Right. This one goes out to anyone who still believes that there’s a safety net in place. It’s also for anyone who believes that the jobcentre system is still vaguely functional, or that there are checks and balances in it to keep things fair.

This post is an update on a story I’ve been writing about a man with learning difficulties who is signing on for JSA. He sometimes struggles with his jobsearch, because he isn’t able to use a computer to apply for work. He hasn’t been sanctioned so far, because his jobcentre adviser has been reasonable. The problem is that she’s suddenly no longer his adviser. Now, he’s in a precarious position. It is unlikely that he’s the only one.

Let’s start from the beginning:

Readers of this site will know that I’ve been spending time with Eddie (name changed), a 51-year-old Kiburn man who has mild learning difficulties. He also struggles to read and write with any fluency. He has spent most of his life working in general assistant jobs in commercial kitchens and stores, but was made redundant about four years ago. He’s been signing on for JSA ever since. Eddie is desperate to find another job – but he doesn’t think that is going to happen through the jobcentre. Neither do I. That’s because I’ve seen the whole process in “action.” Every fortnight, Eddie goes to the jobcentre to show his adviser his jobsearch papers. He must prove that he’s searched for 14 jobs every two weeks. The adviser checks his papers, sets a time for his next appointment and then waves him goodbye. The whole exercise takes ten minutes, if that. Nobody ever offers to call employers on Eddie’s behalf, or to put his CV forward, or to organise interviews, or to liaise with anyone who might take him on for work. It is incredible to think that some people are now being forced to engage in this moribund process every day. It is unpleasant to know that Iain Duncan Smith believes he’s onto a winner with this kind of “concept.” It is also unpleasant to know that he may well be onto an electoral winner with this kind of concept, given that the “scroungers” line has well and truly taken hold and there’s no political opposition to the destruction of support for people who are out of work.

Anyway – in my last post, I wrote about the problems Eddie had completing an online jobsearch. His jobcentre advisor had told him to choose and apply for at least three jobs online as part of his fortnightly quota. The problem was that Eddie couldn’t use a computer well enough to start this jobsearch (as you can read here, he wasn’t sure what a browser was). He was unable to type in the complex urls that he’d been given – you can see some of them on the list he was given here:

and he struggled to follow the text on the job application pages. He was very concerned that he’d get sanctioned if he didn’t complete the three online applications. I ended up typing his CV and then submitting the online applications for him. When we went to his signing on appointment, we raised these issues with his jobcentre adviser. The adviser freely admitted that she knew Eddie couldn’t complete the online jobsearch – but said that she was unlikely to sanction him because she knew about his learning and literacy difficulties. Unfortunately, as I said at the time, that isn’t good enough. People in Eddie’s situation can’t rely on a forgiving adviser to protect them from sanctions. We’re in a sanctions-driven environment here. Things can change very suddenly. Advisers come and go, or take leave, or go off sick, or move to new jobs. A reasonable adviser can suddenly move on.

Which is, of course, exactly what has happened. Last Thursday, Eddie turned up for his fortnightly signon session, only to be told that the adviser we’d seen two weeks ago wasn’t working on Thursdays any more. (I wasn’t able to accompany Eddie to last Thursday’s appointment, so he went alone. He said he didn’t have a good experience. People often report that they are treated with less respect when they go alone to their jobcentre appointments). Eddie was instructed to show his jobsearch papers to another adviser. He reported to me today that the new person was impatient and told him that he’d need another appointment. Eddie was worried that this meant he was going to be sanctioned. Unfortunately, this new adviser wasn’t prepared to reassure him on this point, or to make a new signing on appointment for him. Continue reading →

To the Royal Courts on the Strand today, where Disabled People Against Cuts, Independent Living Fund recipients and their carers turned out in very good numbers to support disabled people who are taking a second court case against this repulsive government’s second decision to close the ILF.

Part way through the day, disabled people went and sat on the Strand and brought the traffic to a standstill. I only hope Lord Freud was out in London in some overpriced government vehicle right at that moment and found himself stuck in a lane somewhere.

The Independent Living Fund is the pot of money that profoundly disabled people use to pay for the extra carer hours they need to live their lives as independent adults. For many people, ILF money tops up council funding for care. Unfortunately, this government dislikes the idea of disabled people living like grownups in their homes and working, studying, socialising and doing their thing like everyone else. In fact – I think we can safely say that this government dislikes the idea of disabled people living at all. God knows Iain Duncan Smith has put an extraordinary effort into getting rid of the ILF. I’ve been writing about the ILF battle for several years now. I expect nothing from IDS and understand that he’s an extremist, but even so, I’ve found the government’s continued and renewed assaults on this group of people difficult to fathom.

The ILF closure makes no sense, unless you understand that IDS is malicious and such an ideologue that he actually wants blood on his hands. The number of people who get ILF funding is small – about 18,000 (the fund was closed to new applicants in 2010, so the number of recipients is not growing). The average cost of the ILF each week is about £345 – which, as Inclusion London says, is considerably less than the average weekly cost of residential care. A lot of ILF recipients will end up in carehomes if they can’t afford high-cost support at home.

And they won’t be able to afford that care at home. Councils certainly can’t pick up the tab for people with high support needs. I’m already talking to people who rely solely on council care and are left dangerously short of support. Cutting the ILF could be deadly. It really is that simple. So – why pursue this group of people with such venom? Could it be that IDS wants to punish them for not going quietly? Is it that he wants to get them simply for existing and needing financial support?

“The reason coalition ministers don’t mind slashing entitlements for disabled people, are quite happy to use them as guinea pigs for new benefits that don’t work, and to chuck them at incompetents such as Atos, is because they couldn’t care less,” Aditya Chakrabortty wrote this week. I think it is partly that. I also think it is part of the general plan to eradicate anyone who needs help from the state (anyone who isn’t a banker, that is). A generous view would be that it’s a combination of the two, but I don’t always feel very generous. I’ve been writing about this evil for too long.

Last year, the court of appeal overturned a government decision to close the ILF and noted the adverse effect the closure would have on ILF recipients. The government came back in March this year and announced again it would close the fund. So, disabled people are taking the government back to court. The case started today and carries on tomorrow. I hope they win. They must win. There is a crucial truth at the centre of this fight. It represents a turning-point for all of us. Saving the ILF is not just about saving a pot of money. It’s about saving the idea that disabled people deserve to live like everybody does. Once you abandon that concept, you abandon the idea that everyone counts and that everyone deserves to live.

Which is one of the reasons why disabled people and their personal assistants turned out in very good numbers on a weekday to give their support to people taking an all-important and potentially life-saving court case. That June 2015 ILF closure deadline is getting nearer.

And listen to these people talk about their lives and the ILF. Dunno about you, but I think that Iain Duncan Smith has decided they shouldn’t live.

We’re NOT all in this together: the story of the closure of the Independent Living Fund from Moore Lavan Films on Vimeo.

Excellent photos from the vigil today here

This is a report about having to sign on every day for jobseekers’ allowance – an entirely pointless “process” that seems to be taking hold:

On Wednesday, the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group and I went to talk with JSA claimants at the North Kensington jobcentre.

Almost as soon as we got there, people brought a significant fact to our attention: the North Kensington jobcentre appears to have instigated a daily JSA sign on regime for some people. Daily sign on does, or at least is, pretty much what it says on the tin – it means that people must present themselves at their local jobcentre every single day of the week and sit and wait until they see an adviser for a brief time. Their attendance is noted and there’s a (very) quick catchup about people’s jobsearches. And that’s it.

Daily sign on was one of the platforms government’s ironically-named Help To Work platforms. The Help To Work scheme was launched in April to much fanfare (by government) and consternation (by reasonable people). I wonder if we’re seeing evidence now that it is underway, after a fashion. We’re certainly seeing evidence that people were right to dread it. The daily sign on exercise is nasty and utterly pointless – certainly as far as helping people into work goes. The three people who I talk about in this article reported that absolutely nothing happens at their daily signon appointments. I think we’ll say that again – absolutely nothing happens. JSA claimants must turn up at their jobcentre and have their attendance noted. One person reported a quick chat and check with a jobcentre adviser about jobs applied for – “and that’s ridiculous, because they can check everything that I am doing online,” he said. “They forced us to use [Universal] Jobmatch, so they can check everything already.”

When that’s done, the person is given a time for the next day’s appointment. After that, it’s all over until the next day. (A man I spoke to at length at the Clacton jobcentre recently reported exactly the same experience). Talk about an exercise in humiliation and futility – like people who must use the already-degrading JSA system needed another one.

People can’t use jobcentre phones to call employers (the man who described daily sign on process as “ridiculous” had got into trouble with security for demanding that the jobcentre let him use a phone to call prospective employers), no employers are rung on their behalf, no job interviews are arranged. I can well believe that – I’ve attended a few sign on appointments with people now and have seen how this system “works.” I don’t think I’ve been to one that has lasted more than ten minutes. Which means that daily sign on is not about finding people work. It’s about taking people by the scruff of the neck and keeping a very tight hold. It’s about letting people who are out of work know that their lives are no longer their own – that once people are unemployed, they’re not entitled to even a few hours’ peace of mind, or relief, from the DWP. It’s about disrupting people’s lives and making sure that they get up each day not knowing whether they’ll still have JSA at the end of it. It is depraved. Nobody we spoke to on Wednesday knew from day to day what time their sign on appointment would be. They were given a time for the next day’s appointment at the previous day’s appointment. That means people can’t plan their week, or even from day to day. They’re not allowed to plan their week. The subtext is that people who find themselves out of work have no lives – and, perhaps more to the point, are not entitled to lives. If you’re unemployed, you must forfeit your right to yourself. The people we spoke with were absolutely furious about it. I am too, just by the way. I think we’re very much at the point where the DWP should be forced to open the doors on all of this. This regime exists to deliver stress and panic, and nothing else. That needs to be fully revealed.

The first man we talked was in and out of work, as so many people we meet at jobcentres are. He was 46. He worked in marketing and business development – “anything. I will take it.” He found work himself and was hoping that a few leads he was following would pay off soon. His problem was that he could only get short-term contract work. I find that again and again.

The daily sign on (he’d just started) was angering him badly and very disruptive to his actual jobhunting: “it is so time-consuming and it doesn’t serve a purpose for me or them. It costs me and them time and money for me to be here every day.” Because of that, he’d asked the jobcentre if “it was possible for them to provide me with additional services while I’m here – where I can use the phone for basic things.” Using a phone for half-an-hour or so would mean his daily attendance wasn’t a complete waste of time. Unfortunately, this suggestion was not well-received. He raised his voice and management was called down. “The lady decided to that I was being awkward and she walked away and she calmed down.” That, he said, was ridiculous. “All I wanted was access to a phone. There’s nothing there. I don’t think I was being awkward asking them what provisions they have.” As I say, his actual appointment was a complete waste of time. “They went onto the computer to see whether I had done any jobsearches. But I said that I want them to provide a service.” Continue reading →