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.
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