This is a video of one of several incidents I’ve seen in recent times – a jobcentre adviser/security guard/person giving a sick or disabled person a very hard time for the hell of it.
This video is from Kilburn jobcentre. I made it earlier this year.
In the video, you’ll see G4S security guards telling Linda*, the sick and disabled woman I was with, that she must walk up the stairs to the first floor to attend a JSA meeting.
More than that – the guards insist that all JSA signon appointments MUST take place on the first floor and that Linda will have to climb the stairs to get to her meeting. No matter that Linda has serious breathing problems and had by that stage been ill for several months. No matter that the jobcentre knew this and had even called an ambulance for Linda a couple of weeks earlier because she was obviously sick (I have a video from that day where a jobcentre adviser says “Yes, I can see that,” when I point out Linda’s awful pallor).
The guards in the video are absolutely uncompromising. Linda must walk up the stairs to her jobcentre meeting. That’s where the meetings are. If you don’t walk up there and sign on, you don’t get your benefit. That’s that.
Charming.
I’m posting this because I want to show you a bit more about the way things really roll in these places – in the real world, away from the DWP’s endless, empty prattle about “helping” sick or disabled people into work. I want to make a point about the contempt that a lot of people meet with as a matter of course in jobcentres. They’re not treated decently, let alone “supported” in any obvious way. Forget being “helped” to find work. These people spend most of their time just battling for reasonable treatment. The world needs to know how deeply the DWP’s institutional contempt for benefit claimants runs. You find that even in apparently small incidents. These small incidents speak volumes if you ask me. That’s what I’m showing you here.
I have, needless to say, been thinking about this incident, and the many similar ones I’ve experienced, ever since our newish DWP uber leader Damian Green released his work, health and disability plans/ode to employment this week and filled our airwaves with the standard We Are There For Sick Or Disabled People blather.
“We must be bold in our ambition to help disabled people and those with health conditions,” Green has yabbered via mainstream outlets, as you’ll be all too aware.
I find myself wondering if Damian and I are experiencing the same bureaucracy, or even the same universe, when he and the DWP guff out these banalities about tailored government support and “help” for sick or disabled benefit claimants. “Help?” Really? My experience is that institutional contempt for sick or disabled benefit claimants is now so entrenched in the relevant bureaucracies that jobcentre security guards feel that they are absolutely entering the spirit of things when they refuse to help someone with obvious health problems deal with a flight of stairs.
This contempt is particularly noticeable when a claimant is older, long-term unemployed and unlikely to get work for those reasons. These people have been written off – not just as jobseekers, but as human beings. They aren’t granted everyday courtesies, let alone “help.” I wonder if Mr Green is aware of this.
You’ll see in the video that Linda and I go to the stairs and find that she can’t climb them.
I go back to the guards and grovel for while. You’ll hear me deploying the wheedling voice that I roll out on these occasions. There’s a scene in a trailer for I, Daniel Blake where the young woman with her kids is thrown out of the jobcentre because she’s raised her voice and has been deemed aggressive. (I’ve seen the trailers, not the movie). I can confirm that is exactly what happens in real life. It has happened to me. I bring out the wheedling voice when a better result than expulsion is required. It worked on this occasion. After a lot of back-and-forth, the guards agreed that I could go upstairs and ask Linda’s adviser if she’d meet Linda on the ground floor. I had to grovel there as well. In the end, the adviser said she would come downstairs. Took a lot of work and begging to get to that point. So much for tailored support.
So. Let’s just say for now that we’re starting from a long way back when it comes to Damian’s brave new world of bureaucratic support and respect (don’t laugh) for sick or disabled benefit claimants. We’re starting at a place where contempt is the default setting. Can’t wait to see how Damian plans to change all of that. I personally think that change could take generations.
*name changed
There isn’t going to be any change. This is how things started in Germany with the sick and disabled the only difference is that we are expected to kill ourselves – the Germans at least had the decency to shoot/gas their victims.
Tories know that DWP ‘reforms’ have killed – further cuts are murderous in intent.
appalled but not surprised, i wonder if there is anyway to appraoch Ken Loach or the writer of the film with this.
And why on earth is this poor lady not on ESA and in the support group, assuming from a comment in the article she is not as it says “she must walk up the stairs to the first floor to attend a JSA meeting.” if she were in the SG she wouldn’t need to go to the JC, this is just harassment and persecution.
According to Green, support group won’t be around much longer and most of those in it will be forced to go to the job centre to see a job coach.
Yes, I was wondering if the DWP letters received by people in the support group last year telling them to attend the jobcentre for work focused interviews were some sort of rehearsal for this latest… http://www.katebelgrave.com/2015/02/severe-mental-health-condition-tough-we-think-you-might-be-fit-for-work-even-if-atos-didnt/
There’ll be no such thing as a disability benefit soon.
People need to understand the basic reality about the so-called ‘welfare reforms’.
The DWP attitudes to people are so nasty because they simply reflect the political ideology of their masters.
Make no mistake, they knew that there would be deaths and suffering on a massive scale. But they forced through the changes even so.
Propaganda against the unemployed, disability denied, vindictive cuts and restrictions on all sides.
What we are seeing is a war against welfare, with one underlying message.
Stop claiming your Job seekers Allowance, your disability benefits, your Universal Credit. Or face the consequences.
“Stop claiming your Job seekers Allowance, your disability benefits, your Universal Credit.” which seems to be shortly extending to the State pension given the noises coming from the Tories.
The assessment centre have cameras on the car park. It has a ramp but it has no button so wheelchair or scooter users can press to open the door and the door opens outwards and too heavy to open on your own. While we were there an man with a walker was unable to open the door and my son had to open it . I was called and told it was on the 1st floor and the didn’t think my scooter would go in it, my son told them he would look in the lift and he told them it wouldn’t be a problem. I got out the lift we were took through many doors and corridors. All the time I think they are watching. The question and tests are just ridiculous, first you can’t see pain, secondly they can’t see inside your body, thirdly I had every piece of evidence from every Dr. 2 GP’S letters, a scan report and letters from consultant and pain clinic and a nurse or Physio is supposed to know more than a Dr, GP & consultants. I have also suffered from depression with my conditions and more so after by daughter passed away. In her report I made good eye contact and she couldn’t see any form of depression, what do you have to do sit in a corner rocking and whaling. She asked me to push my legs against her hands and the nurse could decided if my legs were weak and she also did a similar test for my arms, then I told about all the adaption and equipment I had in my home. From all that she deduced that I could go more than 10m with an aid and therefor I didn’t need a car and took my mobility allowance off me. My car is adapted with a hoist for my scooter.My car is my life line. I have had 3 spinal operation, 2 herniated discs and i have spinal stonosis, I had TIA which is a mini stoke, i have osteoarthritis, fybromyalgia and I’m in chronic pain 24/7 and take 16+ tablets a day it can be more depending on pain. The thing is you can’t see pain or depression, just because you can’t see it does mean its not real. They make you feel like a fraud. I fought the decision and I was able to keep my car. The whole process made very ill, life is hard enough already without this.
I had exactly the same experience, Elaine. It has made me so ill and depressed on top of all the pain 🙁
Kate, you mentioned Damian Green “filling our airwaves.” One of the major reasons that I tend to avoid news channels on tv and radio is to avoid such stressors firsthand.
Perhaps my worst ever such ‘wind-up’ was from the then ‘Secretary of State for Health & Social Security’, Peter Lilley MP around Easter hols 1994, and the time that I received it via BBC Radio 2 News. I had just come in from yet another stint of charity fundraising I did for a little known disabled children’s charity. I did that fundraising in order to top up my student grant in my 41st year that was far more meagre than anything Peter Lilley would have received in his undergraduate days. My income was supposed to be something like 20% of my takings; my total takings amounted to less than my travel costs and eating out expenses.
Making matters worse, starting on the ‘Mandatory Award’ initiating full-time study at the start of the uni’s second semester in February, I had noticed that while I had been signing on for unemployment benefit right up to the start of that second semester, the grant cheque I received at the start of the second semester had been made out from January start of term, and so I was obliged to pay back about 1/3 of what I had received from Camden; and that included no housing benefit.
I was so distressed from all that and the stresses of full-time study exacerbated by very slow working pace, that I first developed ringworm in my 41st year. Compared to this then disabled career-builder, Lilley and his like were born with silver spoons in their mouths and thus had no real ENTITLEMENT to denounce benefit claimants as drains on the economy.
As I went on to say years later, Benefit claimants require firmer safeguards, not tougher sanctions. And it does not inspire me with confidence and trust in Damian Green’s purported benevolence that Ministers [are] set to force work-related activity on everyone in ESA support group. I would rather have more time to recouperate from the aftermath of my years as a disabled jobseeker and set my own time for engaging in ‘marketable’ activity at a time of public spending cuts and government defaulting on disability equality.
‘Consideration’ and ‘balance of bargaining power’ are key to contract law. The wages of ‘welfare reform’ that disregard the realities that your video ‘snapshot’ above and my experience expose is death in more ways than those exposed by coroner’s courts; most of all, it is the deaths of: truth; compassion; mutual trust between State and citizen; and hope.
It will be interesting to see who replaces Lord Holmes (Con.) as Disability Commissioner on the Equalities & Human Rights Commission.
“Concerns about the tenure of Lord Holmes .. were first raised when he was made a Conservative peer, only seven months after his appointment as disability commissioner in 2013.
“These concerns resurfaced earlier this year when EHRC announced that it had commissioned a major piece of research into whether the government’s welfare reforms had harmed the human rights of disabled people and other minority groups.
“Disability Rights UK (DR UK) pointed out that Lord Holmes had voted in favour of many of those reforms after he joined the House of Lords, including cutting payments by £30 a week for some new employment and support allowance claimants, and it raised concerns over how disabled people could have confidence in the inquiry “whilst Lord Holmes has his position as a commissioner and chair of the EHRC’s disability committee”….”
Sources: Disability News Service: Activists welcome disability commissioner’s decision to leave Equalities & Human Rights Commission
It’d be useful if Labour finally got around to appointing a shadow minister for disabled people too… not that useful, I grant, but more useful than having nobody. Marginally.