We head today to the world of single motherhood, crap wages and the useless DWP! – a world where the boons of #MeToo are taking a while to trickle down.

I give you L, another low-paid woman who knows too well that if you’re not born rich, any system designed with your needs in mind will be garbage.

L did not have one of the fun pandemics – ie didn’t really get the headspace to fully focus on cranking out bread and bottled pickles, or finally tackling the mandolin, etc. Much of L’s pandemic was spent trying to work out why the DWP seemed eternally incapable of paying her landlord the right amount of universal credit – or indeed any universal credit – for her rent each month. The rest of her emotional energy was spent hoping she wouldn’t be evicted because her rent arrears grew each month that her landlord wasn’t paid.

This had been going on since before the pandemic, of course. Nobody who earns too little to live on (a category that is now widening to include almost everyone) ever gets a stress-free period.

L has kids, rent of well over £1000pcm for the standard overpriced rented shitehole and an inadequately-paid, part-time job of a type she is doomed to forever attend. Like so many since the dawn of time, L’s role in society is to live out that eons-old (aeons? – whatever) political-class fetish about the character-building nature of low-paid work and its ever-accompanying threats of eviction and homelessness. On the bright side, answers to questions about the real meaning of life are in here somewhere. Ever lain awake wondering why you were ever born? Wonder no more. Like just about everyone since time began, you were placed on earth to play a small role in an enduring conservative fantasy about insecure housing.

Speaking of a key role in homelessness: let’s go to the DWP. Because her job doesn’t pay enough, L needs universal credit each month to meet her exorbitant rent. Unfortunately, relying on the DWP for anything other than negligence is a path to anticlimax.

Although the DWP is meant to pay L’s rent to her landlord via her local council each month, there have been months since 2019 and at least to the end of 2021 when it just hasn’t. Those months, the DWP paid absolutely nothing in the housing costs portion of L’s universal credit. Just – zero.

Nobody who is involved in this has been able understand what the problem is. This confusion is almost as big a problem as the missing rent – you look at month after month of sums and statements, and you absolutely cannot grasp how or why the DWP has arrived at the figures before you. The DWP is wielding 3 weapons of torture by this point – the confusing sums and payment amounts, the piling on of fear about rent arrears because people’s landlords aren’t getting their money, and what appears to be an evergreen failure to answer journal questions about any of it.

This is my point, really – it’s just so HARD to sort these things out, even when you come at it from all angles.

We – L, me, and a helpful council officer – had a zoom meeting about this circus a few months back. All that anyone really got from that meeting was an eyeful of everyone else’s confusion about the DWP’s sums: another benefits zoom meeting where you give up trying to get anywhere and just sit there checking out backgrounds and faces, including your own.

I would say there are a couple of good things about these zoom meetings, though. One is that they can bring an intimacy to proceedings which, ironically, did not exist at pre-pandemic, face-to-face sessions with officers. It is easier to relate to someone who is sitting in their small lounge at home and mouthing an unguarded “What?” at DWP sums on a screen.

Also – there are no security guards at zoom meetings, which I have to say is a massive improvement. Nobody at the butt-end of things will fondly remember those pre-pandemic meetings where you had to stand in the rain begging a run of inflexible and ever-present security guards to let you into a council building for a hard-won, face-to-face meeting about your accommodation with an exhausted-looking housing officer who would generally end the meeting before it began by telling you there was no point in talking. The officer would say something like the council had decided that it didn’t have to find you a permanent place to live, and so you might as well leave. The other plus about zoom meetings is that they give officers a chance to see you and your kids living your human lives in the home that they are thinking of throwing you out of. Is there a chance that these views of real lives will take the wind out of bureaucratic sails?

Probably not.

And anyway – none of this helps a) the DWP with its maths or b) anyone with the DWP’s maths. As I say, too, you often wonder if there’s any point asking. I am firmly of the opinion that trying to get to the bottom of things with the DWP via your online universal credit journal actually reduces your chances of understanding. Your universal credit journal is supposed to be the place where the DWP answers your questions about your universal credit – questions or statements along the lines of “can you please stop deducting so much money for debt repayments, because I can’t afford food,” or “I give up. Where did you hide my rent money.”

The problem with leaving a universal journal message in recent times is that you generally get either a) a baffling answer, or b) no answer (you sometimes get the first, followed by weeks and months of the second). You get numeric dreck or a weird instruction and then, after that – nothing. Seriously. Total silence for weeks. Messages go unanswered as though there’s nobody at the other end. Maybe there isn’t anyone there, or anyone there who can cope for more than 10 minutes. I can’t imagine that this government prioritises adequate staffing for a system that is used by the sort of people that this government mostly hopes will drop dead.

L had both problematic experiences with her questions about her rent in her journal. First up, she got a weird answer and then after that, she got no answers. The DWP is meant to arrive at a monthly universal credit amount for L via a calculation that factors in her earnings and any other entitlements or limits or whatever. Since 2019, it seems the DWP has added some wage payments together, left others out, paid rent to L sometimes and sometimes to the council, and sometimes – looks like – to nobody. God knows what has being going on really. As I say, you open up a pdf with 2 years’ worth of entries and immediately start losing your mind.

The council officer gave us a list of dates for the missing rent payments. L posted these in her universal credit journal and asked the DWP where they were. The DWP left a journal message which said they needed the details of the bank into which the rent money was paid before they could investigate the problem. Issue here was the DWP already had those bank details. It was the same the bank account they’d been paying L’s rent money into in the months when they managed to pay it.

It’s usually at this sort of stage that you start to understand life is too short to try fighting things with logic. You also suspect that the poor schmucks who are tasked with answering journal questions feel the same. Certainly, they all seem to log off. I wrote L a message to post in her journal about the question about the bank details. After that – nothing. Total silence.

The no-response thing went on so long that L decided to give me permission to ring with the DWP on her behalf. It sometimes takes the stress off a person if someone else can call. L left a message in her journal to that effect (to tell the DWP she wanted to give me consent to speak about the rent problem on her behalf), but that message also went unacknowledged. I ended up having to call the universal credit helpline and use L’s personal details to get the person I spoke with to access L’s account to check that she’d given me consent to use her details to access her account. That makes total sense, I’m sure.

From there, the officer I spoke with was helpful. You do occasionally find someone who is still trying to paddle. This bloke couldn’t understand where the rent money had gone either, but he assigned the problem to a case officer and said L should hear back in April. Here’s hoping.

I can’t say I think that this sort of shambles bodes well for the worsening cost of living crisis, though – for people who have to, say, contact the DWP to beg for reductions to amounts taken from universal credit for loan or debt repayments – or who have to apply for any sort of relief from any mounting financial problem, should any relief actually turn up. i mean to say. Who will be able to take time from queuing at a foodbank or dying of cold in an unheated home to deal with all of this?