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Monthly Archives: March 2018
Ten week Universal Credit start delay, rent arrears as a result, advance loan repayments, tax credit debt…How debt is built into Universal Credit
The excerpts below are from another interview I recorded last week at Oldham foodbank. I’ll post the full transcript when I’ve finished it.
The interview below was with an Oldham woman called Michelle, 38. Michelle had two daughters aged 13 and 17.
I post this to make the point again that Universal Credit is designed to start claimants off in debt and to keep them there. People are utterly powerless within that. They feel that they can’t fight or negotiate with the DWP.
Michelle applied for Universal Credit in October last year. She had to wait about ten weeks for her first payment (she’s also still waiting to hear the outcome of a Maximus medical assessment which she took at that time).
That long wait for Universal Credit had the usual devastating knock-on effects – the knock-on effects which push Universal Credit claimants into debt from the off.
First problem: while Michelle was waiting for a first UC payment, she went into rent arrears (she rents a place from First Choice Homes at £330 a month). She is now paying those arrears off at about £20 a month. That money comes out of her Universal Credit.
Second problem: because of the delay to the start of her Universal Credit, Michelle had to take out a Universal Credit advance loan to cover costs. She’s paying that back now at about £40 a month. She said she took out a second loan to cover costs as well.
Third problem: Michelle’s child tax credit claim was moved to Universal Credit and the DWP when she made her Universal Credit claim. Like a number of women I’ve interviewed now, Michelle was informed out of the blue that she had been overpaid child tax credits and would have to pay the money back. Without warning, the DWP started to deduct nearly £50 a month from her Universal Credit. There was no negotiation, or discussion with Michelle about these deductions, or about amounts she could realistically afford to pay while still supporting her two kids. The money was simply removed from Michelle’s Universal Credit.
I’ve heard that story time and time again. It’s obscene. These are people in financial hardship. They have children. They can’t make a case with anyone. They’re not even invited to make a case. Nobody wants to hear from them.
I’m making a simple point here, but I’ll make it again and again.
With its delays, loan culture (people in hardship must apply for advance loans while waiting for their first UC payments and then pay that money back) and these random, unexpected deductions for debts from people’s benefit accounts, Universal Credit is designed to ensure that people who have no money start their benefit claims in debt to the state and under real pressure. They are forced to take out advance loans, because their first payments are delayed for months. They are forced into rent arrears while they wait for their first Universal Credit housing costs payments. Money is deducted from their Universal Credit accounts without warning or discussion.
People’s powerlessness in this is disgusting, as I say. They have no choice but to follow the DWP’s line. Organisations such as the DWP have total authority in these scenarios. There is something very disturbing about this. We should all find it disturbing – a government department’s magisterial dismissing of and disinterest in those people who most rely on it.
I asked Michelle if she’d talked to the DWP about reducing some of the repayment amounts, or if anyone had talked to her about manageable amounts before actually taking the money from her.
She said:
“Oh, no, no, no. They just tell you. They don’t ask. They don’t discuss it with you. They just tell you,”
and:
“Just don’t think it’d make a difference really [ringing the DWP to negotiate repayments]. It would just make me worry more…And I suffer from stress and anxiety and panic attacks so…it’s just hard,”
and:
“I just can’t get used to it. It’s just so hard. They should tell you they’re going to do it [deduct money for debt repayments] but they didn’t… because a week before you get paid, you can go onto your [Universal Credit] journal and it tells you how much you’re getting that month. I went on that month and it just told me they were taking it out.”
I wonder why we allow this bullying. The world is run by sociopaths. This isn’t about deciding whether people are deserving or not deserving of support, or whatever the hell it is that policy thinks it is doing. It’s about the state declaring open season on people who claim benefits. They’re the acceptable targets. The normal rules of courtesy or even basic civil human interaction don’t apply.
When the stress of applying for disability benefits is dangerous to disabled people’s health…
Food for thought, as it were:
I went to Oldham foodbank last week.
One of the people I talked with there was Jeanette, 53.
Jeanette said she’d had a stroke in 2009. She used to receive Disability Living Allowance, but like most DLA recipients, was recently told by the DWP that her DLA payments would end and that she needed to apply for the Personal Independence Payment.
She applied for PIP and went for the medical assessment for PIP. She failed her assessment by just a few points. Her PIP application was declined.
I asked if she had appealed this decision – if she had asked for a mandatory reconsideration of the decision not to award her PIP and/or if she had gone on to file a full appeal.
“No,” Jeanette said. “It’s too stressful.” Specifically, Jeanette was worried that the stress of filling in appeal forms and sourcing more medical information would lead to another stroke. “I’ve got to think of my health,” she said. “I just rely on family and friends to get me around…since my stroke, I’ve found it bloody hard to walk… up and down my right side it’s affected the right side of me and the speech, that goes, doesn’t it?”
This is a common story, as many people will know. I can’t tell you how many sick or disabled people I’ve talked to over the past few years who decided not to apply for disability or support benefits, or to appeal negative decisions that they might successfully have overturned, because they were too unwell to cope with our dysfunctional, ridiculously bureaucratic and stressful benefit application and appeals processes.
In other words – people are too unwell to pursue the support that we are supposed to have in place for people who are unwell. Anyone with experience in this area knows this, of course. People know that government separates people from their benefit entitlements by presenting them with a series of soul-destroying bureaucratic hurdles.
Sure, people can try and find welfare advice and support, but often, that’s just another challenge that people could do without. So they do without.
Let me tell you how useless councils are at answering questions about homelessness, intentional homelessness and threats to separate families. I give you Barking and Dagenham…
I post this article as an example of torture by council.
I want to show those who don’t generally have the pleasure how evasive and uhelpful councils are when approached for information on topics such as homelessness and intentional homelessness. They drag non-answers and the silent treatment out FOREVER.
It’s a miracle I haven’t kicked in a town hall door yet.
With that in mind, let’s go to Barking and Dagenham:
As readers of this site will know, I’ve written recently about a woman who was evicted from her Barking and Dagenham flat last year. She had rent arrears of several thousand pounds.
She has three children under 12.
The woman says her housing benefit stopped and rent arrears grew, because she had trouble registering a JSA application.
She, the council and I have spent ages arguing about whose “fault” this was. Fact is it hardly matters. Pretty much EVERYONE I talk to these days is in serious rent arrears. That’s the part that matters – the fact that so many people have housing, rent and eviction problems. I’ve got an inbox full of emails from people who can’t afford housing, or who’ve crashed into debt and conflict when rent problems have arisen. I inevitably find that a council’s primary concern is to make sure that it is not blamed for such problems. A council’s main aim is to rush to prove that the fault is entirely the tenant’s. I’m sick of this. Why even bother to sift through a small corner of the wreckage at this point in the national housing disaster? Council fingerpointing doesn’t solve the core issues (I get to these core issues as i see them later in this post).
By the time the woman in the story and I talked in January, the family had serious problems.
The woman and her kids were homeless. They were sofa-surfing between her mother’s flat (which itself was temporary accommodation) and a friend’s place. Eight people were living in the mother’s temporary accommodation when I visited in February. The eight people shared one toilet and one bathroom. Two of the kids slept on airbeds in their grandmother’s room. The third child slept on a rollout mattress on the floor in another room with two adults. The kids commuted to Barking and Dagenham to school. I need hardly mention the effect that these arrangements will ultimately have on the kids’ schooling and life chances, etc.
There was more.
In a letter to Barking MP Margaret Hodge, the council said it would likely decide that this woman had made herself intentionally homeless.
The council also said that if it found the woman intentionally homeless, it wouldn’t house her. It would, however, refer the kids to Children’s Services (you can see that paragraph here). The woman took this to mean that Children’s Services might separate her from her children. Everyone who reads such sentences thinks that. Needless to say, this sort of text makes people even more reluctant to contact a council to discuss housing problems. A threat of referral to Children’s Services works as a form of gatekeeping. It is disgusting. I see it time and time again these days. Councils insist they’ve tried to contact people to help sort problems out. They also send letters which guarantee people will do anything BUT get in touch.
Which brings me to the core reasons for rent arrears which I mentioned above.
I find there are two main reasons why so many people end up with serious rent arrears. Both need addressing on a national scale.
The first is very simple. People don’t have enough money. They can’t afford rent, LHA shortfalls and/or rent arrears. They don’t have £2000 (or £200 for that matter) to throw at problems such as stopped, delayed, or sanctioned benefits, or to bridge gaps while benefit problems are fixed. They’re already in debt to the public sector for council tax arrears, court fines and DWP loans. God knows I’ve written about that. Let’s not forget either that benefit problems can take MONTHS to fix, because DWP and council bureaucracies are so often outrageously dysfunctional. Arrears grow and grow as problems drift. Continue reading
Getting inside Universal Credit: callout to #UniversalCredit claimants in the Northwest and Northamptonshire
To Universal Credit claimants in the Northwest and Northamptonshire:
As part of ongoing news stories we’ve done and campaigning on Universal Credit problems, journalists Natalie Bloomer, Charlotte Hughes and I want to attend Universal Credit meetings at jobcentres and to speak to more Universal Credit claimants about their experiences claiming UC.
We want to stay in contact with people who claim the benefit, to record people’s experiences in navigating the system and how/if problems are handled by the DWP.
We also want to accompany UC claimants to jobcentre and claimant commitment meetings if possible, to record those meetings and report back on people’s experiences.
Between us at the moment, we can attend meetings in the Northwest and Northamptonshire, and meet with people in those areas. As things continue, we may be able to travel further afield.
If you live in those areas, claim UC and are interested in talking with us, you can contact us by using the contact details or form on this page.