I wonder about this a lot these days.
I’ve posted the letters below to show again the deluge of mail, DWP demands for money, and bailiff and eviction threats received by people who have absolutely no money at all.
I want to give people an idea of the relentlessness with which debt is pursued and the way debt stacks up for people who have no chance of paying any of it. I’ve wondered before about the sort of endgames that the political class has in mind for people in these situations. Will we see lots of people in debtors’ jail? Permanent homelessness? A lifetime chained to unpayable fines? Deportation? Who can really say. I think something might have to give at some point. I certainly see a few people in this kind of shit.
The young woman I’m writing about in this post (and wrote about here) is facing eviction for rent arrears caused by a rent shortfall that she was never able to pay, bailiff threats for outstanding fines and mounting court costs that she can’t meet, and benefit deductions for a loan and supposed overpayment of a couple of hundred quid a year ago.
The debts grow and grow, while the money she has to repay those debts stays the same (she gets about £73 a week in jobseekers’ allowance, which she also must live off). This equation is clearly never going to add, but her debtors keep going for it anyway. This young woman has been homeless in the past. She’s had a very difficult domestic situation to deal with this year. The main point here, though, is that there’s no way out of these sorts of problems if people don’t have money to throw at them. It doesn’t matter why they don’t have that money, or whose fault it all is, or whatever the hell people want to say at this stage. If people don’t have the money, they don’t. And – that’s it.
Nonetheless, debts are chased incessantly. It’s as though debtors expect people who are in this kind of trouble to suddenly come into thousands of pounds. Or something. I don’t really know where those on the collection end really expect things to end up. One of the letters below is a bailiff demand for a travel fine and extra costs. A couple of weeks ago, the bailiffs turned up first thing in the morning at this woman’s flat to collect. Meanwhile, the DWP piles on the pressure with a barrage of letters about benefit deductions and fund repayments. These letters are almost impossible to follow most of the time. I like to think that I have a reasonable grasp of these things, but I just DO NOT understand some of the figures that the DWP arrives at with these calculations. Different totals are set for deductions – from month to month it seems at times. The deductions are taken from benefits at source. Sometimes, this woman has been left with about £40 a week to live on.
Here’s one of a number of recent eviction threats this person has received. For several complicated reasons, this young woman has a housing benefit rent shortfall of about £40 a week and rent arrears of more than £1600 because of that. The Housing Trust has since sent another note to apply for this woman’s eviction:
We’ve met with the trust and the council and will have a shot at sorting things out by applying for a discretionary housing payment. The young woman has been told not to get her hopes up on that score, though. So – yeah. Helpful.
Here is a bailiff’s letter demanding more than £700 for the travel fine (as I say, the bailiffs have since visited again in person):
Meanwhile, the DWP continues to deduct loan and overpayment money from this woman’s jobseekers’ allowance at source. No matter that she has the rent and arrears problems, and is facing eviction and homelessness. None of that appears to be factored in. Letter after letter arrives, advising her of these seemingly random amounts for deduction:
Here’s another one:
Plenty more where those came from, too.
A few weeks ago, I rang the DWP to explain the situation and to try and get some of the deduction rates reduced. The DWP agreed to cut one repayment amount by three pounds and the other by about six pounds. That frees up around a tenner. I suppose we should all be grateful for that.
I’m not sure what is meant to happen next. The DWP can spew out letters as often as it likes. Government can bleat on about scroungers and Taking Responsibility For Yourself as loudly as it wants. None of that changes the fact that people crash. It really doesn’t. I think we’d all know by now if it did.
- Thanks to the CAB adviser who got in touch last time I wrote about this. Advice was appreciated.
I too have been thinking about what their ‘end game’ is, I’ts totally mind boggling
I can only sympathise with this young woman, yet another target for these ruthless new policies. The government could stop all this any time they wanted, but they choose not to do so, because of their beliefs. Their ideology about how society should be run.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
George Orwell – 1984
It doesn’t make any sense to me in the end. Can’t get money out of people who don’t have it. And they really don’t have it. So this is all one ridiculous going-through-the-motions thing which I suppose ends in homelessness. If this person is evicted because of rent arrears, which is happening, I guess that is intentional homelessness.
“Can’t get money out of people who don’t have it.”
Because it’s not the money that they want. It’s our compliance & acceptance of subhuman treatment.
This is exactly how the stock market operates. The rich lenders constantly increase the debts on 3rd world countries which have no chance of paying them off. Because when a country, company or person is in constant debt, control gets exerted whilst our expectations get lowered. Queue in the 3rd world slave labour. See the parallel to the unemployed forced onto constant workfare or work carried out in prisons ie debtors jail?
Apparently, this works really well. For the rich.
Excellent blog, Kate. I really hope this woman gets some respite. The councils CAN write off outstanding debts in some cases. And discretionary housing benefit is aimed at people in complex circumstances. There was something called Local Welfare Assistance which destitute people can get from local councils. Might be worth checking out if you haven’t already.
It’s funny how Tough Love & Personal Responsibility measures never reach people crashing on the stock exchange.
Aside from occasional prison sentence for most blatant public wealth abusers like the Lehman brothers, the finance sector gets forgiven pretty fast once their debts get bailed out. All this without any fines or means tested “trader commitments”.
Yes – some people get bailouts a little easier than others…I usually think of the banks and their handouts when I see the DWP trying to bleed someone for a few miserable quid for a crappy loan like this. It’s all so much easier if you’re a bank in need of a helping hand.
That bailiff company Collectica is part of Capita, the same unscrupulous outfit that manages TV Licensing, whose main prey are single mothers and those on benefits. The 21st century touchy-feely name for the regime we live under is corporatism. In my day we used another term: FASCISM
Total Empathy, I too have bailiffs seeking £1851 for an original £700 bill that Housing benefit owes to Council Tax (agreed by two different courts) ? Its impossible to get the LA to talk sense about this and I’ve been trying for over 2 years!!
Hi, Kate
While preparing for my inclusion in a retirement party for Prof. Peter Beresford of Brunel University, including guests’ reminiscenses, I have just been re-acquainted with the opening sentence of a blog piece of Peter’s from January 2013 that gave the impetus to a placard wording from me.
The blog piece was headed Why welfare literacy is vital:
Lack of knowledge about state support services is putting the system at risk.
Given that investment banker David Freud was Welfare Reform Minister at the time — as he still is — and given the evidence manifested in his Telegraph interview of February 2008, Welfare is a mess, says adviser David Freud and developments regarding DF’s contribution to welfare reforms since, I soon came up with the placard working: Subpoena welfare-illiterate Welfare Reform Minister.
Anyhow, I round off this blog comment with the opening paragraph of that blog piece by one of Peter who was one of the founder members of Social Work Action Network. (Swan brings together social work practitioners and service users, academics and students to counter the twin influences of cuts and managerialism. Under cuts and managerialism and an excessive openness to the concept of ‘transferable skills’, the core values of liberating social work are largely ignored.)
“A frequent finding of recent government consultations is that very few people have an accurate understanding of what entitlements they have to social care – until they need to turn to it. They think it is the same universalist service as the NHS. Then when they need it, they often find they have very few entitlements at all. But this is perhaps only the most visible piece of an iceberg of ignorance about the welfare state. It is perhaps this ignorance which is putting the survival of a safe system of support for the population at especial risk. Given the growing numbers of older and disabled people in western populations like the UK, this is a particularly parlous state to be in.”
Yep I definitely think that people have a general belief that the safety net will be there if they need it – and that confidence is one of the reasons why the system can be degraded. It comes as a very great shock when people find that things are not as they thought.
I also think there’s a lot of – err, misinformation about who is being targeted. One of the reasons that I started making short videos was that I was occasionally talking to people who just really didn’t believe that disabled people – Independent Living Fund recipients in the instances I am thinking of – were being targeted for service cuts. People would say to me things like – “No, it’s not those people. Disabled people who need support will be supported, etc,” and I’d be saying – “well, you’re wrong. Support funds are being closed.” I sometimes think that people really don’t want to believe that people who really need supported will be targeted. It’s more important for them to hang onto the belief that government does the right thing on their behalf.
Sadly, and going on the numerous, utterly disgraceful comments on the internet about the current refugee crisis, I have to conclude that it is not ignorance that leads people to be complacent about the welfare state and the treatment of people who need to use it, but total and uncaring cynicism.
I don’t know if you watched the, very poor, programme about racism with Trevor Phillips in it, in which he tried, in classically Blairite fashion, to claim that he was partly to blame for the ‘backlash’ against racial equality, but the arguments in it made me think back to the 70’s and 80’s and attitudes then. Phillips was fundamentally wrong, and for once New Labour were right. The push to stamp out racism and stop bigotry in it’s tracks was a success, not a failure. It made people think, for the very first time, ‘maybe, just maybe, my attitude is wrong’. But then came the Tories…
Since 2001 the Conservative party have aggressively attacked ‘bogus asylum seekers’ and ‘multiculturalism’. These laid the seeds that were to help the Tories back into power.The Race card, when played by the Tories, as Thatcher did, has long been a big vote winner. As Browns govt floundered in the deluge of the economic crash, as unemployment rose, the Tories also started playing the anti EU migrant card. This, added to Islamophobia has seen racism rear it’s head, with UKIP being another beneficiary.
But alongside the race issue, the Tories have plugged the ‘scrounger’ myth, carrying it far further than the 1980’s and tarring the disabled with the same brush. This has been totally successful, and those who defend the unemployed, the sick, the disabled are increasingly labelled ‘whining lefies’.
Some people are shocked by the turn around, some like Phillips, are convinced that ‘Political correctness’ helped cause the current backlash against immigrants. But this is a fundamentally flawed argument. There wasn’t, nor ever has been, moves to protect those on welfare from abuse, yet these groups are targeted just as viciously, if not more so than migrants. These days, often literally.
So, why have people become so ugly once more? Sadly, all excuses aside, because that’s the way we are. We don’t have a good historical record of acceptance of migrants, of helping the poorest off, but we do have a long track record of being openly hostile to them.
You only conclude that for a brief, shining moment, that inner ugliness was put to rest, only for the right to dig it right back up again, and, like a zombie, it once more walks among us.
Hi Kate,
So sorry that this woman is going through all of this. It does make you wonder what the endgame is, because obviously, the new court charges for example are payable even if you have no income whatsoever: where are homeless people and others expected to magic up money from?
You have my email here Kate. I did say that I would like to help in some way. I haven’t got a lot to spare, but if I could send you a cheque to cash, you could get some shopping for her, which I believe wouldn’t be against the JSA rules.
Anyway, please consider this if it’s not too much bother for you, or if I could do something else.
My thoughts are with all of those in similar situations.
Sasson Hann
I personally believe that most of the driving force in the war against the vulnerable comes from the parasitic global corporations that ‘advise’ UK Government about how to privatise everything.
In the war against benefit claimants, there has been American health insurance company Unum that has carried on advising UK governments since it was Unum Provident in the early 1990’s and the name change to Unum that was cued by their having been declared fraudulent by US judges and declared ‘disability denial factories’. There has also been the global rise of workfare in the ‘welfare to work industry’.
And of course re immigration, far more people have heard the UKIP shit than have heard the facts of G4S systemic human rights abuses, say.
There has long been the custom in Government letters regarding how much benefit the claimant is to expect, that the letter says that amount the claimant will receive is both the amount they are entitled to and the amount that they need to live on.
What that boils down to in my view is that to those who lay down the law regarding entitlements etc think that the claimants are worth shit, I would argue.
I personally can anticipate that with all the benefit cuts that there are and the phenomenon known amonth councils, governments and private companies as ‘joint intelligence’ or ‘shared intelligence’ that more and more people denied benefits will be targeted with letters such as those outlined in Wembley Matters blog piece Police ‘call-in’ of South Kilburn youth seen as threatening and undermining justice principles.
I myself was summonsed in May 2014 to a DWP ‘Customer Compliance’ interview at the jobcentre and to bring with me my last six months’ bank statements. It turned out at that interview that the interviewer was not at all interested in my bank statements as presented but reported to me an allegation received from HMRC that there was a separate Co-operative Bank a/c registered in my name and at my address that accrued £800 interest in 2010/11; my McKenzie Friend from KUWG and I were told that it was up to me to prove that that bank a/c that HMRC alleged existed and that I had not declared to DWP did not exist.
My McKenzie Friend saved me a lot of trouble by having the active intelligence to walk with me to the Co-operative Bank branch that was 100 yards away and get them to verify by way of a check on their system that such an account in my name and at my address did not exist and never had existed. Thus we made it back to the jcp with evidence letter in hand to present to the ‘Customer Compliance’ interviewer and she was satisfied with that. Still though, it was in effect a case of ‘guilty until proven innocent’, and I was not offered information regarding the source of that allegation against me.
Yet I did not take up the matter with my MP, partly because the stress of that false allegation contributed to a stress-related illness that had me laid up with a virus for some weeks leaving me with a backlog of stuff to deal with.
And I recall instances from the times that my income was pegged at JSA levels without DLA where I experienced debilitating illnesses wondering how I would make it to the end of the month without bank surcharges and eviction.
Maybe some of those in Government and their corporate allies are more of a threat to society than those locked up for protection of the people?
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“Forty percent of people claiming Universal Credit skipping meals to survive, new research from the Trussell Trust reveals”
“One in five (21%) people were unable to cook hot food this summer as they couldn’t afford to use the cooker, while almost a quarter (23%) have been unable to travel to work or essential appointments because they couldn’t afford the cost of public transport or fuel, the charity says
The research finds almost two-thirds (64%) of Universal Credit claimants had to spend July’s first Cost of Living payment from government on food
This starkly shows the support package has not been enough to protect people from harm or tackle soaring bills, the charity warns, as it calls on new Prime Minister to urgently provide more support”
https://www.trusselltrust.org/2022/09/07/forty-percent-of-people-claiming-universal-credit-skipping-meals-to-survive-new-research-from-the-trussell-trust-reveals/