Hello all,

Will an earlier JSA sanction that was not appealed nor had expired affect a fresh JSA claim? Circumstances are;

Client left Job in March and decision made in May to sanction him for 3 months due to voluntary leaving. Due to his JSA ceasing he became depressed and then claimed IB/IS successfully.

He is better now and may wish to reclaim his JSA.

Will the earlier JSA sanction be applied to his fresh claim?

For unemployment benefit the rule was that a sanction period is an unbroken period and there is no reason for the JSA regime to operate differently. So a person sanctioned for 3 months on Jan 1 should be eligible to reclaim on April 1 even if they had received IS during the 3-month period.

The system would lead to inconsistency otherwise. Imagine, if in the above example a person ended up on IS for, say 15years, and the system operated to suspend the sanction at the start of the IS claim and re-impose it at the start of the next JSA claim. It is highly unlikely that the details of the original sanction would be at the fingertips of a decision maker on the subsequent JSA claim 15 years later, unlike a situation where the person was only on IS for a couple of months before re-claiming JSA. Thus the person on IS for the shorter time loses out and the other person benefits.

Similarly, if a person gets another job and then loses it within the sanction period (for a non-sanctionable reason and he then re-claims JSA he still has to serve out the original sanction period.

Administrative simplicity and consistency does have its place.

The short answer is no! Have a look at CPAG handbook page 410.

To parrot the above "Once a sanction period has begun, it continues unbroken until the sanction period comes to an end" i.e. his 3 month period ended August time.

I've been dead fished, mine and Paul's sort of coincided.