Author Archives: Kate B

Do too many people claim PIP for mental health problems?

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Answer to the question in the title is No.

One thing I really love is this government’s heavy implication that anyone who claims benefits for mental health problems is taking the piss.

So, in this latest podcast episode, we hear from Mel. Mel claims the personal independence payment for mental health issues.

Mel explains how and why her mental health problems developed – and how one ongoing event in particular pushed her over the brink.

I’m a taxpayer and I’m more than happy for PIP to be awarded to people with mental health conditions. God knows we live in an era that seems designed to drive us all up the wall.

No nationalism here: Trashing benefit claimants is a global sport

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To our last podcast episode for this year:

This episode is about useless millennium governments that are devoted to attacking benefit claimants and cutting disability benefits for votes.

Doesn’t matter if they are so-called Labour or Tory. The (shopworn) political idea is the same across the world – if you go after people who claim benefits, people who don’t claim benefits will vote for you. Even people who claim benefits will vote for you.

Problem is: the so-called numbers on which governments perch this very shaky thesis are garbage. The argument that people who claim benefits are all pisstakers is a complete myth.

In the home country of New Zealand, for example, the conservative government has imposed tougher benefit sanctions in the last year, including a money card where 50% of your benefit is put on a card which you can only use in approved shops for approved groceries.

But – the facts are that fewer than 2% of people who claim benefits do something “wrong” and get lined up for a sanction. Doing something “wrong” often means things like missing a meeting because you hadn’t been told about it.

This 2% is a small group of people with big issues like serious literacy problems or addiction. It’s a tiny group of people who need support, not greater poverty.

It is a group that barely exists – but governments still attack people in it with sanctions.

Governments like to give the impression that harsh sanctions are needed because too many benefit claimants are gadding about instead of looking for work. Actually, more than 98% of benefit claimants in NZ do exactly as they’re told when it comes to jobsearch activities.

The truth is that anti welfare rhetoric around the world is now based on behaviour that is literally nowhere to be seen. It is only a matter of time before global governments start generating layabout benefit claimants via AI, just to keep the [fabricated] numbers up and the anti welfare playbook going.

Fit for work? The DWP sure isn’t.

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Latest podcast episode – in which we look again at a benefits system in terminal shambles.

New DWP head Pat McFadden says he’s going to put jobcentre advisers into GP surgeries to target sick and disabled people for work. Righto, Pat.

That idea in itself is cack, but another important point is that the DWP will screw it up whatever happens, because things already go amazingly wrong. They mix up people’s files, lose their medical evidence, scan it upside down, lose sick notes – the works.

In this episode, we hear from Michelle Cardno who is a benefits lawyer at Fightback for Justice in Bury.

Michelle tells an interesting story about the DWP scanning people’s medical evidence the wrong way up, so that a tribunal judge at appeal only had blank pages to look at.

She also talks about the way that the DWP randomly allocates PIP – ie, awarding PIP to one individual, then taking it away from that exact same person even though their situation hadn’t changed at all.

There’s also a covert recording from a meeting between a social worker and a homeless woman where the social worker reads from the wrong file entirely – it’s another family’s file altogether.

Public sector systems have been decimated by years of cuts. McFadden needs to look at that and make that work before he gets into his other big ideas.

ANOTHER leaked email telling support workers not to help disabled housing and benefits claimants

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In my latest podcast episode:

Another professional has leaked an outrageous email to me – the second in as many weeks.

In this email, a Hackney council officer tells an education specialist to stop writing support letters for families with disabled children who need to be moved out of terrible housing.

This officer works with autistic and SEND children. Their families need these support letters to tell their councils why they must be rehoused. Some letters say that children are at high risk of death in their current housing.

Pat McFadden – the new fibbing head of the DWP

I also talk about Pat McFadden, newly-minted secretary of state for the DWP.

I’m intrigued by the lies Pat McFadden is telling about people being able to declare themselves longterm sick to claim benefits. This is rot. People cannot declare themselves long term sick to claim benefits. They have to go through a humiliating work capability assessment and then wait for the DWP to decide if they should get benefits. Often, the DWP decides they should not.

I talk with Latoya Wray in this episode. She works 3 minimum wage jobs and claims a bit of universal credit to stay afloat.

When she’s not doing that, she’s living in fear of her 8 year old autistic son falling to his death from their flat in a Hackney highrise council block. She has medical and education reports saying that her son is at high risk of death and that the family urgently needs rehousing.

Unfortunately, as seen in the leaked email, education specialists have been told not to write letters to tell that council to rehouse families with autistic and disabled children who are at high risk of death in their housing.

Pat McFadden needs to take his fingers out of his ears and pull out the one he has in his butt, and listen to Latoya. This is what life is really like when you need to claim benefits and help with housing.

Leaked email: Council tells NHS staff to stop writing rehousing support letters for families with disabled children

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My latest podcast episode is about an extraordinary email that a senior health professional leaked to me.

The email says that a Hackney council officer told health and medical staff to stop writing supporting letters for families who need to be moved out of terrible housing – that’s families with disabled children.

The email was circulated in this consultant’s NHS workplace.

This is outrageous. Families want and NEED these supporting letters to give to the council. The letters are medical evidence that a child’s health issues and disabilities are made worse by their awful housing. They prove that the family must be moved. Some of these letters say that disabled children are at risk of death in their homes.

But this email tells NHS staff to stop writing them.

The email is full of other rubbish. It says that families of disabled children can find a place to rent in the private sector in one month – implication being that they don’t need to get on the council housing waiting list or ask for a transfer somewhere better. A month for low income families to find a place to rent in the private sector? That’s just fantasy. We might even call that a lie.

The email also says that the council has a robust system in place “to identify need and allocate housing.”

That’s rubbish. There are families in the podcast who have letters and reports which say that their disabled children are at high risk of death because of the state of their current housing – but they still haven’t been moved.

So. I have a few theories on why a council might want to shut medical staff up on the topic of potential council failures to keep disabled children safe.

We’ve shut your benefit claim with no warning at all – how the #DWP does #disability

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Righto.

You know how Labour INSISTS that disabled people and their families will be supported while Labour dismantles disability benefits?

Well, that’s bollocks. You knew that, but let’s pile it on.

In my most recent podcast episode, Niki, the mother of a disabled and autistic 7 year old, tells us the DWP recently closed her universal credit claim with NO warning.

Niki and I called the universal credit helpline to ask what was going on. I recorded that call and added it into the episode.

Universal credit kept telling us that Niki had to wait for the DWP to carry out a mandatory reconsideration to get her claim back. They happily admitted that that could “take ages.” No money to live on during that time, of course.

Also – the universal credit helpline officer kept telling Niki to check her online universal credit journal to see how the MR was going – problem being that Niki can’t get into her journal, because the DWP closed her claim. Still, universal credit kept saying and saying that Niki should check the progress of her mandatory reconsideration in her journal.

This went round and round and round until universal credit hung up on us. Charming.

This is Labour’s so-called “tailored support” for disabled people and their families. Brilliant, innit.

Labour’s coercive control of people who claim benefits

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Here’s my latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut benefits for sick and disabled people:

“You know how you get these sick bastards who abuse their partners by controlling the family’s bank accounts and throwing a few coins at Mum for food and clothes if she behaves?

Liz Kendall is just like that on taking money from benefit claimants – you know, “this might hurt you sweetheart, but I’m doing it for your own good.”

Feelgood abuse is what it’s all about.

Domestic abuse charities call this behaviour coercive financial abuse, but in political circles it is known as mission critical welfare reform.”

.

In this episode, we talk about failed back to work schemes, money wasted on voracious private “employability” companies and how so-called “tailored” back to work support for disabled people can feel more like a tailored attack.

If Liz Kendall wants to improve working options for disabled people, people with mental health issues and everybody else tbh, she needs to raise the national living and minimum wages to £20 and more. People would be a lot less depressed if they could earn enough to meet their bills and then some.

Then Labour needs to tax major corporates like Amazon for the kind of money that would pay to make every workplace and space accessible.

The benefits system actually causes serious mental health problems

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In my latest podcast episode, we take more piss out of Liz Kendall and Keir Starmer’s barely-watered-down plans to cut PIP and disability benefits.

We talk about the fact that one of the reasons that people claim PIP for mental health problems is that life is so difficult for so many people. Wages are low and rents are impossibly high, and people can’t cope. Hardly a surprise, is it.

Why don’t Kendall and Starmer focus on that?

 

We also talk about the fact that a lot of people can’t work because the support they need doesn’t exist.

I talk to Megi in the podcast. Megi is the mother of a profoundly disabled autistic 8-year-old. This girl is bladder and bowel incontinent, non verbal and has violent meltdowns every single day. She barely sleeps.

She is dangerous to herself and others. She can’t be left alone for a second, including through the night. Megi had to leave a good job to become her daughter’s fulltime carer. She now gets a measly £300-ish a month in carer’s allowance. Great.

Liz Kendall will protect disabled people who are “most” in need from benefit cuts? Do me a favour.

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My latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut disability benefits and support money:

“Forget Kendall’s bollocks about protecting disabled people who are “most” in need (whatever that means) from her vicious benefits cuts.

Because the truth is that governments actively go after people who are most in need.

 

I would also like say that it is my considerable experience that when you cut support money for sick and disabled people, a lot of them just get sicker and often, you know, die – as opposed to rushing out and enthusiastically looking more work or whatever it is that Liz feels greater poverty motivates sick and disabled people to do.”