You’re homeless. You should be grateful for a flat without furniture or a fridge or floor coverings… Suck it up

Back to homelessness in East London – where Newham council tells Maya and Rakib, a homeless couple with two very young children, that a flat with smashed and broken storage sheds and no floor coverings, or stove, or furniture is perfectly adequate for (the likes of) them.

The couple is homeless. That means they have no rights and no voice. They must live wherever authorities tell them to live. They must be grateful. They must understand that they’re at the bottom of the pile – and that’s how everyone else sees things.

Truly, homeless people are disenfranchised.

Says Maya:

“The council officer said they often rent flats out as shells and that was okay.”

This is important. It shows where the official mindset is at.

Windowsills in the flat

We’ve reached a point (we’ve been at it for a long while) where officers and politicians genuinely believe that it IS okay to shove homeless families into shells and hovels – and that homeless people who are offered a shell, or a hovel, don’t know they’re born.

I think that a lot of officials genuinely believe this. After years of austerity, this institutional contempt is rife.

“At least you’re inside,” the argument goes. In the bureaucratic mind, sleeping on an uncovered floor under a roof is better than sleeping on a park bench – because that’s the choice. That’s where the line is now. We’re all meant to accept it. Homeless people no right to expect the basics, let alone a healthy environment, or anything so romantic as comfort.

Homeless people who hope for the basics are felt to have a scandalous sense of entitlement.

I hear the most extraordinary things as a result.

I’ve written about councils giving homeless pregnant women and sick and disabled people air mattresses in lieu of beds.

I wrote about 67-year-old Paul in Oldham, who was told by officers at First Choice Homes that the filthy, tiny and rotting static caravan that he lived in counted as adequate housing and he’d make himself intentionally homeless if he left it. I attended a meeting with him where an officer actually said that.

Paul in his caravan

I wrote about Marsha who was shown a place in Woolwich with stained mattresses, a broken, filthy oven and broken doorframes. She was told to accept the place, or else.

Oven at the flat Marsha was shown

Homeless people must accept all of this, or risk a council discharging its duty to them – that is, refusing to help them any further.

Their “choices” come down to – “do you want to live inside, or outside?” and “live in this hovel, or else.”

It’s the “or else” that gets me.

The letter that Maya and Rakib received about the council’s offer of the “shell” has “Or Else” written all over it. Literally:

“…the Council considers that it has discharged the legal duty it has accepted to you by providing you with this accommodation and does not intend to arrange any further offer of housing to you…if you fail to attend the viewing we will take this action as a refusal of a suitable offer and pass your case back… for it to be closed…”

These letters are always the same, but you see my point. They’re threats, not letters. They’re certainly taken as threats by the people who receive them.

Smashed sheds at the flat

Maya and Rakib have been living with their two little kids in one room in a Newham homeless hostel. They moved in over two years ago. Rakib commutes to work from there.

The council recently offered the family the temporary place that I’ve been talking about in this article. As I say, the flat has no floor coverings, no furniture and no security. Storage sheds at the flats have been smashed as you can see in the photos. Neighbours have warned the family about gangs.

Maya says the council told her and her husband that they could go to Money Works and take out loans if they wanted flooring, or furniture:

“ we can’t afford to buy furniture ourselves.” The family can’t really afford loans and loan debt either, of course. Nobody can.

The family can, of course, ask the council to review its offer of this flat – but the truth is that reviews these days ain’t worth a bucket of the proverbial. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a council review officer overturn an initial housing offer. That only usually happens if campaigners and/or lawyers get involved and kick up a stink. People may get a more humane housing offer in such cases. That’s because a fuss has been made, though – not because the processes of appeal that are available to homeless people actually work.

Maya and Rakib were told by housing advisers to accept the flat – and then ask the council to review the offer in the hope that the council would change its mind. Housing advisers do say that. The problem with that advice is that it is next to useless these days as far as getting better housing goes. As I say, reviews are rubber-stamping exercises. A council is not going to change its mind.

Anyway.

My point is that the fact homeless people dare to raise concerns at all is considered outrageous. People are shown places with rats, mice, filthy mattresses, rancid ovens and filthy floor coverings – or, as in this case, with no floor coverings.

Officers make statements such as as It’s Fine For You To Live In A Shell/Caravan/Hovel and feel that they’re talking sense. They’re not, but here we are.

I’d ask Newham council for comment on this, but as readers of this site will know, I’m blacklisted by the council. Still. Have emailed the new administration recently for comment recently on other stories and had no response. Boo hiss etc.

33 thoughts on “You’re homeless. You should be grateful for a flat without furniture or a fridge or floor coverings… Suck it up

  1. Often you do just have to suck it up, if you’re poor and desperate. I wasn’t exactly homeless but was of no-fixed-abode for a while about 4 years ago, staying at my sisters temporarily, then took the first flat I could find – filthy, crap cooker, heating not working, mouldy walls stained carpet, no proper bathroom, etc.. crime-ridden neighbourhood, but private rent, not Council, AND I had to pay a £300 bond + one month’s rent in advance! It takes the piss, there’s nothing in here that’s worth 300 quid. But I’ve cleaned the place up a bit since then, and got a portable heater, and the leccy is cheap here (dodgy old coin meter) and I had some curtains that fit, plus I already had my own bed/mattress, so I’m managing and it’s ok. Be worse if I had kids. The cooker is still crap though, and life would be easier if I had a washing machine. But at least I ve got a roof over my head, could be worse I suppose. But having said that, Councils should do a better job of housing people in need.

  2. I’ve been ‘lurking’ (is that what it’s called?), on this site for some time now. At the outset Kate, I want to thank you for your unremitting dedication to exposing the abuse of power by bureaucracies.
    I am in my 70’s and legally qualified. I was born and will die a socialist. And I have questioned the decisions of bureaucracies. The price has been high, and frankly I hope I do get that long permanent rest sooner rather than later, because of the utter despair of what years of conservatism by the ConLabs have done.

    I came here because that is what we do; we look for shelter, for the like minded. It has been in a bizarre way ‘comforting’ to know I was not alone, and even to know that compared to others I was far better off.
    But the feeling of threat causes anxiety and severe insomnia. It has not, and never will stop me though.
    It’s the ‘ I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees’ thing. I’m here now because I finally blew up at the open corruption of process with my HA this afternoon. I am mindful not to suggest for a moment that they are corrupt………….only the process.

    And then I read this. I was contacted by the production company who make Dispatches a few weeks ago. I knew what their focus was, and knew who they were going after. What I wrote to them in part is exactly what I’ve read in this piece I’m responding to. I told them that people were being offered well below standard housing, and were made to feel that they should be grateful for it. I told them that even society would judge negatively those who were offered such housing and were critical of it, ‘because they are the ‘lucky’ ones. This is how these Councils and HA’s have succeeded in offering accommodation that is in an appalling state to desperate people. They are Teflon; they are immune; they are totally unmonitored. And they know it.
    Community law pays little. I was a tenant for 33 years across the pond with no problems. I have been threatened twice with eviction now; -and it all started when I desperately accepted a flat with multiple problems-not least a kitchen floor falling in. They told me because it was ground floor, I would ‘only fall a foot’.

    Everything since has stemmed form this, and how they have done it is interesting, and deceitful.
    I am so very sorry to see so many disenfranchised people in our Brave New World. I could go on….!
    I am old and ugly enough to tell you that people like you are vital to counter the worst of today’s abuses. Keep on keeping on.

    • That is much appreciated. I think it’s the fact that people have been utterly disenfranchised by all of this that makes me angriest. It’s intolerable.

    • I watched the Dispatches programme on Landlords from Hell, and though the examples there were no doubt some of the more extreme, the nonchalance and disinterest shown by the landlord will be familiar to most housing association tenants. It’s also interesting to note that as time has progressed fewer and fewer of those on the boards, or management committees of HAs come from a social housing background, and probably none have ever lived in social housing. I know from personal experience that there is a correlation between tenants having direct power and how HA staff react to them. For a time I rented from a housing association that was tenant controlled, where, theoretically at least, the tenant majority board could sack the staff. However, at the time most of the front-facing staff employed by the HA were themselves tenants of social housing, which made a big difference. It wasn’t perfect, but the HA was small enough, and responsive enough that the kind of shocking conditions we saw in the programme would just not have been allowed to develop.

      The view that social housing is just for the poor, as housing of ‘last resort’ is also problematical. Since 1977 social housing has been allocated on a needs basis, which would be wrong to argue against, but it has re-enforced this notion that it’s housing for the inadequate, the incapable or the feckless. Social housing should be available to all.

      Aneurin Bevan certainly thought so, encapsulating his view that:

      “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”

      All, of course, living in council housing. In his 1949 Housing Act he removed the restriction that stated that council housing was to be available only to the ‘working-classes’, which made everyone eligible for council housing, not matter their social or economic status. He even went further and insisted that housing was well designed, had adequate space and even that there was both and upstairs and downstairs toilet – quite something at the time when many houses didn’t even have one insisde!

      I think many of today’s so called ‘socialists’ would have difficulty in getting their heads around that one. Nye Bevan really understood socialism in a way that apparently even many supposed socialists don’t. His socialism seems to be bereft of the kind of inverse snobbery that anyone who spends time around ‘socialist’ groups will know. We seriously need to relearn about Bevan and his vision of a civilised society.

      • Padi, regarding what you said there about the view that Social Housing is just for the poor, yes I know that is a misnomer because in my previous property (HA) there were two flats occupied by tenants who were both N HS Psychiatrists! Some very expensive cars parked up outside. One of them lived with his partner, a Spanish woman who was a nurse.

        • Interesting you should say that. My HA (and another one I’m familiar with), both carry on about lack of housing availability for older people (my speciality, sorry!), yet both allow people to get these flats whilst they still own property/s. My neighbour openly admits to owning a flat in a luxury block here, because she is allowed to. At my previous place a woman boasted about her other three properties! She finally had one upgraded and moved into it. My first HA moved a woman into a flat whilst she retained ownership (local people were familiar with the property)-of a half million pound large house just down the road.

          I suspect this is happening (in these cases) because the HA can pull in a full rent. Privatization.

  3. My daughters moved from a homeless hostal into a 2 bedroom house.Its run by purple house in Hull. She’s told me that all the walls are covered in mould , so is the cooker and the doors aren’t secure.Shes been diagnosed with c.p.t.s.d and she’s vulnerable. Shes been told its her job to clean the mould which Im pretty sure is an environmental health issue.The rent is £200 a week as its classed as supported housing , but the worker very rarely puts in an appearance.

  4. Utterly disgusting that someone from the council, and a Labour controlled council at that should think that a dirty and broken down flat that has no furniture is suitable for a couple with two small children. At the very least it should have the basics needed, such as beds and bedding, a kitchen equipped with the basics and a basically furnished living area.

    I think the basic problem is the kind of rhetoric that’s been pumped out by the likes of the Daily Mail for years has poisoned people against anyone who needs to ask for help. Do the people working for councils realise that they are playing a part in the normalisation of the kind of behaviour that ultimately led to the Holocaust? To some that might sound like hyperbole, and I truly wish it was, but anyone who knows anything about the issue will know that this is exactly how such monstrous crimes are committed.

    What these council workers should be doing is engaging with their consciences, and asking whether they would consider the kind of accommodation they are offering to other people suitable for themselves? But of course, these people will never be held to account, even when they really should, as no-one should be able to get away with doing wrong, which is what these council workers are doing. It is because they are willing to regard some people as less deserving than others that the system gets away with operating as it does.

    There are no excuses, and the basics of furniture etc can always be found, as there are, at the very least, lots of charities that would be ready and more than willing to help people who find themselves in such predicaments – but it would seem that the council workers don’t have the wit to sort this kind of thing out, and worse, that they don’t even care.

  5. “Do the people working for councils realise that they are playing a part in the normalisation of the kind of behaviour that ultimately led to the Holocaust? ”

    Bang on. It isn’t hyperbole, but such a rationale will be dismissed as such by those who benefit from the system today. They pivot on ridiculing anything challenges their ugly status quo.
    Thatcher had remarkable success with her principle of ‘divide and rule’. In my humble opinion this is the fundamental cause of what is happening today. There IS safety in numbers. That’s what’s missing; people do not support one another; nobody speaks in defence of others. It is a mantra today to ‘not get involved’.
    I live in sheltered (the first joke) accommodation; high density living. What I notice is what I’ve mentioned. Another aspect of it is ‘what will happen to me, if I complain’. They have people scared; literally scared.

    I’m smart enough to see blatant; quite blatant favouritism here, but yesterday I was dumb enough to finally react to it.
    I’ve played right into their hands. The former caretakers/then wardens/then scheme managers are no longer on site. They have been rebadged as ILO’s: Independent Living Officers. They work out of a cosy little room with a kitchenette, in the base of a sheltered block (I’ve been into it), and have become comfortable and inert. The less they do, the less they want to do.
    I have to say that there are notable, seems very troubled, but is hamstrung by the same thing as myself.
    What they now have instead of the nurturing role they had, is an autocratic system, with one of them appointed as an enforcer. She loves her job! I suspect in the way that DWP staff love theirs.
    In the last two days I involved myself strongly along with others in countering the defensive arguments by landlords that the s21 should continue. It was clear that Landlords Association or whatever they are called descended on the Guardian to put up a spirited defence of this odious crapThat’s why I did it.
    It currently remains in law, and my instincts are screaming that that is what I’m now facing
    __________________________________________________
    And what I have been reading here for sometime is worse; far far worse. I only ask that none of us get to the stage of using the same argument: ‘you have much better accommodation (and I do); -you should be grateful

    I know I’ve vented here. I know that. But so very many out there know the raw vulnerably of being totally alone. There is absolutely no one to turn to.
    I cannot even comprehend how that must feel for anyone like that who is homeless, or struggling in substandard accommodation.
    My heart damn well bleeds for you, it really does.

    • The fact that the names of cartakers has been changed to officers says it all ! The names of things are changing , schools , hospitals etc. Without any explanation .

      • I meant to reply to your post, sorry!

        They do this because they are reducing services. The cancer (amongst so many other things), – of today’s society is marketing. Marketing allows for glossy websites that promise everything and deliver very little. Marketing is a ‘Mission Statement’ from my HA that is quite simply crap. It’s a lie.
        (I took them on over one ‘promise’, and they bobbed and weaved their way out of it. It’s par for the course).

        A caretaker had the same ring as a warden (though if you take those two literally; one sounds nurturing and the other like a prison warder).
        ‘Officer’ sounds MUCH better! Yet these staff went from being so ‘nurturing’; even on call during the night if an ambulance was called; -to being Independent Living Officers. Apt; they ARE independently living, and are far closer now to that prison warder example because they have an appointed ‘enforcement’ ‘officer’.
        And we pay far more for the privilege. They all work part time;-hours not given, so we are told so and so ‘will be back next Monday’ etc

        But they are ‘officers’ you see. One who became a ‘Team Leader’ (TLILO to you), has become autocratic and pompous. She actually used to be nice…

        And on this blog we are seeing the very worst of bureaucracy. A virus that can be fatal.
        I have little doubt that if this continues, workhouses of the 21st century will reappear.

  6. If they ever move in and then get to move from a place like that and the landlord checks the place before the move they will probably be told to put things in order, even though it was like that when they moved in.
    A person I know moved into a place that was a dump, just a shell, she applied to move, applying for properties, before all the online stuff started where you place a bid on the property. When the council came to inspect her place they said she would be expected to do some repairs to the property, I told her to go through the county court because everything that the place had when she moved in was the same, she sent the court papers to the council and also demanded all out of pocket costs plus £250.
    The council tried to evict her but she held on and said she would put the compensation up to £2500 if they tried. In the end she got a move and the £250, the council tried to offer £50 but she said £250 or court, she recorded everything from the start.

  7. One night a burglar entered the Geology Museum in London and stole a quantity of uncut precious stones from an exhibit. The next day a detective was put on the case, who made good progress and discovered the thief’s home. The thief’s wife let him in. “She showed me in over bare wooden floors. The curtains were sacks and brown paper, the solitary table had been mended with bits of firewood, and the chairs were orange boxes spread with newspaper. A rickety old wardrobe stood in a corner. It had no door, and I could see there were no clothes in it, not even a spare frock or a coat. And it was October. In another orange box propped against the wall were three chipped cups, a couple of plates, a knife, two forks and a few spoons, a loaf of bread and some margarine in paper, a small packet of tea and a little blue sugar bag.” The woman had a young babe in arms.
    This crime took place in August 1933, the detective was Fabian of the yard, and that was how the very poor and destitute lived then.
    My next door neighbour, a banker, said to me a few years before Austerity arrived, “Britain will never be able to successfully compete for business unless we reduce the living standards of our workers to those of our competitors in the Third World.”
    Slowly forcing a return to the 1930s for the poor appears to be well underway.

    • That says it all. After all, someone has to pay for the Bankers’ bonuses, and we can’t expect the Rich to pay..

  8. Not directly related to housing, but apparently Amber Rudd is now saying that most people are using foodbanks simply because they’re ignorant of which Benefits they are entitled to claim:

    https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2019/04/17/amber-rudd-is-right-and-people-have-been-using-food-banks-who-didnt-need-to-tory-mps/

    Whilst Unions in Scotland are calling for Universal Credit to be scrapped:

    https://intensiveactivity.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/scottish-unions-call-for-end-to-universal-credit-and-for-a-radical-welfare-system-to-replace-it/

    • Nice to see the STUC are seemingly serious about getting rid of UC, but also that they want to see something so much better put in its place. I think it’s crucial that ordinary people contribute to ideas about what a social security system should be, as it is people like us who will have to depend upon it when in need. I just hope that the UK wide TUC and the WTUC adopt a similar stance.

      It’s also interesting how effective the Extinction Rebellion protests are, as soon as the police arrest 20 people, 30 more turn up! How many more can they arrest? Where will they put them all? Can they arrest everyone?

      • Maybe, just maybe, we are starting to turn a corner and people power can force change, the old guard dark cabal needs bringing down. If so it’s been a long time coming.

        • I really hope you are right. It could just be the climate issue that buries these dinosaurs. Politicians who are moaning about ER are coming across like deluded old farts.

          • I suppose it depends whether or not they can involve people who aren’t usually involved in activism… the Occupy movement was interesting but I think (as many others have said) that it was the ultimate lack of an alternative vision for society that meant it really went nowhere. I struggle with that myself. The truth is that many of the people I speak to don’t want socialism or whatever they envisage as socialism. They really want a sort of continued but benevolent capitalism (yes I know) that benefits all – so working for places which have jobs with good wages, decent and secure housing that people can easily afford (to own) and so on. I think things keep fizzing out because the only idea that keeps coming around is a sort of continued capitalism with fairer distribution.

          • I think that possibly the environmental agenda has a better chance as it’s a better understood problem that most people have already largely accepted – it’s only politicians and their capitalist controllers who don’t see the need as it will deny them the profits they desire. And we have the added factor that youth will not allow us to sidestep the issue any more.

            However, it’s not all bad, as this article in today’s Guardian does give some cause for hope, though as contained in the article, so many have been turned off politics and won’t even engage in things that would be to their benefit.

            https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/19/newcastle-radical-metro-mayor-corbynista

            As you’ve found Kate, people do just seem to want a more benevolent form of capitalism – probably not realising that they can have the decent job with decent pay, and own their own house under a socialist system. Their minds have been poisoned by the likes of the Daily Mail and an education system that hasn’t taught them critical thinking, let alone taught them about what democracy really is.

            Unfortunately, those deluded people you talk about Kate are the UK equivalent of those Americans who believe in the American Dream, but as the joke goes;

            “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

            I think that part of the reason that austerity hasn’t sparked more of a revolt is because for most people it’s effects are more of an annoyance than anything else, and besides, so long as you can afford to keep up the payments, the credit card covers the rest. I suspect things would change quite dramatically if the economy took a sudden change for the worse and it exposed just how fragile our economy really is. Basically it’s buoyed up on property values. It’s also a fact that the picture of socialism presented to people is the bad side of the old communism of the Soviet empire, where it’s all the bad things that get all the attention. But even in those countries it was possible to own your own house, so long as it wasn’t ostentatious, and indeed, it was a right enshrined in the Soviet constitution. People also had automatic access to state funded childcare that our present Tory government hasn’t the wit to organise properly. But again, people are not educated about these things, and tend to accept the version of the truth as peddled by the likes of Trump. I suspect that if socialism ever does manage to get something of a foothold in the USA and manages to deliver significantly that people will start to sit up and take notice. If people read Chomsky, (and he is very accessible) they might begin to see things somewhat differently, as he explains in a way that isn’t patronising, and can articulate it in everyday language that people can relate to, whilst making a lot of sense.

  9. I kept in touch with Occupy Wall Street because of what they attempted to do. What they did succeed in doing was staying put for quite a long time. I came home and the contact severed, but I often wondered how it ended, as it inevitable was going to. All I hope is that they unsettled the scum in their cozy little ivory towers on a daily basis.
    People don’t want socialism in my view because society has been taught to fear it. Like any other political ideology it is flawed to all hell, but it at least-if genuine, does have a focus toward the ‘common man’.
    That fear has been instilled in the most inexorable way, with the gradual encouragement to condemn communism and then as the shift to the right got a pernicious grip, to condemn socialism. What’s next? Why are people unable to see that they are being led to an ideology that will effectively enslave them to master and servant. Given the stories you have featured here, we already have that. This time I have read the links, and all I can do for these poor sods is bloody well cry. That’s all.

    The increasing political shift to the Right has made ideologies that screw us acceptable FFS!
    Capitalism doesn’t give a flying .uck for the ordinary Joe/Josie.
    As a hardened cynic, the only hope I hold,-the only one; is that this will get so bad that it will implode in some catastrophic way leaving society shaken to the core, with no choice but to return to a fairer society.

    The job for Corbyn Labour I fear is too massive. I believe if they get to power they will bottle out and ameliorate some of the policies that are so critical to enact.

    • I don’t think that Corbyn can do it all alone, and certainly not through Parliament. I think what will be crucial is localism, and starting to do things like are happening in Preston where the local authority has really started to turn things around and develop the local economy. However, it’s a huge task, and given that it’s taken even the neoliberals 40 years to get to where we are it isn’t going to be rectified overnight, and even so, I think an overly statist approach would be mistaken. It would just make it very easy for the next set of Tories coming in to sell it all off again. Basically industry needs to be put into some kind of legal entity that operates to similar rules as the National Trust where selling off anything is extremely difficult indeed as once they own something it is generally the rule that they own it in perpetuity. I also think that a radical industrial democracy needs to be introduced, which would not only pay dividends in terms of industrial relations, (you don’t tend to go on strike against yourself!) and could transform our economy to one based on need, not greed.

  10. Interesting too how fashionable subjects like the environment get so much attention. But benefit claimants, the homeless, Universal Credit or the disabled,
    not so much.

  11. This is a worrying development. If some mentally ill people want to work then fair enough, but these things have an habit of starting off as a voluntary scheme and eventually becoming mandatory, either that or they become an acceptable means of defining the norm and further marginalizing those who don’t, or can’t, participate. There is no mention of those such as myself whose mental health is likely to deteriorate when in work. Whenever I get a job I lose the will to live and am very depressed. Bollocks to the neoliberal notion that work is the cure for all ills. If work is so great why don’t the rich do it?

    https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/20/nhs-england-to-expand-jobs-scheme-for-mental-health-patients

    • To be any good work needs to be meaningful. Most of what passes for work for the poorer section of society is far from meaningful. How on earth can some job in retail or hospitality be in any way meaningful?

      Decent, meaningful work that pays decently and has decent working conditions can be very life enhancing. A lot depends on the work, but I can see that being condemned to many jobs would make anyone lose the will to live.

      Though no excuse, much of the reason for the kind of situations that Kate comes across with worrying regularity is one where those working in it are totally demoralised, not just by the nature of the work itself, but by their own working conditions and low pay as well. People who are undervalued, underpaid and overworked cannot deliver a first class service.

      I know that’s a fair picture of many working environments, and I think that anyone would lose the will to live working in them. In those kind of situations I think it’s far more honourable to remain a claimant. I think Oscar Wilde had it about right when he wrote this:

      “As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.”

      • It’s also the Stress it causes, as well as the soul-destroying boredom of daily unending drudgery. Most jobs I see, Warehouse/Picking/Packing/Production, are always described as “fast paced”, which is very Stressful, I know from personal experience when I was younger and there’s no way I could work like that now at my age, it’s stressful and physically/mentally exhausting and I think I would either crack under the pressure or collapse. But these sorts of initiatives run the risk of setting a dangerous precedent; “if other people can do it then why can’t you?” . That becomes the prevailing attitude and rather than being tailored to the individual it just becomes more of the one-size-fits-all mentality, another tool at the DWP’s disposal, another stick to beat you with. I think these types of ideas need nipping in the bud straight away. Nudge theory be damned. If someone is ill, physically or mentally, the last thing they need is someone else suggesting that they get a job. Let’s keep the two things entirely separate; Illness – Work, like oil and water, do not mix and share nothing in common, and have no business being integrated.

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