A short post on the state and petty humiliations:

Posted below is a list of questions taken from a recorded conversation between a woman affected by the recently-lowered benefit cap and a Basildon council housing options officer last week.

This woman is already in significant rent arrears because of the lowered cap. She went to Basildon council to ask what would happen if she couldn’t pay the arrears (the answers, which you probably can guess already, are at the end of this post). I went with her.

Basildon has an open-plan public services hub: council services, the library and the jobcentre all in one enormous ground-floor room. Security guards roam the place. You take a ticket and wait for your number to come up on a computer screen.

“There’s no privacy,” the woman I was with said when we got there.

She was right. There wasn’t. There were a few private rooms off to the side here and there, but you weren’t invited to use one. There were open cubicles all over the place across the floor. You could hear absolutely everything that was going on in the ones around you. At one point, we sat next to a guy who was explaining to an officer why he was struggling to pay his council tax. We might as well have been attending his appointment with him. We could hear every single word that he said.

Doubtless, people could hear every word said at our desks as well (we met at three different desks that day – two council, one jobcentre). Which wasn’t the best. Here are some of the questions that the council officer fired at the woman I was with. He didn’t keep his voice down particularly as he went through them. He read the questions from a list – one question after another in exactly this order:

– Are you pregnant? (The abruptness of that one took both of us aback)
– Currently or ever been in the armed forces?
– Ever been in social care?
– Any criminal convictions? Have you ever been in prison?
– Have you ever been street homeless?
– When you’re living on the street… do you know anyone who works at this council?
– Number of dependent children?
– Do you have any medical conditions?
– What income are you receiving?

Grim. The woman I was with had to answer them all. The answer about medical conditions was particularly personal.

You feel extremely uncomfortable at these points. It’s surely humiliating enough having to give this sort of information to the officer – often a complete stranger – across the desk. Knowing that anyone who walks past or even just turns their head can hear it all is doubly demeaning.

It happens all the time, of course. Heaps of council and DWP places are open plan. That doesn’t make it any better, though. It actually makes it worse. It means there’s agreement across the board that people who get state help forfeit any entitlement to the basic human courtesies.

No wonder people get furious. I find myself getting angry at these places and I’m not even the person being told to publicly reveal their life story.

Re: the What To Do About The Benefit Cap question we were asking: to cut a longish story short, the answer was that people either cover the rent shortfall themselves, or find somewhere cheaper to live with or without the help of the council with the homelessness duty. More on that one soon.