We’ve shut your benefit claim with no warning at all – how the #DWP does #disability

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Righto.

You know how Labour INSISTS that disabled people and their families will be supported while Labour dismantles disability benefits?

Well, that’s bollocks. You knew that, but let’s pile it on.

In my most recent podcast episode, Niki, the mother of a disabled and autistic 7 year old, tells us the DWP recently closed her universal credit claim with NO warning.

Niki and I called the universal credit helpline to ask what was going on. I recorded that call and added it into the episode.

Universal credit kept telling us that Niki had to wait for the DWP to carry out a mandatory reconsideration to get her claim back. They happily admitted that that could “take ages.” No money to live on during that time, of course.

Also – the universal credit helpline officer kept telling Niki to check her online universal credit journal to see how the MR was going – problem being that Niki can’t get into her journal, because the DWP closed her claim. Still, universal credit kept saying and saying that Niki should check the progress of her mandatory reconsideration in her journal.

This went round and round and round until universal credit hung up on us. Charming.

This is Labour’s so-called “tailored support” for disabled people and their families. Brilliant, innit.

22 thoughts on “We’ve shut your benefit claim with no warning at all – how the #DWP does #disability”

  1. Thanks, Kate

    While many commentators whose ‘authority’ is questionable are saying that the welfare state is ‘unsustainable’, I think the real issue is that the huge chasm between government proclamations and what really goes on is the fundamental weakness of our welfare state, and your blog is one of the remedies to that situation.

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  3. In cases like this, I would strongly advise that the claimant contact their MP, Kate.

    But not, as I did in 1991 with my then newbie MP, Glenda Jackson. After waiting over months for Unemployment Benefit, I handwrote her a 12 page letter in state of panic and feeling completely ignored by authority while mainstream mass media focused their attention on bread queues in Moscow and the then Archway ‘Goulag’ Department for Social Security office was in meltdown as the Major government began to make claiming much more difficult with various ploys such as cases being handled remotely rather than face-to-face, and making a fresh claim when coming off a government funded period of training.

    I think the fundamental problem is that DWP uses ‘claimant confidentiality’ and ‘commercial confidentiality’ with the view that the claimant is their property and answerable to them. Now, the Starmer government is moving toward digital ID cards supposedly to ward off ‘illegal immigration’. (See bigbrotherwatch.org.uk on that and other such issues.)

    Yet, of course, as you’ve implied regarding UC caseworker caseloads, the biggest benefit fraud of all is the statement, “The help you need, when you need it.”

    I think that 12 page handwritten letter pre-dated the fraudulent slogan I’ve just mentioned, and my personal history as a claimant by that time amounted to something like a year a page as a disabled jobseeker with invisible disability that included six weeks attendance at a Manpower Services Commission-run ‘Employment Rehabilitation Centre’ in 1978. There, they said that I was “too slow to ever benefit from any further or higher education. You will be terminated [sic] at the end of next week.” I could go on and on about that, but just conclude that tale here by saying that vocational assessment reports were deemed “too confidential for the claimant’s unsupervised access,” and claimants were not allowed ANY access to their medical reports.

    So, to reiterate and qualify my opening paragraph here, I think it would be great if the claimant in question wrote their MP but with professional guidance, which is ever more hard to find.

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    • Hello! Yes can be worth going to MPs with benefits problems. That is a good shout. They tend to be useless on housing and tell people to go to their councils which is bloody hopeless. A useless council is usually the reason why people go to their MPs

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  4. “Reform of the welfare system “must happen”, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Pat McFadden, has told the BBC.”

    (Here’s a contradiction in terms aka Political double talk)

    “Speaking two weeks after taking over the welfare brief, he vowed to press ahead with changes to ensure people get the help they need and to address the rising cost of benefits.”

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg3jl0ylkyo

    They are “reforming” in the wrong direction. Yes the WCA should go but NOT be replaced by the same criteria as the PIP Assessment ffs! This means that no one will be able to get on the sick with a wide range of illnesses unless said illness renders them completely disabled. Result will be thousands of sick and unfit people forced to seek work, and thousands more over-60s (who generally all have some illnesses or injuries) clogging up the Jobcentre and unemployment system.

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      • The new SS Work & Pensions has been an MP only since 4 July 2024.
        As a decades long disabled claimant, mature graduate and volunteer, I was writing long before the 2024 landslide election about the need for government to listen to disabled people, and was saying that governments should listen to disabled people rather than talk at them.
        Some of what I wrote can be found via the website of my late friend Noel Lynch (1947-2022).
        See https://theonlygreenroom.blogspot.com/search?q=%22alan+wheatley%22
        I reckon it’s high time UK governments listened to the UN Disability Committee rather than the senior Civil Servants who — unlike claimants as marginalised minorities! — are never buried in an electoral landlside that strengthens authoritarian government..
        And I reckon a good way of saving public money would be to scrap ‘confidential confidentiality’ by which dodgy DWP contractors deny claimants the opportunity to be a whistleblower and even to receive signposting information regarding the claimant’s progress on various course options, etc.
        I conclude by mentioning that I strongly recommend claimants with even a suspected ‘mental-cognitive impairment’ to arrange to receive screening tests for IQ components via GP surgery, that would be analysed through tests that involve Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) at local authority disability services.
        I received such tests in May 2011 at age 57, and although I did not qualify for free-at-the-point-of-delivery ‘learning disability’ [sic] services, the report I was given was far more incisive than anything I received over the decades via jobcentre-based Disability Service Teams.

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      • Oh yes, they do time announcements so it gets buried in the daily zeit gheist that is the Apocalypse Update. Many people will have missed it, and won’t know until the letter arrives, or maybe just a message on your UC Journal ordering you to attend the Joke Centre.

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  6. Welfare Reform is scrapping Universal Credit, until then Labour are Tory slaves to Universal Credit. Politics & politicians do not work & need to be sanctioned as useless. British Values are Food Banks where you can get value on a meal for the day. Keep blaming the Tories for Universal Credit yet Labour love Universal Credit.

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    • I recall being part of an impromptu ‘Welfare Action Group’ conference delegation that stemmed from a Welfare Action Group conference being hosted in the Greater Manchester Regional Authority offices in 2016. We popped into the offices of Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham, who told us from the experience of Greater Manchester citizens’ and their relationship with the Regional Authority that Universal Credit was more trouble than it was worth.

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  7. Am just watching the Tory Conference on tv , it’s comedy gold. Mel Stride is in full swing, Much talk about “the dignity of work” from someone who has probably never worked a day in his life. Promises of Welfare cuts and an end to illegal immigration (I think he meant Refugees arriving in boats to seek Asylum) and accusations that Reform are “marching to the Left”. Oh hang on, the speech just reached an unexpected shouty crescendo as if to add neaning or impress the delegates. Deluded, much?

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  8. Re your podcast, yes the DWP certainly does make mistakes. When I requested a Mandatory Reconsideration last year they gave me a date up to which I could submit further supporting evidence, e.g. a Doctors letter, etc. Then they went ahead and completed the Mandatory Reconsideration before the date they had given me! I had paid £40 for a letter from my GP (yes, you actually have to pay them to write a fkng letter on your behalf) but was still waiting to receive it. Mind you, it still came in handy to submit to the Tribunal when I made the next stage of Appeal.

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  10. Maybe if you’re like me and never throw anything away you might have a folder full of old Bank statements and Utility bills going back a decade or more, but most people won’t. And even then it would be quite a task photographing or scanning and saving them all on a smartphone (if youve got one) and then uploading then to UC, all 108 files. Crazy. And as you know, you cannot reason with them, it’s like speaking to a brick wall.

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    • What would they say to an MP who is on the consttuent’s side and can make political capaital out of the case as a ‘good constituency MP’?

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