Yesterday, I was over in Oldham talking to Mike Kendrick from the South Chadderton foodbank. The South Chadderton foodbank is open on Mondays from 11am to 2pm.
He reckoned that about 50% of the people who came through the foodbank’s doors were there because they had been sanctioned by the jobcentre. A high proportion, I thought.
Needless to say, I have a big problem with government/DWP denials of any relationship between benefit sanctions and social security cuts, and foodbank use. One of the main reasons I find these denials hard to accept is that I keep meeting people outside jobcentres who say that jobcentre advisers tell them to go to foodbanks if a sanction/loan deduction/cut to money means they’re out of money.
So. There may not be a link between sanctions and so-called “welfare reforms” in the government’s mind, but there certainly is a link between all of these things in the minds of jobcentre advisers and people who sign on. There also seems to be a link in the minds of people who provide foodbank services.
More soon. Spending a lot of time talking with people in Oldham at the moment, so more updating next week.
DWP attempts to deny the link between sanctions and foodbanks, is just another tactic in their ongoing campaign to try and draw attention away from the dreadful cruelty of what they are doing. Using hunger, and homelessness as a weapon against claimants to punish them and force them to obey.
To break their spirit, and bring them to their knees in desperation and poverty. Ready to do whatever the DWP commands.
Taking the last crumbs of food away from children and the disabled is not an act of charity. It helps no-one to make them homeless, reduced to stealing or begging to survive.
But to pretend that there is no connection between sanctions and foodbanks is to show the contempt which the makers of our new society have for some of its most vulnerable citizens
It is an intriguing denial… I’ve actually sat in jobcentre meetings where an adviser has told sanctioned people to go to a foodbank and/or the council for emergency assistance, which includes foodbank referral… so, yes. I see a connection – I’ve seen that connection being unfurled before my very eyes, if that makes sense.
See also Disability News Service report DWP media reports ignore benefit deaths… and IDS resignation
Rewriting history by leaving it out altogether. Hm.
The food bank referred to is in Oldham, North-West England and in the year 2016. I know that such things vary over different parts of the UK and have also got worse in post-2010 ‘austerity’. (Before 2010, ‘austerity’ was a case of central government cutting local authorities’ spending money and then local authorities cutting or freezing the ‘grants’ by which councils paid for charities to administer services to vulnerable people; the charity I worked for on zero hours contract in 2005/6 had no training budget as a result, while we had a vast array of ‘service user needs’ under the remit of ‘adults with learning difficulties’. Meanwhile, before 2008 banks’ crash, Labour government said nothing to the banks about the need to reduce risk; they also failed to boost house building and thus conspired in laying the basis for unpayable mortgage debt and the current house price explosion.)
On a coach trip from London to Blackpool for one day’s attendance at a Green Party national conference in 2009, I detected more than an element of scapegoatism and potential leverage for seeding hate crime against benefit claimants on an advertising hoarding at one North-West England coach stop. It was basically saying, “If you supect someone is ripping off housing benefits, tell us!” Of course, areas where poor people rather than poverty and inequality portrayed and then regarded as ‘Public Enemy Number 1’ set the tone of things to come.
A few years after the 2010 General Election, a researcher into food bank usage told a London Social Work Action Network meeting that the majority of food bank users at sites he had seen in London were working poor. I believe that was before benefit sanctions became as prevalent as they are now, though the case probably still applies where the private rental property market has gone out of control and there are no posters extolling the public to report rogue landlords!
And of course, perhaps Universal Credit was piloted largely in key areas of deprivation first? Under Universal Credit, ultimately, if you are sanctioned on one benefit, you can be sanctioned on all your benefits including housing. “In Ashton Under Lyne, where Universal Credit is already being applied to everyone, low paid jobcentre staff are sent to Oldham for jobcentre interviews so they don’t have to be sanctioned by their immediate colleagues….”
Waged people, take note! Under Universal Credit, poor people are ‘all shit together’ and perhaps that is the truest meaning of the term ‘Universal Credit’, or, should I say, ‘Universal Sanctions’?
Of course,
“Waged people, take note! Under Universal Credit, poor people are ‘all shit together’ and perhaps that is the truest meaning of the term ‘Universal Credit’, or, should I say, ‘Universal Sanctions’?”
should read
“Waged people, take note! Under Universal Credit, poor people are ‘all IN shit together’ and perhaps that is the truest meaning of the term ‘Universal Credit’, or, should I say, ‘Universal Sanctions’?”
Just yesterday I talked to a woman leaving an Edinburgh jobcentre. She worked at a foodbank type scheme in her local area and had asked the jobcentre to refer people her way if they were sanctioned. The jobcentre refused. She told me most people who ask for help have been sanctioned, many with young children. She also told me that the jobcentre appears to be targeting people who don’t speak English very well. I heard someone say the same things 6 years ago when this all started. And the DWP are still getting away with it.
Those denials are hard to accept because they’re absurd lies. This government has managed to make anti-vaccination crankery and AGW ‘scepticism’ look respectable.
Here we are in 2022 and this:
Universal Credit claimants must widen jobsearch or face Sanctions
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60149016
When will the nightmare ever end?