Author Archives: Kate B

When the stress of applying for disability benefits is dangerous to disabled people’s health…

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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…

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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

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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.

Waiting 3 months and more for #UniversalCredit for rent: “I was ringing the DWP in tears saying: ‘I’m really scared I’m going to lose the house’.”

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Article by me on politics.co.uk today about a disabled woman’s three month+ wait for Universal Credit:

“Karen Sheader, a Hartlepool film company director, has the bone condition osteopetrosis. Her bones fracture and can take months to heal. In 2017, bones in her legs broke. She was forced to take sick leave. She made a claim for Universal Credit.

What followed was a tortuous three month wait for Universal Credit payment.

“It got to 14 weeks and I was constantly on the phone to them. I kept being told, ‘somebody will update your [Universal Credit] journal by 6pm tonight’. They didn’t… and I was getting conflicting advice from people. It has such an effect on the way you feel. You’re stuck in the house with two broken legs and nobody seems to give a fuck.”

Read the whole article here.

Does anybody actually work at the HMRC or the DWP anymore, or are we now just down to a couple of (useless) answering machines?

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Posting this because I am very badly pissed off, even for a Monday:

For nearly two weeks, I’ve been trying to get answers from the HMRC and/or the DWP for a story I’m writing about a disabled woman who had to wait THREE MONTHS for her Universal Credit claim to start.

She was receiving statutory sick pay each month, because she had to take indefinite leave from work.

As I understand it, the HMRC was supposed to tell the DWP how much statutory sick pay she received each month, so that the DWP could adjust her Universal Credit claim accordingly and pay her some money (she particularly needed the Universal Credit to meet her rent). i think this might have to do with the famous HMRC-DWP Real Time system. Who can really say. God knows how any of this is meant to work. Probably it isn’t. It’s all a total pile.

Needless to say, neither the HMRC nor the DWP managed to do what they were supposed to in this woman’s case. They were even more useless in this instance than they are on the rest of Universal Credit, which is an amazing achievement.

The HMRC couldn’t get the sick pay totals right and the DWP refused to make any adjustments, so this woman’s benefit claim went nowhere for months. I’ll be publishing a longer story about this soon.

Point today is that someone needs to answer questions about the wreckage that is Universal Credit and the relationship between the DWP and the HMRC. Problem is that nobody will.

I’m getting very sick of this. I’ve had it with being ignored by government departments.

I rang and wrote to the HMRC and the DWP asking both departments how Universal Credit and Real Time adjustments are supposed to work, if statutory sick pay was included – and these adjustments don’t work.

All I’ve had back is several emails from some faceless HRMC bureaucrat/actual robot who keeps writing this exact sentence:

“Thanks Kate, I will see what I can do.”

I know what he can do. He does fuck all. He certainly doesn’t answer my questions.

Maybe somebody out there can. If anybody knows anything about claiming statutory sick pay and claiming Universal Credit, and the “system” that the HMRC is supposed to use to inform the DWP about the amount of statutory sick pay a Universal Credit claimant receives, give me a shout.

Putting disabled people in flats with totally inaccessible upstairs toilets, giving pregnant women airbeds because there’s no furniture: more from the housing frontline

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This is the fourth article in my series with a frontline council homelessness and housing officer who has worked in housing offices across London and Greater London for 15 years.

There’s a full transcript from this interview at the end of this post.

In this article, the officer explains how basic human dignity and any notion of safety or comfort have gone by the wayside for homeless people in austerity.

The erosion of these basics speaks volumes about society’s real opinions of people in homelessness and hardship. We do better by our dogs.

The officer says that at one council recently, pregnant and sick and disabled homeless people (one person just had major renal surgery) were given cheap airbeds (which didn’t always inflate) to sleep on in temporary accommodation, because there were no proper beds.

There was nothing in the way of furniture at all in these places. Giving homeless people an airbed to take to the accommodation had just become par for the course. Cheap airbeds which often broke were considered good enough, even for people who had trouble moving around and standing up:

“Some woman who was like seven months’ pregnant. You know – she was enormous, because she had this huge big baby in her belly. She was given an airbed to pump up… There was some old guy who’d had an operation. I can’t remember what the operation was – I think it was a kidney operation…? or something like that. He’s given this airbed to pump up.”

The officer also talks about a disabled person being placed in temporary accommodation in a split-level flat in London where the toilet was upstairs and couldn’t be reached by that person. The disabled person had to use a commode downstairs in the main room before a complaint was made and alternative housing found:

“The bathroom’s upstairs and they [the tenant] are like, “well, how am I supposed to use that? I’m in a wheelchair…. [I suppose] they’re [the council is] like, “well, you know, get a commode… shit in a carrier bag…”

So it goes these days, the officer says. Councils place homeless people in any accommodation that serves the two basic purposes of housing people in immediate need and getting them out of the office fast:

“It is just the fact every council is scraping the bottom of barrel a lot of the time for TA [temporary accommodation]. I think a lot of the time, they [councils] just put people in shit and just hope they don’t complain. If they do complain – okay, we’ll do something about it…but we will wait until they do that [complain].”

The officer says the airbeds situation came about because the council rented blocks of empty flats from landlords who bought flats to let out for as much money as they could get – but spent nothing on making the flats habitable.

The officer says that in the past, when there was more money around, councils would put in place programmes to make sure temporary accommodation was furnished:

“The council might say, “give us a ten-year lease on these and we will put some furniture in them, or something,”

but in austerity:

“Now, it’s just money-saving – like, “fuck it – we’ll just take it as it is and give somebody an airbed…These were really cheap airbeds, so you would get people coming back the next day saying, “this airbed didn’t even…it’s got a puncture, or the pump don’t work.” So, they spent last night sleeping on some half-inflated airbed.”

Continue reading →

Intentionally homeless with kids? Council will house the kids but not you – ie, you’ll be separated from them. The hell with this.

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This does my head in. It should do yours in as well.

I spent an hour this morning interviewing a young woman who has three kids under the age of 12.

She was evicted from her flat at the end of last year for rent arrears. I have a letter from her council to her MP which says the council is likely to find her intentionally homeless, because of those arrears.

The young woman believes that the council has found her intentionally homeless. She has no fixed address, so she isn’t sure where any post advising her of her situation is going, or if it is being posted at all.

She’s sofa-surfing with her three kids at the moment – sometimes at a friend’s place and sometimes at her mother’s place. Her mother is in temporary accommodation herself and has eight family members in the flat with her. Two of the school-aged kids are sleeping on airbeds with their grandmother in the grandmother’s room. The older child sleeps on the floor in a room with two others.

At the end of that letter is this sentence:

“If [name removed] is found intentionally homeless, then the Housing Options team will not assist her into alternative housing and will only give her advice and support to find her own accommodation. A referral will, however, be made to Children’s Services in respect of the welfare of the children”:

In other words, people who are found intentionally homeless risk having their children removed, or, at least, having their children housed away from them. What a threat that is – and to so many people. So many people are evicted for rent arrears these days. So many women tell me that they are terrified that the council will remove their kids if they can’t find decent – or any – housing for them. Getting evicted and finding yourself without a roof is bad enough. Now, homeless people believe they risk losing their kids if they return to to their council to challenge an intentional homelessness decision, or if they approach a council for further housing help.

This shit has to stop. Councils cannot be permitted to threaten women with the loss of their children, just because those women are poor.

This situation is untenable. Let’s have some #metoo outrage about it. Imagine the headlines and fury if some council tried that that sort of threat on with a middle class family, or – gasp – a celeb.

“We’ll come after your kids.” I think not.

Image: the two airbeds on either side of the grandmother’s bed:

A rise in the number of rough sleepers? Bet those shocking numbers don’t show the half of it. Look at these two guys.

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The Guardian has a story this morning about the shocking rise in the number of people who are sleeping rough.

The government should be smashed for that rise alone. Slashing social security to the point where more and more people sleep outside in this climate is a crime against humanity in anyone’s book. Winter is freezing cold, especially here in the north west. Forcing people to sleep outside during it is murderous. Simple as that.

Point I wanted to make is that there are people who may not appear in these counts, because they have options some nights – if you can call them options – which means they have a bed or couch for that night. Their existences ain’t exactly great. They’re still street homeless. They still have appalling experiences. They are still out a lot in the freezing cold and can be out any minute in the freezing cold. Someone needs to take Theresa May to meet and count these people, and to rub her nose in a few realities.

I’m thinking of two guys in particular – James, 50 and Roy, 64 – who I’ve interviewed in Oldham. They’re both street homeless – but they’re not always on the street.

James, who I often meet with, regularly stays with his friend Vance, who was street homeless for years, but was finally found a council flat about two years ago. This arrangement works well sometimes and badly at others. Late last year, James had the shit kicked out of him – apparently by another guy who was staying at the flat. A roof often comes with considerable compromise.

It certainly did for Roy, 64, who I spoke with at length at Oldham foodbank recently. Roy was street homeless (at aged 64, if you don’t mind – a crime in itself), but sometimes stayed with a “friend” in Chadderton who charged Roy money out of his benefits to stay on the couch. He attended the foodbank that day in the hope that someone could help him find somewhere better to stay.

You see the point. When you spend a lot of time talking with people who are in and out of street homelessness, you talk with many people who are street homeless, but who are sometimes able make other arrangements that remove them from view. Doesn’t mean they’re having a brilliant time of it. I don’t know how many of these people do or don’t appear in rough sleeper counts – the Guardian article makes clear that criteria for counting rough sleepers is strict and only takes in people who are outside. Whatever. My point is that government needs to be strung up for creating this hidden rough sleeper nightmare as well. Like I say – people don’t know the half of it.

Forget #metoo celebs for 5 mins. Where’s the wall-to-wall mainstream outrage and coverage about the violence the austerity state visits on women?

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Am pissed off this morning. Here are my perceptions of celeb domination of #metoo and mainstream obsession with celeb suffering as a priority:

I just finished a phone call with a woman who has three young kids and is homeless. They’re all homeless. She and the kids sofa-surf at a friend of the woman’s some nights and some nights with the woman’s mother in her mum’s flat.

The woman was made intentionally homeless by her council for rent arrears – arrears the woman said she didn’t realise were building up, because her housing benefit, which was paid straight to her landlord, suddenly stopped last year. Her housing benefit was stopped, because there was a problem processing a JSA claim she’d made.

She was accused of “getting money from somewhere else.”

Just about every woman I talk to in these situations is accused of “getting money from somewhere else” – which, for so many women I speak to, often means accused of living with an ex, or sleeping with some bloke who pays, or your choice of variations on that charming theme.

This side of things is remarkable, now that I think about it. I’m actually sitting here as we speak thinking about all the women I’ve written about over the years who’ve received housing benefit, or other kinds of state support. It occurs to me that nearly all of these women were accused by a council or the DWP at one point or another of cheating the state by generating extra cash for extra goodies via a man – ie, living with an ex, or with new bloke, or with some bloke nobody had even heard of.

That should tell you all you need to know about the state’s real view of women. We’re all cheating liars who’ll suck anything for an extra fiver for drink and fags – and that goes particularly for women who receive housing benefit. No matter that the state accuses people wrongly. No matter either that some women need extra cash in austerity and that people take the options they have with good reason. The realities of real women’s lives in this era doesn’t matter a damn. Women are seen as graspers, whether we need money or not.

Back to the story. The woman I talked to this morning was eventually evicted and found intentionally homeless. The woman says that the council told her that it would house her kids, but not her. The council would find the kids somewhere to go if social services got involved – but not her. The subtext there was pretty clear, to her at least: she’d be separated from her kids if she went down that line. I hear this story again and again and again and again. I hear this story every time I interview a woman who has a housing problem, rent arrears and kids. “You’ll go one way and your kids will go another.” It’s the threat to beat all threats. It never, ever ends.

Which brings me to my main point. Where is the wall-to-wall #metoo mainstream press outrage for women in these situations? Where’s the non-stop support and mainstream press coverage that #metoo celebrities have now had for months on end? Why is a night out or a trip in a cab with a groping celeb or politician now the only sure way to get women’s issues on the mainstream agenda, especially as a viral and ongoing concern? Reading the mainstream press at the moment – even those publications we’re supposed to rate for maturity and depth – feels like spending too much time on rubbish celeb sites. I know this, because I do both.

Where’s the widespread mainstream press and political eagerness to believe and report non-stop women’s stories of abuse and dismissal at the hands of the austerity-enforcing state? I tell you this – I bet a lot of the women I speak to wouldn’t even be believed by the media and political classes at the moment. They’d be called liars and exaggerators. Even in polite liberal circles, there’d be smirking about the choices made by these women and about women who have children in poverty (for all the world as though women always have a choice). Councils and the DWP would say that women had lied about making rent payments and about missing jobcentre meetings and all the rest. They’d be believed – not the women. There’d be snarky remarks about the feckless and irresponsible poor, and the working-class mother’s terrible and destructive sense of entitlement.

Celebrities are admired by the mainstream and generate web traffic. Women who are throttled by the state in austerity are not and do not. I know this. I get this. I can’t accept it.