Here’s a very recent example of the extraordinary lack of support that disabled JSA claimants can find at jobcentres when they’re looking work.
In the recording below, an adviser at a north London jobcentre actually tells me that advisers at this jobcentre can’t give extra jobsearch help or support to the disabled claimant who I’m with. The adviser doesn’t try to pretend otherwise. He says that the jobcentre can’t help this disabled man, because there are no Disability Employment Advisers at this jobcentre now (DEAs are advisers who are meant to have additional skills and time for disabled benefit claimants). Nobody else at the jobcentre can give the man extra support. The adviser said that the man’s only choice was to move jobcentres to one that does still have specialist disability advisers. That was the end of that. So much, I thought, for the DWP’s claims to me by recent email that disabled benefit claimants can expect “tailored support specific to their individual needs,” at jobcentres. These DWP claims of “tailored support” for disabled JSA claimants are rot as far as I’m concerned – as great a lie as the DWP’s use of fake benefit claimants and quotes in leaflets. It seems to me that when the DWP talks about “tailored support” for disabled claimants at jobcentres, the DWP pretends to offer a service that it does not.
The disabled JSA claimant in this case is a 52-year-old man who has learning and literacy difficulties. He worked for years as a kitchen and general assistant, but hasn’t found work since he was made redundant from his last job about six years ago. I’ve attended his JSA signon sessions with him for over a year (we both wonder why we still bother a lot of the time). This man struggles with writing and spelling in particular. We’ve spent much time filling in job applications together. Here’s an example of an application form he filled in where he copied words that I wrote in my notebook into the form. You can see the trouble that he has writing coherent sentences even when he copies text:
This man often says that he is keen for a job. He says that he attends job fairs and when we met last week, we arranged to meet again to fill in application forms for porter and general assistant roles (he can’t use a computer, so needs other people to make online applications). He needs help to fill in the forms. He says that he’s lost his chance at jobs in the past, because he couldn’t complete forms to an acceptable standard: “I went to a nursing home in Enfield which I really should have got in there, because it was just a simple kitchen assistant job. No – the reason they give me was Oh, there were some mistakes in the application form and the spelling.”
That’s why at this man’s JSA signon meeting last week, I asked the jobcentre adviser if anyone at the jobcentre could help this guy fill in his forms. The adviser said No, nobody could. The reason given? – this jobcentre no longer had a Disability Employment Adviser to provide that sort of support, as I say. The DEA left a few months ago, wasn’t replaced and nobody had taken on the extra duties. (The now-departed DEA at this jobcentre told me earlier this year that nobody else at the jobcentre would have time to help disabled claimants when she left). The jobcentre’s advice for this man was that he should move jobcentres, to Tottenham, if he wanted any help. There were still two DEAs working at the Tottenham jobcentre. And… that was it. I was sitting there thinking – great. Iain Duncan Smith wants to force more sick or disabled people onto jobseekers’ allowance and this is his idea of tailored jobsearch support – a sad shrug from a jobcentre adviser and an instruction to go elsewhere:
Recording:
Transcript:
Me – “is there any facility like now that [DEA name removed] is gone for someone to help with an application? I mean I’m quite happy to help, but I just wondered if the jobcentre offered that kind of service… [to help with] the writing… this kind of stuff…
C – we don’t have ….that’s what I was explaining to him [the claimant], I don’t know if he was here with you, that before leaving [DEA name removed] knew that there would be no one to take over. She told me that she was advising him to go back to the Tottenham jobcentre, because Tottenham they have two [DEAs]
M – Yeah, he just has trouble getting there. So here they don’t, really, basically.”
A couple of things here.
The first thing is that moving jobcentres can be very difficult for someone who needs some support and finds change very hard to cope with. This man had already moved jobcentres from Kilburn when he was rehoused earlier this year. He hasn’t coped well with the move. He’s often angry and belligerent. Another move to another jobcentre would not be easy. He resists the idea absolutely. God only knows if he’d have to move again at some point, as well. The adviser we saw last week said that he expected the number of DEAs to drop across jobcentres, too – “to save money,” he said. Appointments at jobcentres already get cancelled because of a lack of staff. I have turned up for a number of jobcentre or work programme meetings over the past year, only to find that they’ve been cancelled due to a staff shortage. I can’t imagine this situation or the numbers improving.
The second point I’d make is that Disability Employment Advisers aren’t always brilliantly helpful anyway. I’m not convinced that “tailored support” for sick or disabled people is their exact goal. I think that their focus is government’s: to push everybody into unpaid or very low-paid work. The DEAs I’ve met seem obsessed with pushing disabled people into unpaid work, or with lining disabled people up for the work programme and low-paid work choice jobs. Earlier this year, this man and I met several times with the DEA who recently departed this jobcentre. She ignored this man’s concerns about his diabetic illness (you can hear a recording here) and spent our meetings trying to sign this guy up for voluntary work, or for work choice programmes with Seetec. She didn’t fill in applications forms either, just by the way. She pushed reams of forms over the desk and expected me to talk the guy into agreeing to sign up for work choice, and, presumably, to fill in the forms if he did agree. There was nothing tailored going on there.
You see my point. Our fortnightly visits to the jobcentre are utterly hopeless. I’ve introduced a post-signon lunch at Wetherspoons into the outing just so that we have something to look forward to and can chat like human beings. I’m guessing that this guy has been parked by the jobcentre in some way: he’s been unemployed for a long time, he’s getting older and he isn’t well (he has trouble with his diabetes and seems to struggle to manage his sugar levels). He has become very defensive and resistant as time has dragged on. I’d say that his various jobcentres have stuck him on some sort of Too Hard To Fix list. It may also be that decent advisers don’t want to torture him any more than they have to. It seems likely these people know full well that his only real options outside the jobcentre are unpaid work, or very low-paid, insecure, manual jobs. That being the case, they sign him on and let him go. And so on we go with the charade: backwards and forwards we travel to that jobcentre. We sit, see the jobcentre adviser and get that week’s jobsearch signed off. Occasionally, an adviser makes noises about the work programme. We hear those noises and then we leave. I suppose that sooner or later, someone will force him onto another work programme course (he’s been on four).
I keep trying to work out what is really going on here. This guy is older and unwell, and now he’s belligerent. The jobcentre is just a place that guys in his situation are dumped these days. I expect he’ll soon be joined by plenty more people in similar situations. I already talk with other people in similar situations. As I say, Iain Duncan Smith plans to push more disabled people off disability benefits and onto jobseekers’ allowance as people are expected to find work. His department claims that all will be well, because jobcentres are geared up to provide the support that sick or disabled people need to find decent work. That DWP email again: “Jobseekers now have access to dedicated work coaches, who are trained to provide tailored support specific to their individual needs.” I’m saying I Think Not. This service isn’t tailored. It’s threadbare. There’s a disabled woman I attend another London jobcentre with: we’ve turned up twice to scheduled meetings with a work coach this year only to be told at the door that the work coach couldn’t make it.
It is high time that the DWP and work programme providers gave us some transparency with this “system.” Reporters should be given free access to work programme and work choice placements, and jobcentres. Let’s see what this tailored support really looks like all over. If Iain Duncan Smith is really going to shove more sick or disabled people into jobcentres, they will need something better than this. I can’t imagine that they’ll get it.
When I lived near Leeds I used to shop in Castleford and passed a job centre on the way to ALDI, this wasn’t the job centre I had to sign on at the one I signed on at was 9.2 miles from my home this one was just over 4 miles away, 4.4 to be exact, when I queried it with them they said that JC+ was not in my area.
Re “tailored support specific to [our] individual needs”: Disability Equality Trainer Michèle Taylor has advised that the word ‘requirements’ is more powerful than ‘needs’. ‘Needs’ is a word too much linked to ‘neediness’, whereas ‘requirements suggests rights, responsibilities and authority.
And “tailored support” presupposes proper assessment of what our disabilities really involve. Proper assessment in itself would involve substantial up-front investment. The Wechsler Adult Intelligene Scale tests I went through with Camden Learning Disability Services near my 60th birthday indicate that for some intellectual functioning categories, my scores are ‘borderline’ on ‘learning disability’ range that is set at or below IQ score of 70. The subsequent report from CLDS gives me great documentation for ESA ‘Work Capability Assessment’ purposes, but no entitlement to even a formal diagnosis from CLDS that would formally diagnose my impairment/disability as dyspraxia.
Such a formal diagnosis, I am told, would cost me hundreds of pounds. So in effect, all the learning-and-co-learning hoops and hurdles I have gone through over the decades since 1978 when a Manpower Services Commission-run ‘Employment Rehabilitation Centre”s ‘Occupational Psychologist’ [sic] told me that my career difficulties stemmed from “a birth defect” have benefitted me nothing in terms of employment credit.
Right wing ‘welfare reform’ is not really about rewarding effort and ‘saving disabled people from worklessness’, but the privatisation of the welfare state and screwing the economically vulnerable. Benefit sanctions and threat of sanctions are really a means of unconscionable global corporations finding commercial profit in exploiting the people they would previously have ‘parked’ as not worth the current time of day.
You are correct PARKED is not in the DWP/JC+ vocabulary I am on ESA in WRAG and haven’t had a WFI since Feb 2013 and the two previous ones they have lasted only minutes basically telling me I should be in the support group. I have effectively been parked in WRAG since 2010, Feb 2010 if you say my condition got how it is, or May 2010 since been given anything above assessment rate of ESA.
Can’t help thinking that neither needs nor responsibilities are being met in these places… the same thing happened when I accompanied Angela to her jobcentre signons in Wembley and then to her work programme provider Reed. The whole thing was a waste of time like you wouldn’t believe. If the DWP had wanted to meet her requirements, they would have left her alone to apply for work herself. Which is exactly what she did. She applied for and got a job herself. No thanks to the DWP
http://www.katebelgrave.com/2014/05/the-realities-of-a-daily-trip-to-the-jobcentre-in-a-wheelchair/
See also http://www.katebelgrave.com/2014/10/more-work-programme-provider-shamelessness/
yep that day was incredible. We both just sat there going – you what.
And there is this from a Telegraph interview with investment banker turned ‘welfare reform adviser’ David Freud eight months before the banks’ collapse in 2008:
“There will be bonuses for hard cases, and no special treatment of disabled people or lone parents with children at school. ‘There are about 3.1 million people not working, I think we can get about 1.4 million back to work,’ Mr Freud says….
“For the companies that do well, the rewards could be huge. ‘We can pay masses – I worked out that it is economically rational to spend up to £62,000 on getting the average person on Incapacity Benefit into work.'”
Welfare is a mess, says adviser David Freud
Now that David Freud is life peer as Tory Welfare Reform Minister, I parody what Albert Einstein said of the A-bomb: “The 2008 banks’ collapse changed everything except the investment banker’s way of thinking.”
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They (Jobcentreplus) are simply not interested in disabled people in the slightest,and are completely and blatantly open about it.Don’t be surprised to hear “we need to remove you,the problem is how we do it without making it look like we’re not at fault”.
Just keep a note of the incident,most importantly keep signing.Nothing comes as a surprise about these people.
“It seems likely these people know full well that his only real options outside the jobcentre are unpaid work, or very low-paid, insecure, manual jobs. That being the case, they sign him on and let him go.”
That. The elephant in the room is that there isn’t any work. Or at least not work that people can live on. This is regardless if you are disabled or not.
But instead of letting people sign on in peace, Job centres turn into morbid, estate agent like, cults – eager to sell “houses” when there are no “houses” available. All whilst struggling to meet new “housing sale targets” just so they can keep their own jobs… It’s a culture of fear. Laced with contempt for those who don’t play this game.
Another thing disabled ESA WRAG claimants get pushed into, is Permitted Work. According to the DWP, people on ESA can earn up to £20 a week as long as they register themselves for doing Permitted Work. The registration lasts a year.
The reality is, they stop your money as soon as that form is sent to you. This happened to a friend of mine – every single time! Apparently, the staff at his local Job centre are friendly. But what those friendly advisers don’t realise, is that their helpfulness fuck up his claim.
The most decent thing the Job Advisers could do is to simply to say – don’t bother. Your claim will get fucked. And it aint worth those extra £20.
That’s before we get into the pitfalls of earning £22.05 during one week & £0 during rest of the year… Yup, they’ll stop your money cause now you’ve violated the conditions for Permitted Work. That £20 is not an average. It’s a ceiling for how much you can earn each and every week. Good luck tying to explain that to an employer when they ask you to fill in for a few hours.
Thanks for that. I am definitely intrigued by this government’s obsession with work. It knows very well that a lot of work isn’t financially viable. Until the minimum wage doubles or triples and rents become reasonable, a lot of this IDS blather is hot air anyway.
I think what Plebrise says about people’s money being stopped once they move on to ‘Permitted Work’ seems to tie in with JobCentre Plus meltdown that I experienced as a JSA claimant on part-time work whenever I submitted my part-time earnings forms at fortnightly signing-on session in 2005/06. JSA claimed that I did not qualify for JSA and stopped my money, and that included telling Housing Benefits that I no longer qualified JSA and therefore did not qualify for HB.
Perhaps JCP — and the Work & Pensions Select Committee — have given up monitoring the level of meltdown on incoming calls, in much the same way that DWP fail to monitor the impact their sanctions have on claimants well-being?
For a picture of how JCP meltdown impaired livelihoods in 2004/05, see the November 2006 Community Care article by welfare rights specialist Neil Bateman, Jobcentre Plus: Poor service continues.
And for an idea of why ‘austerity’-led cuts to council services might lead to under-provision of social workers’ time to help prevent the most vulnerable people being made sacrificial lambs in order to ‘cut the deficit’, see the Community Care May 2013 article Social worker or benefits adviser? Examining the impact of welfare reforms
Thanks for exposing another great elephant, Dude Swheatie. The fact that it isn’t worth working part-time whilst still claiming JSA & Housing Benefits.
Working Tax Credits were once an escape for part-time workers or the self-employed who weren’t earning enough to cover eh, astronomical private market rents but had a regular enough income. But that escape from DWP harassment is closing in as well.
So basically, the decent thing Job advisers can say if they are really honest is, don’t work. Not unless you earn enough to stay off benefits completely.
Anything else just leads to same nightmares Dude Swheatie lived through. Or at the very least you’ll experience even more pressure from Job advisers than before.
Was meant to say: at the very least you’ll have the added pressure of doing your part-time work as well as be expected to look for work on a full-time basis.
Because the pressure from Job centres won’t go away even when you are working. Which of course makes you prone to sanctions.
See also http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=%22lord%20freud%22%20disabled%20%C2%A32%20hour.
Maybe what the Weflare Reform Minister eventually apologised for was speaking what was really on his mind?
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