I got a note from the DWP FOI yesterday to tell me a response to an FOI request that I sent last month about deductions from Universal Credit for tax credit debt would be delayed.
Of course – that’s happened before and not just to me. The point I making today is that I can’t get anything from the department on any front. The press office wouldn’t give me even a one line response to use about a fortnight ago for a question about private companies which do or don’t run Universal Credit contact centres (the department sent me a list I had and then I had to send another FOI. I couldn’t understand why the DWP wouldn’t just tell me who ran the contact centres).
And then there’s the fact that people’s requests for their own benefits paperwork go unanswered by the department.
Don’t like it.
IDS has stamped his legacy of contempt on the DWP & Gauke has taken up the mantle, yet is dumbstuck by the indefensible mess he’s inherited. I predict that Gauke will walk, soon.
“Legacy of contempt” – well said. IDS should be before a justice, taking the rap for this whole bloody disaster. Anyone who creates a system which actually causes homelessness, illness & death needs to face a jury and then a long stretch.
A long stretch on the end of a rope.
God will save him. IDS has a direct line/VPN to the Almighty
I think the medical assessors should be tried for at least man slaughter when ppl die within a month of being found fit for work. They need to be made accountable for dispicable actions.
I am reminded of an early 2013 piece in the Guardian by Prof. Peter Beresford, Why welfare literacy is vital, in which he argued that “Lack of knowledge about state support services is putting the system at risk.”
That led to my presenting the author with a placard design, ‘Subpoena welfare-illiterate welfare reform minister’ that he had blown up to estate agent’s bill board size and that I accompanied as part of a display of disabled people’s messages to accompany a talk he gave at Brunel Uni that March.
Along the lines of Beresford’s kind of Social Policy course being devalued under ‘austerity government’, it seems clear now that for such government policy makers, ignorance of what they are doing is perhaps key to more blissful sleep. While I oppose the death penalty even for mass murder/corporate homicide, I do say that it can be good to make such ‘decision makers’ squirm with the realisation of what they are doing.
See also Steep rise in ESA sanctions. Swheatie says: “Now it’s not just the absence of winter fuel payments that can do sickness benefit claimants in.”
It’s not just FOI and other requests. I put in a complaint and after the usual nothing replies, they just stopped answering after I requested to escalate it to the next stage of the complaint procedure. I sent several letters to the Jobcentre none of which received a reply. I then found a thread on Rights.Net where some advisers were failing to receive answers to their written complaints and that it seemed to be common. I think contempt is a good word to use for the jobcentre, the staff that work there and the DWP as a whole. It seems to be the core value that inhabits them all. They genuinely are deserving of contempt in return.
This is a monumental thing and it needs to be escalated in a major way. Can take the traditional routes on case by case basis – ie complaints, contacting MPs, looking for lawyers for JR etc – but there’s a much, much bigger thing here of a department that needs turning over from start to finish. Have been looking for a lawyer in the last month for these things and getting nowhere.
Shama Chakrabati ?
Ten years ago in Community Care magazine there was and item Social workers rationing services: the unhappy gatekeepers. By Simon Heng.
In 2015, Oxfam was pilloried as being ‘too political’ in its ‘Perfect Storm: Zero Hours Contracts; High Prices; Benefit Cuts; Unemployment; Childcare Costs’ campaign against the slash and burn of ‘austerity’ government cuts.
I would say that with central government abandoning funding of local authorities by 2019, and of course the damage done to council funded services such as CABx and other vulnerable people’s services along the way, declining numbers of members of the helping professions are more witnesses of what the UN Disability Committee Chairperson described in August 2017 as a Human Catastrophe regarding this Government’s administration of disabled people’s services.
Now, in a report on Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group e-list, there is this regarding KUWG 6 November demonstration outside DWP HQ Caxton House [aka Cack House]:
“Rebecca — a nurse — spoke on the bullhorn quite few times, she told of the time a claimant had been sanctioned, such was his distress that he slit his wrists, she and her colleagues could not get through his despair to explain to him he had 4 days to tell DWP why he shouldn’t be sanctioned, in order get the decision overturned.”
The Nazi slogan at Auschwitz concentration camp, emblazoned above the gates was, “Arbetit macht frei [‘Work makes you free’].”.
Perhaps the current Government’s covert motto — aided and abetted by saturation coverage of tax haven stuff in mass media and the middle-class blinkers of 38 Degrees — is, “Further spawning of public ignorance is key to our democratic success.”? And maybe a touch of, “We don’t even want ourselves to know”?
(In 2010 38 Degrees did not even list Labour’s ‘welfare reform’ attacks on disabled people as a potential campaigning priority.)
“Perhaps the current Government’s covert motto — aided and abetted by saturation coverage of tax haven stuff in mass media and the middle-class blinkers of 38 Degrees — is, “Further spawning of public ignorance is key to our democratic success.”? And maybe a touch of, “We don’t even want ourselves to know”?”
Well said.
New placard posting: What is the point of public services that are democratically unaccountable?
I’m always amazed at the sheer arrogance of the DWP. A department not dealing with national security, as they seem to believe, but with the administration of benefits and pensions. Not responding to requests is a classic tactic of theirs. It just adds delay and difficulty to proceedings. Costs them nothing, and causes endless trouble. The DWP are under fire at the moment over Universal Credit and the general brutality of their system, so no doubt we can expect a lot more delays and general evasion.
NO
i am a disabled wheelchair bound lady with MS and a serious heart condition that is unstable resulting in daily angina attacks
no pay since Jan 17
no one helps or responds
MP, DAVID GAUKE,aNDREW RHODES OR THE PM
NEED HELP URGENTLY OR I WILL DIE
AS I CANNOT AFFORD ANY HEART OR DIABETES MEDICATION
The Rule Of Three Against The DWP
Always follow the Rule Of Three when dealing with the DWP:
1. Get your local MP into any complaint as soon as possible, particularly if they are Labour or other opposition party.
2. Whatever the DWP say as a first response, ignore this, and get the MP to refer the complaint to the Independent Case Examiner.
3. Whatever the ICE say as a first response, ignore this, and appeal it to Level 2.
This gives you the best chance of a reasonable result in a system heavily biased against the claimant.
New placard design: Placard: Tell DWP to FoI!
I am waiting for a complaint to expire after they sent a copy of my Mandatory Reconsideration letter to my neighbour, who opened it, read it and now can’t make eye contact with me, as he now knows how I came to have PTSD, (gruesome violent crime at work, making WRAG rather a damaging place to be). It’s headed of to the ICO after 28 days expire. No apology. Nothing.
It’s just dreadful. Like being in an abusive relationship with a narcissist, where the rest of the world thinks everything is fine and you’re dying inside.
Also waiting on my subject access request, and a FOI request asking, amongst other things for any paperwork pertaining to how they examined the conflict of interest in Maximus being both the employer of the person who recommends a face-to-face assessment, and the person who does the face-to-face assessment for ESA. Pretty big conflict, as they’re hardly likely to recommend against something that generates revenue.
Also finished my submission for the select committee, just in time. Suggested they disband the DWP, and joined it to the NHS and SS for a proper interagency programme for the workless. That way we’ll have more doctors etc on site in hospitals, able to do the assessments, suggest treatments and signpost therapies. And the assessments will be less iniquitous.