Monthly Archives: May 2018

Don’t care if you have to pick your child up from school. You must attend the jobcentre so we can watch you apply for jobs you won’t get

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Another story from recent leafleting outside Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity:

JSA and Universal Credit claimants say the jobcentre is presently forcing claimants to attend the jobcentre at least once a week to sit at computers and apply online for job after job. Jobcentre advisers watch while they do this.

People say they weren’t told why they had to attend these sessions in the first instance. They were just instructed to get to the jobcentre at a set time, or else.

Such regimes are not new. Most people who sign on are forced into these compulsory attendance activities. I interviewed people at North Kensington jobcentre who had to attend the jobcentre every single day to sign on. It really is Big Brother stuff – the DWP forcing claimants to a location where they can be seen. Can’t be long until government decides that people who sign on should be tagged.

None of this is about helping people find work, of course. It’s about a government department standing over people who are already trapped.

At these compulsory onsite jobsearch sessions, people just sit at computers and send off one job application after another. They literally never hear back about any of them. Often, they don’t know if the jobs they’ve applied for actually exist. People have to engage in this perfectly meaningless activity on work programmes and at work courses as well. I’ve sat with people as they’ve done it.

“Petty tyranny” is the phrase.

The depth of this pettiness (if there is such a thing as deep pettiness) never ceases to amaze. Jobcentres find any excuse for it at any level.

At Stockport recently, I spoke with one woman who’d just started these compulsory attendances.

She was on edge as it was. Her son had autism. His ESA had been stopped. So had her carer’s allowance and housing benefit. She was signing on for JSA to try for some income.

Now, she had another problem.

Her jobcentre adviser had set her next mandatory jobsearch-at-the-jobcentre session at exactly the time when she had to collect her ten-year-old daughter from school.

She said the jobcentre knew perfectly well that she had a schoolage daughter, but refused to change the time for the compulsory session:

“I’ve got to come here at three o’clock – but how am I supposed to pick my daughter up? They [the jobcentre] don’t care.

This is the only jobcentre [in Stockport]. If I walk, it will take me about 45 minutes. It took me an hour today on the bus, because of the traffic. What I’m going to have to do is take my daughter out of school early to come here. She’s missing out on her education.”

I’ll have to make some excuse up [to tell the school].”

I have a great many conversations like this with benefit claimants: stories about the DWP making already difficult situations even more difficult for people in agonising ways. Still, the DWP gets away with it.

This woman had problems enough. She was appealing the DWP’s decision to stop her son’s ESA. She was trying to sort out problems with his PIP and carer’s allowance.

Now, she had to drag her child out of school, and lie to the school about the reasons why, to get to a jobsearch session that in itself was pure charade. Non-attendance at that session would very likely mean a sanction.

This incident may sound small, but it absolutely wasn’t. It was part of a picture. Once the DWP has people, it never stops putting the boot in. Every part of their lives is fair game.

All hail the DWP – actively making it near-impossible for people with no money to start or keep work

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Talked to two people about the above while leafleting with Stockport United Against Austerity at Stockport jobcentre today.

The first woman had just got a job as a careworker – but the jobcentre wouldn’t pay £60 for the fastrack CRB check she needed. With that fastrack CRB check, she could start work in about a fortnight. Without it – she wasn’t sure what would happen.

That £60 was a lot to her – “it’s about a week’s JSA,” she said. That kind of money is make or break for a lot of people. This woman was heading into the jobcentre to argue the toss again.

The second woman was in part-time work. She needed Personal Independence Payment for support because she had severe epilepsy. She was finding it impossible to get PIP, though. She’d had a lifetime Disability Living Allowance award, but government, of course, cancelled lifetime DLA awards and forced those DLA recipients to apply for PIP.

She made a PIP application – and had been waiting three months to find out whether or not she’d receive PIP. She was still waiting. The DWP had told her the wait would be longer. The stress of the wait and not having enough money was making her epilepsy worse. She’d had to cut her hours down, because her health was deteriorating badly.

So it goes at this end of austerity. Government likes to say that anyone who signs on is a loser and a wastrel by definition. In fact, government and the DWP play an active role in making sure that people who have nothing crash out entirely. It really does feel like that.

Mental health problems – but benefits sanctioned. In hospital with asthma – but benefits sanctioned. No money – but benefits sanctioned. ENOUGH.

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On benefit sanctions:

Leafleting on Friday at Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity, I spoke at length with two (more) people who have been left destitute this year by benefit sanctions.

Craig was in his 20s. Anne was 50 (I’ve changed both names).

Craig was a Universal Credit claimant. Anne received jobseekers’ allowance.

Craig said he’d been sanctioned twice this year. His current sanction would run into June. He said he was getting about £30 a week to live on.

Anne was trying to survive on hardship payments of £40 a week. Her sanction was from March until June.

Both Craig and Anne had appealed their sanctions. Both had lost their appeals.

This Just. Never. Ends.

It’s still all too easy to find people in these situations – people who are forced to live on the edge because their benefits have been sanctioned. They can barely afford food. They certainly can’t afford to heat their homes adequately.

These are human rights issues. So is the fact that inflicting such hardship on people who are out of work and money is widely considered acceptable and even desirable. The world needs to wake up to that abuse.

Sanctions achieve nothing. They don’t address the real issues – the lack of work (especially for people who are disabled, or older), the failure of support (particularly for people with mental health issues and/or support needs) and the malaise that inevitably defines an outlook when people have been unemployed for a while and know that every single one of the DWP’s compulsory jobsearch activities is a charade.

I can’t make that last point strongly enough.

Attending jobcentres meetings, or pointless work courses, or compulsory websurf session where you must sit at a jobcentre computer and send endless CVs to people you’ll never hear back from – none of these mandatory jobsearch activities go ANYWHERE for so many people. Just about everyone I’ve talked to at Stockport so far has mentioned these aspects of jobsearch.

Every meeting, course, or web session is a slap in the face because of that.

Sanctions as punishment for people who are trapped in this circuit is out of all proportion to the “crimes.”

Stopping people’s already-meagre incomes and pushing them further under the breadline for the minor sins of missing jobcentre meetings, or forgetting sicknotes, or whatever, is the real criminal act.

Still, the state enjoys it. It certainly gives itself free licence.

Like most people I meet in these situations, Craig and Anne relied on friends or family when their money was stopped.

Craig said:

“Basically, I’ve been living off £120 a month since January… [It’s] dreadful. If it weren’t for my mum and dad, I would be…[he shrugged].

Anne said:

“It’s £40 a week [I get in hardship money]. I’m on Pay As You Go [for] gas and electric – ten pound a week on them two. Then you’ve got £30 a week on food… I even had to borrow £4 off her [Anne’s daughter] to get up here about my money [the bus ride to Stockport jobcentre from Anne’s place cost about £4]. I went to the bank on the Wednesday and I thought “Oh No.” I didn’t even have the £4. I had to borrow it off her. Don’t like asking, but what can I do.”

Continue reading →

Behind the scenes with frontline service users in austerity: excerpts from interviews and covert videos and recordings

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The post below – Linda’s story – is an excerpt from a story in a collection project I’m working on.

The project collects interviews I’ve made with people directly affected by benefit cuts.

It also collects covert recordings I made from 2014 when I accompanied people to jobcentre meetings, ESA and PIP assessments, and council homelessness meetings.

My aim is to show you how benefit and service cuts have ravaged the lives of people who’ve been among the most marginalised by welfare reform and austerity.

The videos and transcripts from the meetings that I recorded between people in need and frontline staff demonstrate how utterly dysfunctional frontline services have become.

The project also shows how people respond personally and politically to a brutal austerity state.

I’ll post more extracts from this project as I work on it this year.

This collection of interviews and transcripts is being made possible thanks to a Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust grant. 

Amiel_Melburn_logo

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The rest of this post is an extract from a story about a Kilburn woman I call Linda.

I met Linda and her partner Eddie (name also changed) in 2014.

Linda and Eddie were in their 50s.

Both had learning and literacy difficulties, and worsening health problems.

Both received jobseekers’ allowance. I recorded their jobcentre meetings for about three years. They attended Kilburn jobcentre when we met.

The post focuses on a particularly difficult experience that Linda had at Kilburn jobcentre at the start of 2016: Kilburn jobcentre erroneously closed Linda’s JSA claim when she was ill and missed two signon meetings.

She was left without income or rent money for months.

The video and transcripts in this post show:

– the problems that people with learning difficulties had meeting the DWP’s strict signon criteria and the excessive punishments people faced if they did not meet DWP demands.

– jobcentre advisers admitting that people in Linda’s situation were vulnerable to sanctions and claim closures, because the DWP had removed the specialist disability staff who might have intervened when people with support needs were threatened with sanctions. Disability Employment Advisers were removed from jobcentres as part of austerity cost-cutting at that time.

– Linda’s distress at her illness and at not being able to to find a jobcentre staff member to help her restart her claim

– the DWP’s general institutional contempt for people who relied on benefits.

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Let’s go in at the deep end.

This article starts with a description of that devastating time for Linda: the months in late 2015 and early 2016 when Kilburn jobcentre closed her JSA claim and left her without income or rent money.

Video: Linda at Kilburn jobcentre on February 26 2016.

I called Linda in Feburary 2016, because I hadn’t seen her for a while.

Linda told me she hadn’t received any money for weeks, because the jobcentre had terminated her JSA claim.

Jobcentre advisers said they’d closed Linda’s claim, because Linda had missed two JSA signon meetings.

Linda said she’d missed the meetings because she’d been too ill to attend (she found out later that she had thrombosis). She told me that she was still very unwell and couldn’t walk far.

Closing Linda’s claim was an obscene decision by any measure.

The jobcentre knew Linda well. Advisers knew her story. Linda had signed on at Kilburn for more than seven years. Hers was a familiar face at the jobcentre.

Advisers knew that she had learning difficulties and was in poor health. They knew Linda relied on her JSA. They knew that her age, learning difficulties and deteriorating health meant she wouldn’t find work – that she hadn’t suddenly stopped attending JSA signon meetings because she’d found a job.

They also knew that Linda would only miss a meeting at the jobcentre if she had good reason. Linda often said she hated the jobcentre, but she attended her appointments there religiously – possibly because the jobcentre was a place she knew and could go to.

Advisers knew all of this, but still they closed Linda’s JSA claim. Such were and are the times. Advisers told us that the rules said two strikes (two missed meetings) and you were out (your claim would be closed). Some staff were sticklers for the rules.

Finding someone at the jobcentre to take responsibility for restarting Linda’s JSA claim was a nightmare. Continue reading →

Council officers told off by managers for deciding that homeless people should be helped. Wtf is going on here.

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I’m back, so here we go:

As readers of this site will know, I’ve been publishing interviews in which a council homelessness officer talks about working on the homelessness frontline as the housing crisis deepens (there are links to earlier articles at the end of this post).

This officer has worked in housing offices across London and Greater London councils for nearly 20 years (the officer still works in council homelessness and housing offices in the same areas).

Sometimes, this officer has worked as a council review officer.

Review officers re-examine council decisions that homeless people want to challenge. Review officers can overturn a council’s original decision not to help a homeless person with housing if that officer decides the original decision was wrong.

Problem is – this officer has come under pressure from senior council management NOT to overturn original council decisions when those original decisions found against a homelessness person’s entitlement or priority for housing assistance.

The officer says that this happened not long ago at one London council.

At this council, the officer overturned the council’s original decision not to give an older homeless person and a disabled homeless person priority for housing help.

A so-called medical adviser from the private sector who “advises” councils on such things (more on this external-medical-advice-for-council-homelessness-officers racket soon) had come up with assessments which were taken to mean that the two homeless people shouldn’t be given priority for help on medical grounds.

The officer disagreed.

Events took an outrageous turn after that.

The officer was told off by management for overturning those two decisions – for deciding that the council must give those two homeless people priority.

The officer reports being called into a meeting with management and asked to justify overturning these decisions not to give those homeless people priority.

Senior management was displeased to find that review officers were overturning council homelessness decisions – even though overturning council decisions after reviewing legislation and a homelessness person’s application was a key part of a review officer’s job.

The officer was very unhappy about this. The officer says, “it was like getting a formal warning” for saying the council should help homeless people that it wanted to disregard.

The officer felt that the whole incident was a worrying development – senior management hauling reviews officers over the coals for overturning decisions that reviews officers should overturn.

More than that – the officer was asked to liaise with the council’s housing options team in future if the officer decided to overturn any more council homelessness decisions.

This was an extraordinary instruction.

Review officers are supposed to work separately from the housing officers whose original decisions are being reviewed. They might ask the original officer for more information about a case and decision – but not for permission to overturn it.

The whole idea is that a homeless person’s application goes to a different officer if the homeless person wants to challenge the council’s original decision not to help.

The team that made the original decision should NOT be given the chance to lean on a review officer who is considering overturning the housing team’s decision. Certainly, a review officer should not have to ask the original decisionmaking team if that team is okay with somebody overturning a rotten decision that team made.

Said the officer:

“The manager [who came to see me] had these files in his hand.

He said, “let’s have a chat.” I said, “Okay.”

They [the files] were some non-priority decisions. I had overturned them. Continue reading →