More claimants than ever have been sanctioned – financial punishments for apparent breaches of the rules that result in benefits being stopped for anything between four weeks and three years – since the coalition ratcheted up conditionality in autumn 2012.
But it argues that the cumbersome administration of benefits by jobcentres, coupled with a heavy-handed sanctions system whereby claimants who breach ever-tighter benefit rules have payments stopped for weeks at a time, is a bigger contributor to people going without food.
Even if Hall had filed a discrimination claim, such suits are harder than ever for claimants to win.
Cabot also noted that ever more claimants are dropping their own cases due to the increased bureaucracy, as well as a lack of adequate legal representation, translators for indigenous languages, and long waits in detention centers.
"The court is not saying that [the claimant] can never, ever, ever get his case back in court... But, for now, we have got problems and the court is not sure [the claimant] can solve them..
Consequently, the real cuts fall on the small minority of other benefit claimants, and if universal credit ever actually comes in it is likely to exacerbate what is intergenerational unfairness in a particularly damaging way.
Benefit claimants have felt this way ever since Iain Duncan Smith got his feet under the table at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and introduced his pointless but cruel Work Programme, modelled on earlier reforms carried out in the United States under Bill Clinton.
"This is by far the most outrageous treatment I've ever seen a claimant receiving after they've reported harassment," said John Winer, Sorrell's lawyer.
It stressed that no family will take an immediate cash hit, but the "long term generosity of the welfare system will be cut just as much as was ever intended, as new claimants will receive significantly lower benefits than they would have done before the July changes".
