Tweet…that they all know exactly how bad things are for people who need social security. Their surgeries must be full of people who can’t meet the rent, have been sanctioned, must live in shitty housing, are being treated badly at jobcentres, can’t get support workers, or enough carer hours, or can’t meet an energy bill, or have massive forms to fill in to claim a benefit and so on. They must absolutely know how things are.

I can say this, because I know a lot about the way these things are myself. I get heaps of emails and contacts from people who need help with these things. I’m just one blogger and and I can’t keep up with the number of people who need some kind of help. I’m not even sure what to tell people anymore. People just get angry if you suggest the CAB. They say that they’ve tried and the CAB is oversubscribed. I don’t even reply to some emails these days, because I just don’t know what to say and I end up making a sort of non-decision to do nothing. I haven’t got anything helpful to say. Everyone I know who works in these areas – paid workers, volunteers, campaigners – is overstretched beyond belief. I talk about it with people all the time. People burn out all over the place.

MPs know this. They see it. People who need social security don’t just disappear because parliament tells a small voting public that they should. I find that the more people government strikes from the Deserving list, the more people get in contact for help. Everyone who is on the ground knows that. Pity there’s nowhere to take that knowledge.

TweetHere’s yet another post about the crappy callousness with which the DWP treats people it finds fit for work and throws off disability benefits…

We’ve heard plenty of stories like the one below in the past few years and I imagine we’ll be hearing more of them as more and more people on the Employment and Support Allowance disability benefit are forced to look for work. At jobcentres recently, I’ve found more people who were either on ESA and recently found fit for work, or who are in the ESA work-related activity group (the group for sick or disabled claimants who are thought capable of some type of work in future and of attending work-related activities*) and being forced to attend the jobcentre for work activities, even when their jobcentre advisers happily concede that those work activities won’t lead to jobs. These few people don’t make a trend, of course, but I’m inclined to think they suggest a direction of travel – a DWP crackdown on people in the ESA work-related activity group and ESA in general. As you’ll know, George Osborne targeted new claimants to that work related activity group in his July 8 budget, so ESA is certainly in his sights. I already know people in the ESA Support Group who have received letters telling them to attend work-focused interviews (the ESA support group is for sick or disabled people who are supposed to be excused from work and work-related activities). I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again and why not: I think the government’s ultimate plan is to eliminate disability benefits, as well as the idea that some people just can’t work.

Anyway, I do sometimes wonder what the fallout from a crackdown on sick and disabled claimants in the ESA WRAG group will be… I can say this for sure: the DWP continues to remove benefits from people who have mental health conditions in a particularly shitty and cold-blooded way.

Take this latest example. At one of the Northwest London jobcentres a couple of weeks ago, I spent time talking to an older woman I call Mary in this post (this woman did say I could use her real name, but I decided not to at the last minute here, because I’m getting more and more nervous about DWP vindictiveness to claimants). Mary was not in a very good way. Mary said that she had long-term mental health problems and had receiving ESA because of this. She’d been on the benefit for about six years. Mary said that she had been in the ESA work-related activity group until very recently. A few days before we met outside the jobcentre, she’d received the letter which you can see below – the letter which told her that she was no longer entitled to Employment and Support Allowance. She’d been found fit for work after a June work capability assessment. Her last ESA payment had been made on 2 July – just a couple of days before we met. She was obviously very concerned about that money ending – as anyone would be – and had no idea what to do next.

“They didn’t give me nothing [at the work capability assessment] – zero points. I got my letter, but I’m doing this with mental health problems. I can’t read and write very well.” As you can see below, the letter that Mary just received from the DWP told her that she’d get no more money from early July and that she’d better pull finger and start looking for a job: “you should start looking for a job straightaway.” If she couldn’t get a job straightaway (and it seemed unlikely that she would at that very moment, given her age and history) the letter gave a number to call to make a jobcentre appointment. That was the end of that. Other than those mostly useless pointers, all this letter offered was a few of the DWP’s now-unavoidable odes to the joys and supremacy of work: “we know that most people are better off in work,” and blah blah blah. These letters are as sanctimonious as they are unhelpful. There’s a repulsive smugness about the DWP when it pulls the rug on people in these situations.

Which is the thing. I’m not talking about Mary in particular here, or her history. I don’t know enough about her history to go into it. I’m talking about the system Mary is stuck in, the way this bureaucracy behaves towards people who use it and the assumptions it makes about those people. I’m talking about a system which removes people’s small incomes at the stroke of a pen, and the amazing callousness that the DWP shows when it throws people with mental health problems off ESA. There’s no “We Get That Mental Health Conditions Are A Real Thing” going on in this letter, or even “We Get That Stopping Your Income Might Devastate You.” The assumption in this letter is that people who are found fit for work have been taking the piss and that everyone who is found fit for work is robust enough to deal with a major blow like a sudden and total loss of income. This, presumably, is how the DWP continues to “fix” people with mental health conditions and indeed to “fix” anyone who claims a disability benefit. Forget about eligibility for a minute, or whether or not people are “deserving,” so-called (nobody’s deserving as far as this government is concerned, so that conversation is barely worth faffing around with). The point is that this is how people are handled when decisions to stop their income are made.

Sightings of letters like this one and of people in Mary’s situation reeling around outside jobcentres are among the reasons why I await the outcome of Mike Sivier’s request for benefit deaths statistics with interest. There’s absolutely no concession in the above text-heavy letter to the fact that the sudden stop of ESA might have a very bad effect on someone with mental health problems, or that such a letter might make those problems worse. There’s certainly nothing at the front of the letter about help to sign on for jobseekers’ allowance for some income in the first instance, or help to navigate the difficult path to jobseekers’ allowance, or how someone who once claimed ESA might deal with JSA’s difficult, demanding and punitive jobsearch regimes (I don’t count the provision of the Jobcentre Plus phone number on page 2, or the warbling on about Work Coach help at a jobcentre as immediate and intensive support). For her part, Mary was going to try and appeal the fit-for-work decision: “I’m on medication,” she said. “I’m going to my doctor now to get the letters.” I gave her my number and have her address: hopefully, we can catch up and find out how things went. Suffice to say for now that I expect to see more and more people clutching these letters outside jobcentres as Osborne and the boys target ESA – and the people who collect it – for destruction. Cute, innit.

*Update Monday 20 July: sentence with * changed from “thought fit for some type of work” to “thought capable of some kind of work in future” as original could be interpreted as “fit for work” as in a WCA decision to end an ESA claim altogether. Also added “and of attending work-related activities” inside the bracket, as agree with commentator below that the work-related activities requirement for WRAG should be made clear as part of that sentence. Good ESA WRAG definition here.

TweetSo…

Just after the general election this year, I stayed in Dorset and visited the Soul Food kitchen in Weymouth at breakfast-time one Friday. Soul Food does meals for people who have benefit problems, or who are in and out of street homelessness. I spent a lot of time with people there a couple of years ago. When I visited in May this year, I recorded an interview with an older woman who I’ll call Leanne for this post. Leanne was a wheelchair user: cerebral palsy, she said. We talked for a long time. She spoke about the government’s harsh application regime for employment and support allowance. She talked about her social housing flat, which she said she’d been living in for years. She revealed a deep dislike of the social care types who she seemed somehow to answer to: “ I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” she said. Anyway, since we’d just had a general election, I thought I’d ask Leanne who she’d voted for. She told me that she’d voted for the Tories. “Doesn’t make any difference,” she said.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, except to say that life rolls this way outside of twitter. I meet up with people and they say things, and there we are. I speak to a lot of people who genuinely think of political engagement as a luxury enjoyed by other people. Their own minds are busy elsewhere: mainly caught up in a series of run-ins with bullying bureaucrats as far as I can tell (“I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” etc). That’s where the main action is. People read the papers and follow the news, but they don’t imagine for a second that their experiences count towards anything that goes down there. I think that’s why this latest wittering about Labour as the party of welfare has not engaged me. It seems a while since people I hang out with talked about Labour as social security champions.

TweetAs you’ll likely know, last week disabled protestors held another demonstration against cuts to disabled people’s funding: the #Balls2TheBudget protest outside Downing Street, on Westminster Bridge and then outside parliament.

I thought the police might get pissy at this protest, because they were so badly shown up when Disabled People Against Cuts successfully occupied the central lobby at parliament in protest at the ILF closure a couple of weeks ago. And the police did get nasty. Things were okay-ish when protestors carried out the ball-throwing exercise at Downing Street and then closed down Westminster Bridge to protest at cuts, but the police mood soured very fast when people blocked the roads outside parliament. That change in tenor was noticeable. The coppers started to shove protestors around and they pulled down the Balls2TheBudget banner that people held across the street. It was almost as though a message had been sent from our glorious leaders to shut the demonstration down outside parliament right at that moment:

In this video, a copper tells disabled protestor Sam Brackenbury that his carer will be arrested if she stays on the road. Charming:

This video shows the amazing moment when Labour’s Sadiq Khan bolted as he happened upon DPAC protestor Andy Greene who was in his wheelchair and surrounded by police. Four people were arrested for highway obstruction during the protest. Greene was one of them. Khan’s failure to respond in any way whatsoever really was remarkable. He couldn’t find a single word to say about the situation. You’ll see in the video that he just stared at everyone, then legged it. That’s the Labour party for you in these fraught times: disabled people block roads in protest at government slaughtering of social care funds and screwing of disability benefits, and Labour MPs can’t bring themselves to look, let alone to stop. Still, everyone got the message. Nothing says You Lot Are On Your Own more eloquently than Khan’s total non-contribution here:

Thanks a bunch for that, Sadiq. Very helpful.

The arrests were eloquent in their very nature: I think we can confidently say that the establishment had decided to up the ante against these protestors after they occupied parliament on 24 June. That won’t stop people. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we’re seeing something important here. This isn’t just noise for the hell of it. Disabled people are taking the fight for social security to government because they have to, and the louder they get, the more vindictive government gets. Meanwhile, Labour flinches from the sidelines… and continues on the fast-track to oblivion. Everything is escalating – everything except the Labour party, I guess, which appears to be leaving the picture altogether. I’m not sure how this one ends.

TweetThought I’d spend a few pre-budget days rolling out more transcripts from interviews with people on the rubbish end of Tory austerity.

This one is yet another story about jobcentres and useless back-to-work activities (the transcript is at the end):

I went to one of the northwest London jobcentres last week to hand out leaflets with the Kilburn unemployed workers’ group … and I spent a long time talking to an older bloke (he was 54) who said he’d been in the jobcentre for an hour writing his CV with an adviser.

We’ll call this guy Keith. Keith was in the Work Related Activity Group for Employment and Support Allowance. He told me that he’d worked for much of his life in engineering as a fitter, but that all came to an end after a bad car accident about a decade ago. “Now I can’t do it. It’s physically impossible, because I’ll be in and around machines and all. That [accident] was the end of my engineering days. That finished me for a while and then I was really down.”

I give you this work history, because Keith reported it. I personally couldn’t care less whether people have worked or not, or what their histories are. As time goes on, I care less and less. If people are 50+, disabled and at a jobcentre, they’re a) usually in need at that moment in time, b) unlikely to get work because they’re on the scrapheap as far as employers are concerned and c) going to be written off as scroungers whether they worked all their lives or not. Those are the only relevant facts these days. Nothing else that people have or haven’t been or done counts.

Anyway, I ramble… Atos had, of course, found Keith fit for work, in a relatively recent assessment. Keith had managed to get that decision overturned on appeal. He was placed in the WRAG group for ESA. WRAG is the ESA group that the DWP wants to get rid of  – their latest move in what is a none-too-subtle campaign to eliminate disability benefits altogether, along with the concept that some people just can’t work. Because he’s in that Work Related Activity Group, Keith must turn out to the jobcentre every few weeks and engage in completely pointless “work-related” activities.

I say “completely pointless” because that is exactly what those activities are. They’re not about getting people into work. They’re about making sure that older, disabled people like Keith are constantly prodded. Nothing else. They’re just prodded. They’re not helped into decent, decently-paid work, or anything as romantic as that. They’re prodded and needled and nudged and got at, and that’s about that. Keith told me that his adviser happily conceded that the CV-writing was not about getting a job, but just an exercise to complete to meet government requirements. “[The adviser] said – “well, you done your CV and you’re covered. As far as the government is concerned, you’ve done your thing. Just do it” Keith said that he must return to the jobcentre in a few weeks’ time to participate in another “activity.” There’ll be more after that. I imagine Keith is being lined up as fodder for this or that privately-provided work course, or similar purposeless bollocks. On and on it goes. Continue reading →

TweetThis is a video I made today as Disabled People Against Cuts delivered a petition to save the Independent Living Fund to the tosser installed at 10 Downing Street. Campaigners blocked Whitehall for a time and then there was a procession to parliament:

Video transcript here.

A sad day, but people certainly plan to be back. Off to parliament again next week. Pretty good result there last week:

TweetFrom Disabled People Against Cuts:

DPAC joined by Class War, Streets Kitchen, Black Dissidents & others

Announce:

Balls to the Budget

#Balls2TheBudget

Wednesday 8 July, 10.30 am
Downing St

Big balls, small balls, footballs, tennis balls, volleyballs, handballs, rubber balls, plastic balls, flour balls, paint balls, canon balls, beachballs, hairballs, furballs, glitter balls, gumballs, basketballs, garlic balls, initialed balls, personalised balls.

Get creative.

Balls to austerity
Balls to taking our rights
Balls to taking our jobs
Balls to cutting our services
Balls to bankers bonuses
Balls to cutting the ILF
Balls to Met Police
Balls to cuts to Access to Work
Balls to cuts to Social Care
Balls to the Bedroom Tax
Balls to Workfare & Sanctions
Balls to Forced Treatments
Balls to Maximus, Atos & PIP
Balls to Child Poverty & inequality
Balls to low pay & exploiting workers
Balls to anti-homeless laws
Balls to stifling protest
Balls to migrant bashing, racism & Islamophobia
Balls to cuts to Housing, Education, NHS, Legal Aid, Womens Refuges, CAMHS and much much more.

Then, afterwards – We Are Going Back.

11.30 The Lobby, House of Commons. Bring balls.

Online: Twitter from 10.30 am till yer tweeting fingers wear out
Take part online by using and sharing: #Balls2TheBudget

There is a tweetlist you can use here: http://dftr.org.uk/Songbird.php?TweetFile=Balls2theBudget

See DPAC for updates.

TweetUpdate 28 June 2015:

Join Disabled People Against Cuts on Tuesday 30 June at 11.30am at Downing Street as they deliver a petition calling for government to protect disabled people’s right to independent living.

From Disabled People Against Cuts:

“ILF recipients, campaigners and Allies will meet outside Downing Street to hand over petitions calling on the Prime Minister to protect disabled people’s right to independent living. Over 25,000 signatures have been collected online (supported by the brilliant video made by the stars of Coronation Street) and also during the Graeae Theatre Company’s 2014 UK Tour of The Threepenny Opera.”

Follow @Dis_PPL_Protest on twitter for updates.

———————————————————————————————————-

Updates from Disabled People Against Cuts:

Why the ILF closure is threatening disabled people’s social care packages and how the DWP has lied about local council capacity for funding care for disabled people with the highest support needs.

Read the letter to MPs that disabled people stormed parliament to deliver on Wednesday.

Original post:

To parliament then today! – where disabled campaigners took the police by surprise in a very big way. Disabled campaigners occupied parliament’s central lobby in protest at government plans to close the Independent Living Fund in just a week’s time. The ILF is a fund that profoundly disabled people rely on to pay for personal assistants and the extra carer hours they need. Needless to say, this government thinks the ILF should be closed and disabled people cast adrift.

More pictures and videos at Disabled People Against Cuts here.

The police panicked when this occupation started and they got heavy. There must have been about 50 coppers? – Perhaps more. They did hurt a couple of people – I heard one copper say very clearly that the police were trained to use pressure points.

They also grabbed my arms and yelled “She’s filming!” when they saw the camera. The arm-grabbing is the reason why some of the video is shaky. I had to take the SD card out and shove it into my sweaty old bra. Still – on we go. The police threatened pretty quickly to confiscate my phone and camera, so I beat it out of there to get the pics out. Not really feeling the love today, as in #lovethepolice. Etc.

Some pics uploaded now below.

Video: disabled people occupy parliament’s central lobby (includes shot at the start of a copper lifting one guy’s wheelchair to swing it around):

Police start to get shirty:

Disabled people start to occupy the hall and police work out what is going on. Then they get heavy (they were grabbing my arms at this point, so the video is shaky towards the end:

Campaigners in the central hall:

Police start getting heavy as disabled campaigners occupy the central lobby in protest at ILF closure:

Occupation of central lobby continues:

Another video, showing police presence… had to use the phone for this as the camera was about to be confiscated.

TweetWonder if/when this will end in a sanction.

Let’s start at the beginning:

On Monday, I headed to over the river for a trip to a North London jobcentre with a guy I call Eddie in these stories. I’ve known Eddie for about a year now, I think. Eddie’s a 51-year-old man with learning difficulties who has been out of work for more than five years. He worked as a kitchen assistant for most of his life, but his last job ended in about 2010. He’s signed on for JSA since. He talks a lot about wanting another job – “I should be going to work now, not going to this stupid place [the jobcentre]” – but it is pretty obvious he’s struggling on that front.

I suppose there are explanations for this, although I get tired of having to cast about for explanations for unemployment. I get sick of having to somehow justify people’s situations when they are out of work. I don’t know people’s entire back stories and I generally don’t want to know. I only know that people are where they are and that most people have been many things by the time they’re 50.

Eddie is getting older and his health isn’t great. He’s diabetic and injects insulin three times a day. He spends a lot of time at his GPs’ surgery, or getting bloods done, or seeing consultants at the hospital. He doesn’t always present well these days: more often than not, he’ll have food down his front of his clothes and tiny sores on his face and he’ll wear the clothes with the foodstains more than once.

He’s become more defensive and cantankerous in the year that I’ve known him. He speaks a non-stop, belligerent stream: he says that his neighbours are noisy drug addicts “up banging on the walls and shouting all night”, jobcentre staff are useless, that the landlord who owns Eddie’s tiny studio flat is hopeless and won’t fix things when they break, and that England was fine until it was ruined by immigrants (Eddie’s parents moved here from Jamaica before he was born. He describes himself, often, as “British born and bred”). He isn’t tragic, or pitiable, or pathetic, or vulnerable. He’s opinionated. He’s tough. He’s been around. He’s older and he’s probably not first choice for hard, low-paid manual work anymore. I’m not entirely sure that he wants to be. He speaks fondly of his working days, but seems to fear a return to the sort of work that he did. Perhaps he feels that he is out of that race now. I would say that he is stressed. He seems to hate change and he fights it. He’s ageing and knows how that is likely to roll. Don’t we all. Getting older probably isn’t so terrible if you’ve got golf and good health. It’s another story when you’re at the GP a lot, but still expected to grind your last working years out in a kitchen for £7 an hour (if you’re lucky), or for your JSA (if you’re not). I know we’re all supposed to be grateful for the chance to slog at hard manual jobs for stuff-all money until we drop dead, but I can see why someone would rather not. I would rather not myself. The older you get, the less you’d rather. “I could do that work in the big kitchens when I was younger,” Eddie said to me last Thursday when we went to have a coffee after his JSA signon appointment. “I couldn’t do that now.”

Continue reading →

TweetIs this the beginning of the end of Disability Employment Advisers at jobcentres?

Last week, I went to a North London jobcentre with a disabled man who was meeting with an adviser to agree his claimant commitment – the contract which sets out the number of jobs this man will search for each week and so on. We met with the Disability Employment Adviser.

A bit of background: DEAs are onsite jobcentre officers who are trained to support disabled JSA claimants and to direct disabled people towards disability-friendly employers (assuming that such employers still exist). Meetings with DEAs can be hard to come by, presumably because DEAs are in demand and a lot of disabled people need their support. The man I was with had waited well over a month for the appointment that finally took place last week. It was a relief to get to that meeting and to begin to set up the relationship with the DEA. Disability Employment Advisers can sometimes act as a kind of buffer between disabled people and sanctions. They note if someone has learning or literacy difficulties, or other problems that make jobsearching hard. DEAs are not always perfect, but they’re better than nothing. A relationship of some kind can be helpful.

Except – there’s not going to be a relationship of any sort with this DEA, or any DEA at this jobcentre. It seems there’s not going to be a DEA there at all. It emerged that this DEA was leaving in a few weeks and that the job would not be filled. “I’m not going to be doing this job for too much longer and they’re not replacing my role,” the DEA told us. This person said that there would be no DEA at this jobcentre “as far as I am aware.” The guy I was with was a bit shocked to hear this. He’d previously signed on at at a Northeast London jobcentre where the DEA working there had probably saved him from sanctions a couple of times. That DEA understood his literacy problems and knew that he struggled with online jobsearching, because he couldn’t easily use a computer or email. Things weren’t great at that jobcentre and the DEA certainly had ups and downs, but the overall picture would have been a lot worse without that person there and generally onside. Continue reading →