This 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:
A sad day, but people certainly plan to be back. Off to parliament again next week. Pretty good result there last week:
From 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
Update 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.
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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.
Lobby details below from Disabled People Against Cuts:
There’s just over a week to go before the government closes the Independent Living Fund – the fund that disabled people use to pay for the extra carer hours that they need to live in their own homes.
Many ILF recipients use their ILF money to pay for the personal assistants who help them get to work and to college and so on. The government’s decision to go ahead and close the ILF makes a complete mockery of claims that government is keen to support disabled people into work and to stay in work. Actually – the government’s decision to go ahead and close the ILF makes a complete mockery of any claims that government is keen to support disabled people in any way at all.
In England, local councils are supposed to pick up the tab for that extra care when the ILF shuts on 30 June. Funding will be devolved to councils for just a year. As has been widely reported, that transferring of responsibility to councils has been a major mess. Some ILF recipients in England have been left to guess whether or not their councils will pay for the care that the ILF covered, especially in an ongoing way.
The #SaveILF Campaign and Disabled People Against Cuts ask all ILF users and campaign supporters to join a final public lobby of MPs this Wednesday to protest at the closure:
11am
Wednesday 24 June
Public Lobby, Houses of Parliament
Video: ILF recipients explain how they use their ILF funding to live in their homes and communities:
We’re all in it together – aren’t we? from Moore Lavan Films on Vimeo.
Wonder 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.”
There are now just two weeks left until the Independent Living Fund closes. What a shambles this closure is.
The ILF is a fund that severely disabled people use to pay for the extra carer hours they need to live independent lives. But never mind that: the government will close the ILF on 30 June – a monumentally unpopular and unnecessary decision which disabled campaigners have fought since the closure was announced in 2012. With just two weeks to go, the thing is in meltdown. Some ILF recipients in England still don’t know if their councils will pay for the care that the ILF covered, especially in an ongoing way (ILF funding in England will be devolved to local authorities for just a year). You can imagine the distress this is causing disabled people and their families. You can read about that here and here.
This 30 June closure was a coalition government decision out of the DWP, but you can forget about that lot taking responsibility for the distress and the mess. Government and the DWP have already washed their hands of it. The official line is that any problems with the ILF closure in England – and there are plenty, as I say – belong firmly to councils. We may as well note this for the record.
I asked the DWP about support it could offer to people who still hadn’t alternative care packages in place by 30 June, or who still didn’t know what would happen to their care when the ILF closed. The DWP didn’t quite say Don’t Bore Us With That, but it might as well have: from 30 June, the department said, “sole responsibility” in England for “former-ILF user” care lay with councils. No point making calls to the department in the meantime, either: “Any ILF user who has concerns about future funding from their local authority should contact the local authority directly.” Not Our Problem, in other words. Government has left the building. Disabled people and councils have been left to fight it out.
Disabled People Against Cuts and supporters will lobby MPs about the ILF closure on 24 June. Details here.
Video: Corrie stars back the Independent Living Fund:
Video: Disabled campaigners occupy Westminster Abbey in June 2014 to protest government plans to close the Independent Living Fund:
Picture: police stand on tents to stop disabled people setting up a Save The Independent Living Fund protest camp at Westminster Abbey last year.
Video: Independent Living Fund recipient Gabriel Pepper explains why he needs the extra carer hours that the ILF pays for. Gabriel has had three brain tumours. He is one of the ILF recipients who still isn’t sure if his council will meet all his care needs after 30 June.
Is 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
Update 4 June
This post is about the closure of the Independent Living Fund on 30 June.
The ILF was set up over 25 years ago to pay for extra carers for disabled people with very high needs. The ILF pays the wages of the personal assistants who help disabled people wash, dress, eat, go to college, get to work and go out to social events. In a lot of cases, the total cost of people’s care packages are met partly by their local councils and partly by the ILF. A number of ILF recipients require personal assistance around the clock. The government will close the ILF in just a few weeks’ time on 30 June. ILF recipients will rely entirely on their cash-strapped councils to pay for their care. The government insists that ILF money will be devolved to councils to cover the extra costs, but there’s considerable doubt about how long that will last and the money won’t be ringfenced by most councils. The Association of Directors of Adult Social Services is saying today that £1bn will be cut from social care services for older and disabled people in the coming year. You can see why ILF recipients are concerned about their futures.
The DWP insisted to me yesterday that “every effort has been made to ensure a smooth transition to sole local authority care and support for all ILF users by 30 June 2015.” I have serious doubts about this so-called smooth transition as well. As you can see from the interviews in the article that I posted earlier this week (the article is below), there’s nothing smooth about the way things are going for some people. Even at this stage, people are still waiting for their cases (and their eligibility for more council care funding to cover all their care costs) to be reviewed by their councils, or they’re still waiting to hear the outcomes from reviews. Some people have been told their care will be funded at current levels for short periods like six months and then reviewed, or that their care will be funded until their cases are reviewed, whenever that is. A couple of people I’ve spoken have been told that their funding should be met for a year from 30 June, but that they have no idea what will happen after that. People say that they are feeling extremely anxious as they wait to hear what will happen next and for their cases to be reviewed.
I wonder again why the government insists this fund is closed. The ILF hasn’t taken new applicants for five years, so the government and the DWP could simply have left existing applicants to it. There was no need to go after people in this way. Only about 17,000 people receive ILF funding. It’s hard to understand why the coalition government went to such lengths to target that small group, or why the new administration insists on going ahead with the closure and putting people through all of this. The stress that this mess has caused for people in the three years since the last government announced the ILF would close has been unreal – and a human rights violation, I would have thought. The stress goes on as people try to work out what will happen after 30 June and how long any support they’re offered after that date will last.
I’ll add to this blog as things go on this month.
Some more updates from the last few days:
Mark Williams, who lives in Bristol, says that the council hasn’t carried out his review yet. He says he’s been told that his funding support will continue until that review is done. In the meantime, he waits. “I have very little confidence how it will all work,” he says. “Many people are very worried.” (Mark appears in this short video, where he talks about his work and life and the ILF):
We’re all in it together – aren’t we? from Moore Lavan Films on Vimeo.
One recipient in Northeast London has told me that his care needs were assessed by his council just this week. The assessor told him that the council would try to help, but that ILF funding wasn’t ringfenced at his council, that people had to argue for care and that ultimately, council funding decisions are made by a relevant panel. He felt that the assessor was on side, but must now wait for the panel decision.
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Original post – 2 June:
There is confusion all over with just a few weeks until the Independent Living Fund closes. It’s looking more and more like disabled people who rely on the ILF for care funding are on course for a very bad deal:
In just under a month, this already-rotten government will close the Independent Living Fund.
If you had some idea that the Tories planned to keep a safety net for people who need it, the ILF closure should permanently relieve you of that idea. The ILF is a fund used by profoundly disabled people to pay for the extra carer hours that they need to live as independent adults in their own homes. The fund pays the wages of the personal assistants who help disabled people wash, dress, eat, go to college, get to work, make their way to social events and all the rest – the everyday activities that everyone else expects to takes part in because they want to and they can.
Needless to say, the Tories want to put an end to that independence (and to disabled people altogether, on this evidence). The ILF closes on 30 June 2015. I’ve been speaking to ILF recipients in the last few days. People still have no idea what will happen to their care packages after 30 June. They are not at all sure that their local councils will pick up the costs of the care that the ILF has paid for to date. One ILF recipient, Anne Pridmore, just told me that her council has agreed to meet the cost of her carers at ILF levels until October – but that the council will use the months between July and October to try and wean her off her need for carers and teach her to use assistive technology as a sort of replacement. “No amount of assistive technology is going to help me get on and off the toilet on my own,” Anne said.
The government says it will devolve ILF money to councils in the first instance – but there’s no guarantee that money will be devolved for long and/or at decent rates (I’d personally put my last pound on the exact opposite happening, given this administration). Neither is there any guarantee that councils will ringfence devolved ILF funds for social care. Many disabled people use ILF money to pay for extra carer hours that their already cash-strapped local authorities can’t afford and won’t be able to afford when councils take further funding hits. That leaves disabled people people with two very unsavoury choices (and remember this – if you’re not disabled at the moment, but become disabled, these will be your choices, too, unless you are very rich). People can either continue to live at home and rely on whatever care hours that council care departments can spare, or they can consider living in carehomes – and that’s assuming there are carehome places available, which I absolutely would not assume.