Now isn’t this charming.

On Thursday, I went again to one of the northwest London jobcentres to meet up with Eddie (named changed), the 51-year-old man with learning and literacy difficulties who I’ve accompanied to JSA signon sessions for coming up to six months. Eddie’s signon time changed last week and I met him at the jobcentre just as he came down the stairs from his appointment.

He was furious. He felt that he’d been threatened. He said the jobcentre had told him that his next sign on appointment would take place at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon, rather than in the morning as usual. Eddie told the jobcentre that he preferred morning appointments. It suits him. He finds that routine easier to manage. But that is too bad, it seems. Eddie said he was told off for arguing the toss about the new afternoon signon plan. He said the jobcentre made it clear that if he kicked up a fuss about afternoon signon times, he’d be forced to attend every week to sign on instead of every fortnight. No matter that absolutely nothing ever happens at his signon meetings. He’d just be forced to attend more of them and get no help more often. Great.

I hear this sort of thing too often now: people with learning difficulties, or mental health problems being threatened with some sort of backlash if they object to jobcentre regimes. Maggie (named changed), a woman in Northamptonshire who has a long-term schizophrenia diagnoses, told me that she was recently warned by the DWP not to say “Never” when she told the department that her partner Sean (named also changed), who has severe depression and Asperger’s syndrome, would never attend the work-focused interviews that the local jobcentre very much wants to make him attend (here’s that story and the letter that Sean’s local jobcentre sent calling him to such an interview). Sean is in the Support Group for Employment and Support Allowance. People in the Support Group for ESA are supposed to be exempt from all work and work-focused interviews, because of the severity of their health conditions. The idea that some people simply can’t work is clearly being eased out of the DWP, and society, altogether, though – people in Sean and Maggie’s situation are getting letters and phone calls “inviting” them to job-focused interviews. They know they’ll be asked again and that the ante will be upped in a serious way if they refuse. Maggie and Sean are already worried about that “Never say Never To Us” they got from the DWP. They wonder if there will be repercussions.

They have reason to worry. The DWP’s contempt for benefit claimants is often very poorly disguised. And let’s face it – there are times when it isn’t disguised at all. If you want to hear that contempt in full roar, just listen to this recording recently taken at a jobcentre group induction meeting for new JSA claimants:

As you can hear, throughout that meeting, one claimant kept interrupting and challenging the adviser who was in charge of the session. The problem is that the jobcentre didn’t seem to have a plan in place to deal with a disruptive claimant. In lieu of such a plan, the adviser just spat the dummy and yelled at the claimant. Which wasn’t much of a plan, really. Shrieking your head off generally isn’t.

The truth is that sometimes people are disruptive at jobcentres. People sign on for a range of reasons and they bring a range of behaviours with them. That’s just a fact. Professionals ought to be able to deal with it. They certainly ought to be abe to get whatever training they need to deal with it. People with problems sometimes exhibit challenging behaviour. Screaming back at them is not a great professional response. You’d expect the DWP to put plenty of resource into staff and schemes for dealing with challenging conduct in constructive ways. One constructive idea, for example, would be to staff jobcentres adequately – to pay for enough advisers to hold one-to-one induction sessions with new JSA claimants, as opposed to shoving ten or so new claimants into a group session that one person can disrupt. But no. New claimants are told they must attend group sessions because staff no longer have time to cover all information – “there is no way on earth that any work coach would have the time to go through all of this with you in one session,” the adviser in the recording above told that group of people. So. I think that the DWP’s main plan for the tense moments these days is to tool jobcentres up with security guards. God knows they are everywhere. I’ve sometimes been questioned by a line of three guards as I’ve accompanied people to their signon meetings.

I’ll tell you what I see. More and more, I think jobcentres and work programme centres are being used as dumping-grounds for people with learning difficulties, or people with mental health problems – people who once had services that were better angled towards even a basic idea of inclusion. When I first met them several years ago, Sean and Maggie – the couple I mentioned above – told me that they used to attend a local mental health support centre. They met at that centre, in fact. But somewhere along the line, they were told that they couldn’t attend any more. There wasn’t enough help to go around and the feeling was that they could cope on their own – or, at least, cope better on their own than other people who needed the service. Maggie once said a social worker told her to call the police if things at home ever got out of hand.

Eddie’s story is very similar. His mother used to work with employers to find him jobs. As a result, he had work for many years as a general kitchen and hotel assistant. But his mother died about ten years ago and he was made redundant a few years after that. He’s never found another job. He had a support worker a couple of years ago, but that person simply stopped turning up. Eddie was never sure why and he didn’t really know who to check with, or how to chase the person up. He’s recently been found another support worker – but that is only because people at the Kilburn unemployed workers’ group asked around and pushed the council until they found someone. It was down to volunteers at the unemployed workers’ group to help Eddie. There was nothing formal in place for him at all.

There is certainly nothing formal in place at the jobcentre. There’s nothing going on there at all that I can see. Eddie’s jobcentre adviser actually asked me last year if I could help him with his online job applications, because the jobcentre didn’t have the time or the staff to do it. The jobcentre sends him on courses from time to time – the idea being, I guess, that a one-off computer course with a so-called skills course provider will somehow plug a gap that should actually be filled by an adviser who liaises with employers for several hours each week on Eddie’s behalf. That sure as hell isn’t going to happen, though. Eddie’s signon sessions last five or ten minutes at most. Nobody’s once called a potential employer, or helped him fill in a job application form at the signon sessions I’ve attended with him in the last six months. Absolutely nothing seems to be changing there. After last Thursday’s signon session, Eddie and I did what we usually do after his jobcentre appointments – we went to the Costa on the high road and sat down to fill in yet another job application form together. Here’s a picture of the form we worked on. You’ll see that it is complicated and incredibly fiddly – a pain in the butt generally and an impossible ask for someone who struggles to read and write (the papers folded in the packet at the front of the picture are his signon appointment sheets):

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the *charming* welfare-to-work company Maximus. I expect to see a lot more people languishing at jobcentres once Maximus gets cracking with fitness to work assessments. Nick @Mylegalforum has a good article here about a green light to Maximus to “diminishing” the number of people in the ESA Support Group. Nick makes the point that the government won’t want those people found fit for work, or placed in the ESA work related activity group, because there’s no work for people in these situations and WRAG is useless and full to bursting anyway. I know exactly where people found fit for work will go: they’ll be dumped in jobcentres until they fall foul of sanctions regimes and then they’ll be ditched onto the side of the road and/or told to apply for ESA again. That’s our charming era. If you’re not able to work and/or not able to find work for yourself, you can kiss all hope goodbye. At best, your life will spent as work programme and work course fodder. Between times, you’ll be grinding your way around the revolving door out the front of Maximus.

Like I say, I’m already spending a lot of time with people in these situations – people who are long-term unemployed and have learning difficulties, or mental health problems and get absolutely no help on any front. Their support workers come and go as cash-strapped councils cut funding. Their day services have closed, or don’t have enough staff to cater for everyone who needs support. No adviser at their jobcentres can give them more than ten minutes at a time and god only knows what their work programme providers are doing – the provider appointments I’ve attended with people have only ever lasted about 15 minutes and have never gone much beyond a cursory “how’s it going?” from advisers there. I’ve been attending these appointments with people for over a year now and seen no action at all. Maybe I need to give it another year or something. As things stand, I have never seen any adviser ring up an employer, or set up a job interview, or fill in a job application form with someone who can’t, or explain to an employer how, say, a literacy problem can be managed. This is no longer even creaming and parking. This is parking people and then nailing them to the ground.

Anyway. That’s this government and social security, people – redefining the word Clusterfuck about once an hour.

Not everyone’s suffering, of course – Maximus is just about to launch itself into a lucrative contract to repeatedly find people who aren’t able to work fit for work and to put the fear of god into the rest. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but sounds a great little earner, for Maximus anyway. I’d prefer a system where people who needed benefits were assessed for benefits by their own doctors and given any help they required to find work if that is what they wanted, but what would I know. Instead, we have a system where we piss millions away to help companies like Maximus expand worldwide and where the DWP can threaten people with learning difficulties if they find afternoon signons a struggle. It is all complete shit.

You can find details of tomorrow’s day of action against Maximus here.