Judge allows appeal over ‘slave labour’ benefits case decision

On Monday, jobless graduate Cait Reilly lost her claim that a scheme requiring her to work for free at a Poundland discount store breached human rights laws.

Miss Reilly, 23, from Birmingham, and 40-year-old unemployed HGV driver Jamieson Wilson, from Nottingham, both argued that the unpaid schemes they were on violated article four of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits forced labour and slavery.

Mr Justice Foskett, sitting at the High Court in London, rejected their argument. He said that “characterising such a scheme as involving or being analogous to ‘slavery’ or ‘forced labour’ seems to me to be a long way from contemporary thinking”.

But the judge said both Miss Reilly and Mr Wilson were each entitled to a declaration that there had been breaches of the 2011 jobseeker’s allowance regulations.

The judge said Mr Wilson had been given inadequate warning about sanctions if he failed to take part in the Community Action Programme, adding that the written warnings were too complicated and should be more straightforward.

Later, the pair’s lawyers claimed that errors exposed by the case meant thousands of jobless claimants stripped of benefits after receiving official warning letters similar to Mr Wilson’s could now be entitled to reimbursements.

The Department for Work and Pensions rejected the claim.

Yesterday the judge announced he was giving both sides permission to appeal to the Court of Appeal against those parts of his ruling that had gone against them.

In a statement, he said: “It is obvious that there is considerable public interest in the issues thrown up by the case as a whole and there are people engaged in, or who have been engaged in, schemes or programmes made pursuant to the regulations whose interests may be affected by the outcome, including, of course, also the Secretary of State (Iain Duncan Smith).”