with sanctions “was still detectable in people’s lower employment and earnings [compared to those not threatened] three years later”. 

While this may seem counter-intuitive to some – how can a financial threat make people slower to leave welfare? – the answer lies in better understanding beneficiaries’ lives. The government’s mental model appears to be that if welfare recipients are doing the things that get them sanctioned – missing job interviews or Work and Income appointments, for instance – it is because they are lazy or abusing the system.

In point of fact, research suggests many beneficiaries lead complex lives beset by social forces beyond their control. They face a constant, daily struggle to pay bills, they often live in damp and mouldy houses that make them ill, their children have frequent health and behavioural issues, and they themselves are often in poor mental or physical health. 

Any sudden bill is a nightmare. Many hours each week are taken up explaining their situation to government agencies and charities. And they live surrounded by people whose equally complex lives will often suddenly impose on their own. (One beneficiary I know had to abruptly leave a contract job to rescue a friend from a domestic violence situation; such occurrences are relatively frequent for those in poverty.) Beneficiaries also live with a degree of hardship that means they may not be able to afford the petrol or the bus fare to get to a job interview or Work and Income appointment.

If they miss an interview, then, it is far more likely to be due to a sudden life shock than to sheer laziness. And imposing a sanction just adds a further element of chaos to an already chaotic life. It destabilises people even further, diverts even more of their attention to the struggle to pay bills and just survive, and limits even more sharply the time they can give to job-hunting or studying.

There are many ironies in the current crackdown. One is that Act, a supposedly libertarian party that believes people know how to spend their money better than the state does, is the biggest advocate of forcing beneficiaries to let the government manage their finances. Another is that the way to incentivise the wealthy is – apparently – to give them more money through tax cuts, but the way to incentivise the poor is to take money away from them. 

Yet another is that the government has set itself a target to get 50,000 people off the benefit even as our counter-inflation policy increases unemployment by exactly the same number. The final irony is that a government that prides itself on evidence-based policy is committed to a beneficiary crackdown that is not – as far as anyone can tell – supported by evidence.