“They must have something to live on” was one reaction to my story about benefit rules which state that the health of people who have their payment cuts will usually suffer. “They just need to reorganise their spending priorities.”

The relevant rule is buried in guidance to officials who decide on such benefit sanctions, telling them that vulnerable people are those whose health would suffer more than the average person’s.

While some readers were horrified, others were disbelieving. That people are left with nothing to live on is hard for some to accept. On a different article on a GP website I saw a doctor commenting to the effect that people were only poor if they couldn’t afford to buy cigarettes.

There is plenty of propaganda swirling around the issue, and many people would agree with the GP. But that is why the DWP rules are important. Here the government makes it clear itself. Sanctions leave people without the money for food, clothing, accommodation or housing, the DWP guidance confirms.

There were several other important welfare stories last week, not least the revelation that half of all sanctions decisions are overturned on appeal – if they are challenged.

If even a small proportion of the cases not challenged are also wrong decisions that is potentially hundreds of thousands more. All people who have their money taken away and have nothing left to live on.

The other story was about the DWP leaflets which featured made up people with made up stories of the way sanctions have benefited them, or their positive experiences at Job Centres.

This feeds into a perception that the Government doesn’t have evidence its policies help people back into work. The conviction that sanctions work to help job seekers find employment is not evidence-based, but ideological, critics say. Imaginary people, grateful for sanctions, fit into that narrative.

Some people want to see evidence that sanctions are harming people. It is certainly there – in reports from Westminster and Holyrood committees on the impact of welfare reform, for example. I hear regularly from agencies such as Citizen’s Advice Scotland, the Child Poverty Action Group and disability charities, with real stories of real people for whom sanctions have caused misery.

But the DWP's own actions help make the case. Their own guidelines. Appeal statistics. The fabricated stories. And the fact that this Thursday, yet again, the department is expected to block publication of the number of people who have died while on out-of-work benefits - despite being ordered to publish the information.

The irony. A job seeker with such a recalcitrant attitude, or a fictional job-seeking diary, would certainly be sanctioned.