“We’re in court this morning fighting Annington Homes for our right to housing! They are not only demanding we leave our homes, but also trying to obtain an injunction to prevent us protesting on the estate.”
Come and show your support this morning (Monday 30 March):
9.30am
Barnet County Court, St Mary’s Court,
Regents Park Road, London N3 1BQ
Update 27 March: the state of this flat has been reported to Brent council. They said they will arrange an inspection.
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Look at the mould here:
This is a picture from the tiny “studio” flat currently occupied by Eddie (name changed), the 51-year-old man with learning difficulties I’ve been attending jobcentre meetings with. He’s being evicted from this place – a couple of us went with him to Brent council on Monday to start his homelessness application. Eviction or not, he needs to get out of this room fast. I understand that the council is organising properties for him to look at. He may end up out of the borough.
God only knows how many other people are living in places like this. Here’s the mould on the ceiling in the little entrance-bay in the flat:
This studio flat is purely revolting. It’s very small – there’s a bed and a small, filthy kitchen all shoved into one room, with a shower and toilet sort of clipped on at the back. There are mice. There are cockroaches. The mould you can see in the pictures. I took the pictures today when I went to meet Eddie to walk to his jobcentre signon appointment.
But here’s the thing. Eddie’s landlord is collecting £1000 a month in housing benefit for this place. I’ve seen Eddie’s housing benefit settlement papers for this year – £250 a week, which his papers confirm is paid to the landlord. Remember this next time you hear George Osborne yapping on about scroungers. It ain’t guys like Eddie who are taking the piss with their miserable weekly jobseekers’ allowances of about £71. The people who are having a very big laugh on the taxpayer are the landlords who hoover up thousands of pounds in housing benefit for crapholes like you see here. This is the kind of mould that causes serious health problems, surely. The air was rotten. I couldn’t wait to get out of the place. But there we are. This is the kind of environment that is considered perfectly acceptable for people with learning difficulties in our day and age.
Brent council has been in contact on twitter about the photos of the mould that I tweeted, so I’ll be sending a complaint and the photos through. This landlord needs to be taken out of circulation. He’s evicting Eddie and God knows what his plans are next for this flat. I suppose he could decide to put a family with very small children in this place to live with this mould. He could pick someone else on housing benefit who has no choice except to live like this. Who knows.
Here’s a story about one person who is caught in a sort of three-way systems meltdown. God only knows how many times this sort of situation is being replicated across the country:
Yesterday, I visited Brent Council with Eddie* (name changed), an unemployed 51-year-old Kilburn man who has learning and literacy difficulties. I’ve been accompanying Eddie to his various council and jobcentre meetings for months now. The whole thing has been a right eye-opener, for me at least. It has certainly opened my eyes to the various systemic meltdowns that austerity has left us with, and the people who are on the rough end of the whole shambles.
This guy definitely is at that rough end. Last time I wrote about Eddie, I explained how he’d been shouted at by a jobcentre adviser at his latest appointment. The adviser had signed him up for a work choice course without telling him what it was about, or how to organise his travel to it (it’s on the Caledonian Road somewhere) and then took exception when he started to complain. We’d both sat there as the adviser listed his sins (loudly) as the jobcentre saw them. No concession was made to his learning or literacy difficulties during that unpleasant exchange. The only reason that I’d cut that adviser any slack at all was that she’d been reasonable in the past and looked purely exhausted on the day of the yelling-match. Maybe she’d just been bawled out by some sanctions-happy manager who didn’t think she was hitting targets. I generally wonder where the PCS is at these moments. It’s pretty clear to me that some jobcentre workers are too stressed-out to cope a lot of the time (this adviser told me several months ago that back in the day, she saw about five JSA claimants a day. These days, she sees about 15). There certainly are some sadists working at jobcentres, but there are also people who try to be reasonable. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to be reasonable when you’re working in an utterly unreasonable, punitive, sanctions-driven workplace. Anyway – more on that particular situation soon. We’re picking it up with the jobcentre later this week.
Yesterday, we were at the Brent council offices. We were there because Eddie has another problem – he’s about to be evicted from the crummy studio flat that he’s been living in for a couple of years. He had a meeting with the council to try and get registered as homeless. Eddie isn’t too worried about leaving the studio flat as such and you wouldn’t blame him for that if you saw the place. “Studio” is too romantic a word for it. “Hovel” would be closer to the mark. You can see that in the video here (I took this in about June last year, so the place has deteriorated even further since then):
From the Sweets Way campaign: support tomorrow morning if you can: Monday, March 23, 2015, 09:30, Barnet County Court – St Marys Court, Regents Park Rd, London N3 1BQ
Two weeks into a political occupation that has expanded from one to six homes on the Sweets Way Estate in Barnet, occupiers and residents will be going to court to challenge the replacement of perfectly good and truly affordable homes, with yet more luxury new builds.
Following the delivery of court papers, late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 19, residents, ex-residents and supporters of the Sweets Way Resists campaign will be going to Barnet County Court against private property developers Annington Homes on Monday, 23 March, at 10:00am. The campaign aims to challenge the legal processes used by Annington against the estate’s remaining residents, as well as those involved in the political occupation of 60 Sweets Way, during the company’s attempts to bulldoze the estate.
Supporters and families will also be gathering outside of the courts to stand in solidarity with those fighting the social cleansing of Sweets Way on the inside. Families and activists will be available to share their stories with the media. Continue reading →
On Monday 9 March, people going into jobcentres were told that IT systems were down and that the problem was nationwide.
Here’s a picture I took of a sign about it posted outside Kilburn jobcentre that day:
The sign said:
“9 March 2015 Customer Notice
IT systems are down
This is a national problem ie contact centre, JCP, Belfast have no access
We do not know when it will be resolved.
All appointments today must be attended.”
I’ve wondered since then if anyone claiming JSA or ESA had had any trouble – particularly with any information taken down by hand that day not being recorded properly (or at all) when the systems were back up. I could see plenty of potential for sanctions threats here – certainly if changed appointments weren’t recorded and so on. I’ve talked to no end of people in the last year who were sanctioned because of confusion about appointment times and dates.
And wouldn’t you know it… I was talking today to a man who felt that his week got very close to ending in a sanctions disaster because the computers weren’t working last Monday. He’s 56, not in good health and in the Work Related Activity group for Employment and Support Allowance. Last Monday – the day that the systems were down – I sat with this man and a woman from the local unemployed workers’ group who helps him with his ESA paperwork. He had a letter calling him to a work-related interview at one of the northwest London jobcentres last week. The session was mandatory. People in the work related activity must attend work-related interviews, or face sanctions.
Anyway – he couldn’t make that interview, because he had an appointment with a specialist on the same day, so the woman we were with called the phone number on the letter and told the adviser who answered that the appointment would need to be changed. I sat there and listened as this conversation took place. The adviser told the woman that the systems were down, but that she’d make a note to cancel the appointment and arrange for a new appointment to be set.
Needless to say, those details never made it into the system. The appointment wasn’t cancelled and predictably, things started to hit the fan. This guy got a message from the jobcentre on the day of the cancelled appointment telling him to call the jobcentre quick. He told me that when he called the jobcentre, he got a right bollocking about missing the appointment – ie where were you, why didn’t you attend, don’t you know that these appointments are compulsory and all the rest of it. He was very worried indeed about getting sanctioned, not least because of the tone of the call. People are certainly sanctioned for missing mandatory ESA meetings.
In the end, things were only sorted out because the unemployed workers’ group rep put in some calls and made it very clear that the appointment had been formally cancelled. There was no sanction and another date for the work-related interview was set. We attended that meeting this week. This story has made me wonder, though. How many other appointments changes made last Monday were written down on a piece of paper that subsequently went missing, was ignored, or fell off a desk, etc? I wonder what recourse people have if they think that happened to them and if the DWP has said anything about it. Doubtless this is the kind of shambles we can expect regularly once Universal Credit is up and – err, “operational”. If that ever happens.
Today Barnet Unison opened a strike ballot as part of its dispute with Barnet council to keep staff in council employment.
The ballot is a direct response to five commissioning projects agreed at a 3 March council meeting. The projects would mean outsourcing the majority of the workforce into a variety of alternative delivery models.
At the now-infamous 3 March council meeting (the mayor apparently stuffed his vote up and protestors broke up the meeting) the Conservative Administration voted through a decision to explore “other options” for directly delivering council services. The services are Libraries, Adults & Communities, Children’s Centres, Street Scene services and Education & Skills and School Meals.
UNISON estimates that this will mean upwards of 80% of the workforce will end up working for a different employer. According to a recent Barnet Council committee report, there are only 1,466 directly employed permanent staff.
Unison Branch Secretary John Burgess said:
“In December 2014, our branch conducted a poll of our members which produced the following feedback. 87% of our members want to remain employees of the London Borough of Barnet. 61% of our members said as a result of knowing they could be outsourced they are seriously looking to find employment elsewhere; 96% of our members expressed concern about being outsourced and 81% of members said morale was bad in their workforce. Feedback from the Poll and subsequent UNISON meetings reconfirms our members wish to remain Council employees which is why we are recommending a Yes vote in our strike ballot.”
I wonder if Rachel Reeves knows what long-term unemployment looks like.
I do. Plenty of people do.
Last Monday, I spent a long time outside the Kilburn jobcentre with a guy who said his name was Chug, or Chuck, or something like that. His speech wasn’t always clear. He mumbled a lot and clenched his jaw when he spoke. He said he was 35. He was thin and jumpy, and so pale that he was translucent. Heroin, I thought. Maybe crack. I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. I see a lot of guys with that wasted, nervy look.
Anyway, we talked for a while. And here’s the thing. My heart sank early on in the conversation, as it often does now when I talk to guys in this sort of situation. This wasn’t necessarily because the life story this guy told me was harrowing. It was a bit, but I can usually hear people out when they tell these stories. Pity isn’t really my bag. The heart-sinking bit came entirely from the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing to be done for this guy – certainly as far as drawing major attention to his problems went. As soon as I saw him, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell of raising sympathy for him outside of the usual support-group channels. I certainly couldn’t think of anyone big to take his problems to. I couldn’t imagine a senior MP backing him, or a major mainstream media outlet campaigning for him, or whatever. He ticked just about all the boxes that Reeves and other welfare hardliners have on their shared hitlist. He was Romanian by birth (he said he’d lived in the UK since he was ten), maybe ill, a long time out of work and hanging around the jobcentre asking for cash (he asked me for money. People often do). He was clearly unwell, underfed and in a mess. He wasn’t coherent a lot of the time. That’s the reality of a lot of these situations. That’s what you get.
That’s the part Rachel Reeves needs to get, too. Probably she does. Probably she has for while. The thing is that people in the sort of situation I’ve described above already have nothing as far as political representation goes. Those of us on the ground already know that Labour doesn’t care to represent people who are out of work, or to try and explain the complexities of long-term unemployment, or to accept that everyone is entitled to social security and representation, whether people are politically palatable or not. It’s a pity, that. The world needs to know that people in these tough situations exist. They exist, no matter how firmly Reeves clamps her hands over her eyes and pretends otherwise. That’s the point I keep trying to make. People who have serious problems don’t just disappear because nobody claims them. They don’t magically vanish because Reeves or Osborne or whoever decides to draw a line through them in some ledger in Whitehall. They exist. So do basic human needs. Continue reading →
Although Andy Burnham committed to a meeting with disabled people about protecting Independent Living Fund recipients when the ILF closes (he made that commitment on Saturday – you can listen to him talk about it in the video below), he’s now said he can’t meet. I realise he’s busy and that Labour has an election to fight/screw up in the coming weeks, but honest to god. Can’t a single senior Labour figure commit to keeping that fund open so that the disabled people who receive it can live. The ILF is due to close in June. If Labour is going to commit to anything to protect those people, now is the time to do it. Can we take Labour’s refusal to make that commitment as evidence that disabled people aren’t people that Labour plans to represent?
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Original post:
To the Labour Spring conference in Birmingham yesterday! – where a group of Independent Living Fund recipients, Disabled People Against Cuts and me did our best to get answers from Labour worthies about the party’s plans for disabled people’s benefits and funds. The aim was to hear from various horses’ mouths what will happen if Labour forms part of whatever monster administration we end up with in a couple of months, etc.
So.
It wasn’t a bad day out if you fancied a mid-morning cake. There were croissants, piles of those great little pastries with jam and icing, and awesomely big chocolate squares laid out on oddly morgue-y concrete slabs. Answers to the funding questions were a little harder to come by. The people I tried to speak to either ran away, stamped off when compared with Tories, or said they had families to get home to. Not to worry. Plenty of time left before the election (54 days they kept saying yesterday). I think I might get along to a few more of these junkets and hustings. Even the most committed MPs and parliamentary hopefuls can’t spend 54 days legging it from the rabble.
But let’s not carp about that. Let’s go to some of yesterday’s responses. The electorate requires a few decent responses on these issues. Disabled people have taken the brunt of austerity cuts. I personally feel that Labour needs now to be offering something a bit more substantial than “That’s Sad,” or “How Awful” (heard both yesterday) on the topic of this government’s disability funding slaughter. A rigorous commitment to social security from a party that ought to see the point of it would be nice.
We had two questions for MPs:
1) Would Labour scrap the hated and dangerous Work Capability Assessment for Employment and Support Allowance?
2) Would Labour change its mind and keep the Independent Living Fund (ILF) open – the ILF being an all-important fund that profoundly disabled people use to pay for the extra care hours that they need to live independent lives? The current government plans to close the fund by the end of June this year.
You’d expect a reasonably straightforward set of responses, given that the answer to both questions ought to be a resounding Yes. Unfortunately, things weren’t quite as simple as that, as you’ll see.
Out of the blocks (literally) in the video below was Yvette Cooper. I asked her for her views on the WCA and whether Labour would scrap it. She said to talk to Rachel Reeves, because she, Yvette, was in hurry for her next meeting. To be fair, this may have been true, although I noted that she went from walking to her next meeting to sprinting for it very fast when I tried to talk to her. I was asking “Will Labour get rid of it [the WCA]?” as she went. Not a lot of joy there as you’ll see:
No luck finding Rachel Reeves back at base, either. But not to worry, as I say. Am already on the search for a next time.
Onto Andy Burnham next. The great man was in the NHS corner in the top assembly room. In the video below, he speaks with DPAC’s Linda Burnip about the fast-approaching closure of the Independent Living Fund.
Burnham agreed that the profoundly disabled people who rely on the ILF needed protection when/if the funds closes. Which they do, to say the very least. Without the ILF to pay for the extra care hours they require, those disabled people will either be pushed into care facilities, or left at home to try and get by with dangerously low levels of care. It is no exaggeration to say that many won’t get by. The big problem now, of course, is that the ILF is due to close in a matter of months. It’s very late in the day for politicians to be wafting on in a non-specific way about protections for people whose lives will depend on those protections. As DPAC says in the video, Burnham’s integrated health and social care plan is still a long way off. There are also those of us who feel that in a general sense, Labour council attempts to protect social care budgets and facilities in the past five years have been beyond woeful, so putting further hope in widespread protection for disabled people could be a bit – hopeless. Burnham did commit to a meeting with DPAC and Inclusion London about the ILF/these “protections”, so I very much look forward to that:
Next up – I spoke with Liam Byrne about the Work Capability Assessment. God only knows why I decided to do this to myself. I’m starting to think that I may need to re-nose this aspect of my approach. Quite a lot of my life has already been wasted on conversations with fading worthies. You can actually hear my will to live leaving me via my voice in this one. Needless to say, Byrne thought that outsourcing assessments for disability benefits was still a good idea, despite the Atos experiment ending up as a pile of turds. One thing I will say for modern politicians – once they’ve chosen a disastrous ideology, they stick with it. They don’t flail through life looking for new ways to fail like the rest of us. I raised the ILF with Byrne, but didn’t get anything there, because he had to go and talk to some (possibly more important) blokes and also remembered he had to get home to the family:
What next. Oh yes. There was a “conversation” with Angela Eagle near the start where one of our number made a comment about Labour’s approach to WCA not being far removed from the Tories’. She apparently got all upset about that and left because she was a) genuinely angry or b) quietly delighted because she felt that the Tory comparison gave her an excuse (it didn’t) to leave, and on her high horse. Her Spad person told us to “send an email” as Angela marched off. I think I’ve got an audio from that one, but might go for a drink before subjecting us all to it. Definitely let me know if you’ve got hustings coming up in your area, though. Am right up for more of these face-to-face chats.
Working on a few longer things at the moment, so here’s a short report to be going on with – a bit of on-the-ground reality re: support for disabled people who are out of work:
I was at a jobcentre this week with a man who has learning difficulties. First, he signed on (that took a grand total of about four minutes, including a brief interlude of about ten seconds when Security called out to stop me accompanying this man. I decided to ignore Security on this occasion and kept walking). Then, we went to find the disability adviser to talk about people or organisations or someone somewhere who might be able to help this man into work, or to understand his support needs, at least. I had talked with the adviser about this briefly earlier in the week. The aim was to have a discussion about options and then take things from there.
We found the adviser. The adviser was not in a good mood. At all. There was no chance to talk. Before we even sat down, the adviser had signed this guy up to a work course – one which he had no idea how to get to. We were only told where it was when I asked. He’d been signed up on the computer by then. That was the end of the story as far as details or any negotiations went. The rest he’ll have to try and figure out. Travel was definitely a worry. If this man gets the tube, he’ll need to make a change at Green Park, possibly at rush hour. Bus options might work, but seemed complex. The point is that absolutely none of this was raised or canvassed before the course was chosen. This guy I was with is physically unwell, struggles to read and write and to follow complicated directions, and may need someone to help him negotiate the journey, especially the first time that he goes. He clearly felt stressed at the thought of it. I told the adviser that I might be able to accompany him to his first session now that he was signed up. “That’d be good,” the adviser said. I assumed that was the extent of the “help” that disabled people got if they struggled to travel, at least on this day.
The adviser made it very clear that if this man doesn’t get to this course, he’d be sanctioned. “They’re strict,” the adviser said of the provider. For Christ’s sake, I thought. It would’ve been nice to talk about the travel requirements and any potential problems before the place was selected. Perhaps another provider closer to home could have been found. There followed next a very heated exchange about this man’s most recent experience on so-called work choice (which I’ve just noticed seems to be voluntary) and whether or not he’d taken full advantage of the “help” he was supposedly offered by a previous provider. The adviser said he hadn’t. The man said that the “help” hadn’t been helpful at all. The adviser lost patience. This man shouted as well. He was obviously struggling to get his point over. I just sat there and wondered again why we were doing this, and whether the best way to handle someone with learning difficulties was to lose your temper and shriek.
I know that advisers are under pressure – I see stress and exhaustion on a lot of faces at jobcentres. There can be no doubt about that. The adviser in this case has been reasonable on other days. But the upshot here is that a man with learning difficulties has been signed up to a course that he knows nothing about, has no idea how to get to, but was told to attend or else – by someone who was obviously fraught and angry to the point of losing it. That’s the system we have now. That’s disability support and advice at the jobcentre on a tense afternoon.
I do wonder where the PCS really is on all of this. Getting very late in the day and all that.
Remember, though – sanctions are only one problem on this scene at the moment. They’re a very big problem and should be highlighted and fought, but there are other big problems as well. One of those problems is that people with support needs are being dumped in these jobcentres and to my eye anyway, jobcentres can’t cope. You get these days where everyone seems to lose it.
Here’s a little more evidence that the DWP and its work programme providers are perfectly aware that JSA jobsearch and signing-on regimes are not about helping people into work. At all. Those regimes exist only to force people through more and more hoops to keep claiming JSA.
In the recording below (made in mid-2014), you’ll hear a Reed work programme adviser tell me and Angela Smith that Angela needn’t worry too much about the jobs she selected to apply for in Universal Jobmatch, or whether or not those jobs were right for her. (Angela has a Master’s degree and now works as a support officer. She has cerebral palsy. She was signing on for JSA at the time of this meeting). Anyway – the adviser said Angela needn’t worry about the jobs she applied for in Jobmatch, because getting work wasn’t really the point of the Jobmatch exercise. The DWP didn’t care whether or not people got interviews and actual jobs when they selected jobs posted in Jobmatch.
“That’s not part of the remit at all,” the adviser said. All the DWP cared about was evidence that a JSA claimant had fulfilled their jobsearch requirements – that is, applied for an agreed number of jobs every week, or fortnight, or however often it was. You can even hear the guy say that he knew that another JSA claimant applied for a job as a sushi chef just to meet jobsearch requirements. The man had no training, or history in catering, but “he put it on there [chose the job in Jobmatch], because he was at his wits’ end as to what to put on there.” Cute. And you get the picture. It doesn’t matter if the person has a hope in hell of getting any of the jobs they find on Jobmatch, or even a job interview. That’s not the aim of the jobsearch and Jobmatch exercise. The aim of these exercises is to force people who claim JSA to go through the motions of applying for jobs to keep them in fear and in line. Continue reading →
