A few thoughts on Damian Hinds’ claims that jobcentres aren’t needed because more and more people claim benefits online, because I feel like having a rant on this one.
This line from government – “people don’t need face-to-face services because they can easily access benefits on the internet,” makes me absolutely furious. It is deceitful. Very.
The truth is there’s a whole group of people who can’t – and so don’t – use computers at all. They are entirely unable to make or manage online accounts of any description. They find completing online forms impossible. In my direct experience, quite a few people struggle to read and write as well.
I am constantly struck by the number of people I meet in the course of my work who have serious literacy difficulties. We all know the problem exists, but it is still unsettling when you experience the real-life extent of it. I’m better at picking up on this than I was. Some people tell you about their about their literacy struggles directly. Others speak about the problem in a sort of code. People will ask you to read and/or fill in forms for them – they’ll speak while you write. Others will say that they can’t fill in a form, or look a webpage right then, because they forgot to bring their glasses. That happens quite a lot. You start to get the drift when you meet with people on different occasions and realise they say the same sort of thing every time.
One thing is for sure – you have a much-reduced chance of claiming benefits online, or managing a web-based jobsearch if you struggle to read, write, or use a computer and have nobody to ask for assistance.
God knows I’ve seen that plenty of times. Readers of this site will know that I’ve documented people’s computer and written literacy problems in the past few years as they’ve tried to make benefit claims, or carry out the DWP’s exacting jobsearch requirements online.
Filling in job applications can be challenging enough. Here’s a Morrison’s job application form filled in by Eddie*, a man in his 50s with learning and literacy difficulties who worked as a kitchen assistant for years and wanted another job, but was not likely to find one given his age and declining health. I wrote the words Eddie wanted in his application on my notepad. He wrote them on the application form like this:
In this post, I talk about Linda*. She is in her 50s and also has learning and literacy difficulties. Last year, her jobcentre closed her JSA claim when she missed two jobcentre meetings because she was too ill to walk (that was at Kilburn jobcentre, fyi). I ended up filling in the online form to sign her up for JSA again. She was not able to do it.
An employment minister’s claims that most benefit applicants happily apply for and manage benefits online masks a monumental problem of exclusion. I meet people who have abandoned all hope of applying for or keeping benefits, even though they very clearly need to. Complex application forms, intrusive and judgmental staff and constant rejection (particularly for housing help) are all reasons for this. Problems with reading, writing, using computers and just understanding and meeting the DWP’s convoluted requirements are often also high on the list.
And sure – the service people get at jobcentres these days is often terrible, but that’s because staff and the service have been run into the ground.
I really have lost count of the number of times when jobcentre advisers have told me that nobody has time to help people in need with job application forms, or calls to employers, or even to sort general problems out (the most recent was just a couple of weeks ago).
There’s certainly nobody around to help applicants get through the DWP’s own dire benefit application processes – to fill out the DWP’s own online benefit forms, or to sort out the endless problems people have when they’re desperately trying to make a Universal Credit claim. People who want to make an Employment and Support Allowance claim are simply given a number to call. Nobody at the jobcentre will do that for them, or help them fill in an ESA application form.
People need more face-to-face help, not less. Less is what they get, though, and I find it VERY hard to believe that’s going to change, no matter how government finesses closure news with tales of new work coaches and support, and god knows what else. The people I work with are not considered good job prospects. They won’t get much input from Damian’s supposed incoming army of work coaches, mark my words. They have been abandoned, very likely forever. Like I say, I keep meeting people who have given up applying for benefits at all.
When the likes of Damian Hinds blather on about people making and managing benefit claims online, they permanently exclude a whole group of people who can’t and don’t do that. Suppose that’s the whole point.
Yup and double yup – and we aren’t even half-way into UC yet.
A few things I learned about it recently:
If the DWP sends you an email, by law you *must* have got it – but when you send them an email, they can say they haven’t got it until it’s registered ‘on their system’ (whatever that means)
All requests have to be made in your UC ‘journal’ – and you just have to hope that a person reads it. Current experience is that no one does.
People who claim the carers allowance element of UC will not be able to also claim for disability (how many people do we know who are both disabled people *and* carers?).
The rules are changing now so that even if you were overpaid due to a mistake by the DWP, you still have to pay the money back.
Those are just a few, very few things in store …
Barb wrote:
“If the DWP sends you an email, by law you *must* have got it – but when you send them an email, they can say they haven’t got it until it’s registered ‘on their system’ (whatever that means)”
This has an impact much wider than the individual case concerned when government talks about the need for their reforms being ‘evidence-based’.
‘Digital jobcentres’ is just a further cost-cutting and service-cutting measure. In the early noughties, Labour government changed the system from mainly paper-based forms to a system of call-centre ‘helplines’. Thus in 2004/05, 21m calls to Jcp helplines went unanswered. I read elsewhere in late 2006 that that 21m callls amounted to 44% of all calls to Jcp helplines, but cannot find reference to that now. Worse still though was the percentage of calls to the DLA/Attendance Allowance helpline.
Under the system outlined by Barb, the DWP ministry — if ‘ministry’ is the correct word for it — will go on unimpeded in their bullshitting as vulnerable people become more and more vulnerable and isolated, not even recognised as statistics.
And at yesterday’s Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group meeting, we discussed closure of Neasden Jobcentre and disability testing centre — the buildings are being demolished for ‘development’ — and the closure of Kilburn Jobcentre. That will all make it more difficult and excruciating for claimants with a Claimant Commitment to get to a more distant jobcentre, and more easy for the Claimant to be sanctioned.
Ironically, as John Pring reports, there is Fresh evidence that DWP bars email communication from disabled claimants.
Or might it be just plain ‘setting disadvantaged people up for failure’ rather than ‘irony’?
“We don’t email claimants as a matter of course due to the potential risks these pose to citizens and DWP.
“In addition DWP must operate within its legislative framework and follow our business processes including records management. Therefore email correspondence must be carefully managed.”
As piss poor excuses go, this is right up there,
That is awesome, isn’t it. Wtf does that even mean.
Pity the records management concerns don’t extend to taking note of PIP applicants’ medical information. Etc.
And on top of this I’m just watching Countryfile and there is a section about people in rural.. and not so rural areas, that barely have an internet connection as the signal is so poor. Couple that with those who cannot for whatever use a computer, have learning difficulties and any other problem that prohibits them from using a computer, and what is the solution.. a sanction ??
This is just another way to make people disappear from the Government figures as long as you don’t show you don’t exist. Problem solved.
A lady jobsearching in my local library the other day asked me
‘How do I put the two dots after the http ?’. ( She meant of course the colon, for a web address). So I showed her how to use the shift key. She was amazed !
It’s a fallacy to assume that everyone is computer literate. Many people have been left out of the internet revolution. They don’t use smartphones, nor are they online at home.
Forcing everyone to claim online acts as yet another inconvenient barrier between benefits and claimant. A barrier that not everyone will be able to cross.
It also means that claimants can be dealt with more impersonally, at third-hand, through the medium of a machine. And all of it quite deliberate, part of the new reality for benefit claimants. Difficulty of access, complication, and official reluctance.
‘Think tank’ Reform UK talk about digital public services, including digital jobcentres.
Maybe they store their humanity and grasp of what society means in a cloud? It’s disadvantaged people that then ‘come down to earth with a hell of a bump’.
Given that this UC agenda is all about witch hunting and surveillance, I’m inclind to think that’s the other reason they wanna close job centres. Even easier to sanction people if you literally never have to look them in they eye, isn’t it. See this FOI request made by Ian..
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/universal_credit_telephone_inter
Good questions he asks (most of which were literally ignored) which are especially pertinent in light of the planned job centre closures. Ian is alluding to the ‘interviews’ on your job search that typically happen across the desk every two weeks and will now happen over the phone instead. He asks if these telephone interviews are recorded by DWP – but gets no answer.
I’d be looking at recording those phone interviews myself.
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What of all those who are by law not allowed to go on line, there are many people who have rightly or wrongly been found guilty of cyber crime, who are now not allowed to use a computer of any kind that is on line enabled?!!!!
Damian Hinds’ contact details:
Parliamentary
House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA
Tel: 020 7219 7057
Email: damian.hinds.mp@parliament.uk
Constituency
14a Butts Road, Alton, GU34 1ND
Web & Social media
Website Website: http://www.damianhinds.com/
Computer skills in the general population are pretty poor unfortunately, this article by Jakob Neilson makes sobering reading in light of the idea of benefit claims going completely online.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
There is setting people up for failure, and there is setting benefit claimants up for penalties for claimant error.
How about penalising Government policy makers for their culpability? How about starting with investment banker turned ‘welfare reform guru’ turned Tory life peer and 2010-2016 Welfare Reform Minister? He gave the bold assertion in 2008 that Incapacity Benefit claims were assessed by the claimants own GP and that the GP had vested interests in keeping on the claimant’s good books.
The then CEO of Child Poverty Action Group said in response to Freud’s ignorance of IB testing procedures, “Ministers will surely be alarmed that the man charged with major reform of the welfare system and family security rights gets basic facts wrong about benefits that he could find out in a second with a Google…”
Freud further asserted in the same Telegraph interview in which he had maligned GPs and claimants alike: “We can pay masses – I worked out that it is economically rational to spend up to £62,000 on getting the average person on Incapacity Benefit into work.”
Of course, that was before the 2008 banks crash became the brain child of such investment bankers, and before Freud’s ‘economic reality’ gave way to the corporate homicide committed through the agency of medical professionals hired by Atos, Maximus and Crapita being rewarded for lying.
New Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group blog post: DWP ministerial nominations and equal opportunities?
Visiting the DWP website online just now about another matter, I noticed that there are consultations out on the future of a number of jobcentres.
You can see them listed via clicking on the search text future of jobcentre
I have just received a letter today which says my pip has been stopped .I can not read I can not do computes so can some one please let me know how I am meant to fill in the forms this is being written by someone I know. So can I charge the DWP for my my form filling in where do I go from here