Cruel and unusual punishment from a Labour government. Great.
Interesting that £1k of benefits cheating will give the government carte blanche to look through your bank accounts but fraud and tax avoidance by the richest in society and HMRC can’t do a thing. Funny how that works…
UBI to all.
The real cheaters are the billionaires.
Why not a community order?
This is such a strange punishment which is completely unconnected with the offence in question.
That’s a weird punishment.
It will be counterproductive in a lot of cases, if the ultimate goal is to get people back into work.
There’s a lot of areas of the country unfortunately where not being able to drive makes it very hard or near impossible to find work. It could also affect any of the sanctioned person’s dependents in a similar way.
I suppose that could be an effective punishment, even if it is a little unusual.
A monetary fine may mean little to a benefits scammer, and prison is obviously a silly punishment, particularly when prisons are in the shambolic and overcrowded state they’re in now.
When you drive, it’s a big part of your life (or maybe that’s just my perspective, living in rural Northumberland where my “public transport” is a twice-weekly shuttle-bus to Hexham), the threat of that being taken away would be a pretty huge deterrent in my view.
Not only that, it seems a lot more ‘real’ than the threat of prison. People hear prison and they think “pshhhh, I won’t go to prison! That’s for real criminals, and I’m a good person really!”. Comparatively, a driving licence being taken away feels like something that can happen to anyone. You think “oh shit that could actually happen to me”.
I just worry about possible knock-on effects. Ability to drive is useful for job-hunting for example.
