Here’s a little more on the petty tyrannies of the DWP, particularly when it comes to sick or disabled people. I give you this as yet another instance of the institutional disdain that trickles down, if you like, when a government gives strong signals that it’s fine to treat a group of people with utter contempt.
Last week, I attended a JSA signon meeting at Kilburn jobcentre with Linda (named changed). Linda is 51. She has a learning difficulty and a growing list of health problems as she ages: shortness of breath, swollen ankles and a pallor that at least one adviser keeps remarking on (“what’s happened to make you so pale?”), etc.
Because she is finding breathing difficult, Linda struggles to walk up stairs. Unfortunately for Linda, JSA signon meetings take place on the first floor of the jobcentre. Unfortunately too, a jobcentre security guard last week insisted that Linda must climb those stairs if she wanted to sign on and receive her JSA money. The guard also said that there was no lift – an absence which presumably would cause access problems for other disabled people at this jobcentre. I did ask about access for disabled people generally. The guard took a pass on that query.
“All the signing is on the first floor,” the guard said.
“I can’t get up there,” Linda said.
“She’s had a breathing problem,” I said.
“I’m afraid there’s no lift,” the security guard said.
“Last time I come here, I couldn’t bloody breathe,” Linda said.
“No, you have to go,” the security guard said.
So much for making reasonable adjustments for sick or disabled people.
This situation needed resolving, though, so I grovelled for a while. If Linda did not sign on, she would not receive her JSA money. “Tough shit” wasn’t really the right answer to this. In the end, the guard said I could go upstairs and ask Linda’s adviser if she could meet Linda on the ground floor for the signon session.
Had to grovel there, too. The adviser agreed to come down in the end.
I think these stories are important to post. You can just about see a jobcentre channelling government contempt for sick and disabled benefit claimants at these moments. Institutional disdain, you know. Some people have just enough power to make other people beg. Right now, they feel very comfortable making people do just that.
Twenty years ago, during the dying days of the last Conservative government, I worked for what was then the Employment Service. Of all the advisors we had, there were two who were bastards to our clients – a box clerk (a person who worked on the social security/UBO side) who was also a member of the National Front and was shunned by every other member of staff, and a “casual” (temporary) member of staff who worked in the JobCentre/JSC part and was convinced every service user was a shirker (she herself had been signing on for over two years before she joined us; we also shunned her somewhat, I’m afraid).
At the same time, on a register of about 5,000 people (there were two ESJs in my town), I knew only one person who was actually “swinging the lead”. We all disliked having to sign him as he knew all the tricks; we could find him jobs be he always had cast iron reasons not to attend the interviews. We all hated signing him on.
So that was 2 bastards in a JobCentre with about 50 employees (4%) vs 1 in 5000 claimants (0.02%).
I refuse to believe – because it’s implausible – that those figures have changed much in 20 years. I can quite believe that 0.02% of the able and well unemployed don’t want to work. Perhaps even up to 0.05%. I can quite believe that 4% of the staff – they’re now ex-Benefits Agency staff, the ex-Employment Service staff largely having been made redundant – are bastards too, perhaps rising proportionally to 7 or 8%.
So the stories of the hell that unemployed people are put through now when claiming – even worse should they have a disability or some other hurdle of any size to getting work (the hurdle is getting employers to employ those people, not getting them to apply… or at least that’s how it was 20 years ago) – scare me. It can only mean that this is what DWP management want to be happening. And if they want it to be happening, then that must be coming from the DWP itself, and thus from the minister.
That being the case… well, more power to your elbow, Kate, for the work you’re doing with individual claimants and with telling the rest of the world about what it’s like. And I’m frightened – terrified – that I should ever end up unemployed, in a way I never was even when Michael Portillo was the minister in charge of my job.
It requires only a visit to a Jobcentre to see these attitudes in action.
They are the direct result of the sweeping changes to the DWP brought in by Iain Duncan-Smith and his senior civil servants. Changes that were planned, step by step during the Blair years of Conservative Opposition. Developed in detail by his thinktank, the Centre for Social Justice. When IDS vowed that the unemployed were going ‘to play by our rules’. This is how the DWP see themselves, controlling not only the game, but the actual rules as well.
The steady rise of conditionality, the mass monitoring of claimants by the Universal Jobmatch system. The severe and ruthless sanction regime.
When Universal Credit is finally introduced, the government will have almost total personal control of every claimant within it. A vast pool of cheap labour, forced to undertake the most menial and poor quality of work. On zero-hours contracts, with permanent ongoing workfare now rebranded as ‘work preparation’.
As the new system will make no distinction between workfare, training or paid work, it will become increasingly difficult for the unemployed to be counted as unemployed in the official figures. Rendering these largely meaningless, and enabling the government to present this sleight of hand as a massive reduction in unemployment. Imagine if you had a prison where you counted only ten percent of the inmates , wouldn’t that help overcrowding ?
And on the back of all of these operational changes the new official attitudes to the unemployed, after years of quite deliberate media targeting.
The Skiver versus Striver. Good Citizen versus Bad. But all of it, from the coloured posters in the Jobcentre encouraging effort. To the surly indifference of the guards. All of it, quite deliberate.
Why couldn’t the lazy staff come downstairs to prevent this lady hurting herself with getting upstairs.This is mass murder.
Breathing problems, swollen ankles, pallor = chronic (or even acute) heart failure. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and the implanted cardioverter-defibrillator.
When IDS vowed that the unemployed were going ‘to play by our rules’.
The disabled are having their conditions ignored,being in receipt of a disability benefit (for now) still does not matter.They tell people to “go for it” when plainly they cannot,a learning condition diagnosed in early years must be wrong.
A learning difficulty is not the same as a learning disability but still is a disability,American trash use of English causes confusion.
There has been to much glamorisation of some disabilities if somehow there some lost outstanding talent people like Stephen Fry for example and his bipolar disorder as if blessed with talent. Gaynor Thomas sadly fell victim to this horrendous illness who appeared in his documentary.
youtube is full of them,sadly for many life is very different
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLYECIjmnQs
But there *is* a lift at Kilburn Job centre. WTF was this staff on about…?
Unless of course they turned that lift for staff usage only. Like they did with toilets. If so, that truly shows contempt towards disabled people.
The Public & Commercial Services Union published evidence of DWP manufactured corporate culture heartlessness in 2012: See the posters the government tried to ban.
It is definitely hard yards in some places. Also the security guards are especially hard work. Paid shit I suppose. And working for G4S