Some pictures from the No ESA Cut lobby outside parliament today. More to follow.

The welfare reform and work bill returns to the House of Commons today, where a government plan to cut the Employment and Support Allowance disability benefit rate by £30 a week for people in the work related activity group may be returned to the bill after the House of Lords blocked it.

Read more here.

There is a tweetlist here to share during the debate in parliament today.

Photos © @skinnyvoice

Video:

Video transcript:

Paula Peters, Disabled People Against Cuts

I’m here to highlight the absolutely appalling policy that George Osborne wants to implement to cut the Work Related Activity Group of Employment and Support Allowance to Jobseekers’ Allowance Levels which is a devastating move for over half a million disabled people, especially cancer patients, people like MS patients and people like that who need that additional money for their support needs around their disability, money to eat, money to get to hospital appointments.

To cut the WRAG group of ESA is a totally draconian, callous, inhumane move that will have a devastating impact on many lives

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I’m Eilidh Whiteford, I’m the SNP’s social justice spokesperson and the reason that I’m here today is because obviously the amendments that the Lord’s passed in the last few weeks that could reverse those cuts to disabled people are coming back to the commons so it is really important that we’re in the debate this afternoon.

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My name is Neil Gray I’m the SNP MP for Airdrie & Shotts and the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for fair work and employment and I’m here today to show solidarity with disabled people who are opposing the government’s attempts to remove the ESA WRAG, and also the reporting obligations on child poverty. We believe that those are incredibly damaging and we want to see the Lords amendments stand.

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Paula Peters

Vote No to ESA WRAG cuts. Say No and do the right thing by disabled people for once in your lives.

As many people will know…

Iain Duncan Smith and government plan to push more sick or disabled people into work. Pity that he and the DWP lie about the support that disabled claimants on JSA and in the ESA WRAG group will find when they’re forced to try and find work through jobcentres:

You’ll hear below a covert recording made last week with a person who used to work as a Disability Employment Adviser (DEA) in a northwest London jobcentre (this person now works in another jobcentre role). DEAs were specialist jobcentre advisers who had time and training to support sick and disabled benefit claimants. Government cut the number of DEAs in jobcentres by 60% by the end of last year. For months now, advisers have been telling me and the disabled claimants I accompany to jobcentre meetings that the loss of DEAs means there is now little support or help for sick and disabled benefit claimants at jobcentres. There doesn’t seem to have been much by way of a replacement service. Advisers say that there generally isn’t resource or time.

Last week at the northwest London jobcentre I was visiting, I asked the adviser in the recording if jobcentres in the area offered much in the way of specialist, back-to-work support for sick or disabled benefit claimants. You’ll hear the adviser say that there is little support for these claimants now that jobcentres are “getting rid of” DEAs. I have recorded other advisers saying very similar things in past months. The adviser in the recording below said that in her current job, she dealt with some people who have “bipolar and schizophrenia or psychosis” diagnoses, [but] “they’ve got to want to get a job for me to work with them.” I took this to mean that people who were longer-term unemployed because of the severity of their conditions and situations were parked and offered little beyond basic signon meetings with advisers and the occasional work programme placement (we knew mutually of claimants who had been in that category for a while):

“When I changed to this job, I had to like not think about those clients anymore and it’s really, really difficult, because I know they are having problems and I know they are struggling and there is no support for them.”

Recording:

There is a transcript at the end of the post. Continue reading →

I think about this one quite a lot.

Over the past few years, I’ve had many conversations with left activists and plenty of others who hope and/or believe that austerity and adversity will bring out the best in people: that the majority of us will one day rise against social security cuts and the housing crisis, and pull together in common cause. The hope here is that austerity will end in revolt of some kind, perhaps very soon. This could happen, I guess. I doubt I’d see it coming, but then I rarely predict the big events. Turns in the narrative usually take me by surprise, especially when they’re positive. There is absolutely a chance that austerity, and the housing crisis in particular, will provoke widespread fight in addition to the fear. There is every chance that people will band together in a big way and help each other out. I already see plenty of evidence of mutual support.

The problem is that I see and hear plenty of evidence of a serious fracturing, too – a siding against, rather than with, people in the same boat. I tend think of talk along those lines as just the latest installments in a very long-running, anti-community, pro-self global narrative. Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. I never find firm footing on this ground. I speak to people who are from this country and people who have come to this country from other places. Views are very different and very similar. I have quite a few conversations like the one I’ve transcribed below. I have conversations with people who are on the receiving end of government policy and who are largely sympathetic to government. I talk with people who receive benefits and say that government is right to crack down on benefit claimants. They clearly don’t believe that they’ll ever be in the firing line.

I’ve posted the transcript below as an example, so that you can get an idea of what I mean. The transcript below comes from a discussion with a person who claims unemployment benefits and has for a while. You’ll see that this person is strongly of the opinion that other benefit claimants are scroungers and that government is on the right track with benefit sanctions regimes. This is not a view that suggests unity. It is certainly not a view that suggests revolution.

“How can this be,” people say when they hear claimants taking this line. Members of the claimants’ union I was with on the day of the discussion below certainly wondered at the views being expressed. And who could blame them? I mean – how can this be? Benefit sanctions are extremely unpleasant. They’re particularly unpleasant to see. If you attend a jobcentre regularly, you see people being sanctioned. It ain’t pretty. I can tell you that for a fact. There is reason to feel a certain sympathy for people when they are sanctioned. There’s also reason to feel a certain fear. You can’t always predict who is going to be next on the sanctions list, even when you think you can. How can people imagine that they’re not in the firing line when they’re literally standing in the firing line?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. Perhaps you will.

Anyway. Here we are outside one of the northwest London jobcentres at the end of last year. We speak with a number of people. One woman we speak with says that she came here from Russia a long time ago (“it’s complicated”) and is nearly 40. She has lived in England for some years. She is unemployed at the moment and so receives jobseekers’ allowance. She says that she used to receive employment and support allowance, but lost that benefit earlier last year when she was found fit for work at a work capability assessment.

We talk for a long time. The woman says that that people are right to call some benefit recipients scroungers and that something in the local mindset leads people to believe that they are entitled to financial support from the state:

“I know it may sound a bit hard, because I am one of the people who come over here [to the jobcentre] to sign on [for unemployment benefit] but I’ve seen people who you would put into that [scroungers] category.”

“You see certain familiar faces. I just see that this person has no intent of looking for a job – has no intent of doing anything – and I understand why they are sanctioned. It may be not the right way, but otherwise, how will you make the person do something? How you can make somebody to actually search for a job if this person doesn’t want it?”

For herself: She says that she has told her jobcentre adviser that she can’t work for less than £22,000 a year, because she couldn’t afford to pay rent on a lower wage and would still rely on state support in the form of working tax credits. Continue reading →

Yet another disabled JSA claimant is told that his jobcentre no longer has specialist support for disabled jobseekers:

(You can read earlier stories on this same issue here and here):

Last week, I spoke at length with a 66-year-old woman who accompanies her son to his JSA signon sessions at a West Midlands jobcentre.

Her son has serious depression. His mental health condition can be so severe that he struggles to leave his flat and panics if anyone comes to his home. “That’s why I go to the jobcentre with him – because he just wouldn’t go. [If people don’t attend] then of course they get a sanction and they get no money.” This woman is her son’s appointee. He was receiving employment and support allowance, but was found fit for work after a work capability assessment. He is now on jobseekers’ allowance and is supposedly being “helped” to find work by his jobcentre and the DWP.

The problem is that this “help” is becoming very hard to find. At his most recent jobcentre meeting, this man and his mother were told that the disability employment adviser they’d been seeing for support was no longer working in that role at their West Midlands jobcentre. DEAs are/were jobcentre advisers who had extra training and time to support disabled claimants. DEAs are being removed from jobcentres. “She told me that she’s no longer the disability adviser, because they’ve stopped them. They’ve put her on the front desk with all the others. So basically, they’re disregarding disability now.” Her son has a sick note to excuse him from jobsearch activities for a set period of time. His mother said the adviser told her son that he might feel better and more able to look for work after the sick note expired. And there you have it: disability support at jobcentres for people who claim JSA and have serious mental health conditions. Continue reading →

The quotes below are from a transcript of a recording made at a jobseeker’s signon meeting at a London jobcentre in early October. The JSA claimant is a man in his early 50s who has learning and literacy difficulties. He has been out of work for about six years. I often attend jobcentre meetings with him.

The adviser is a man we see regularly. He’s always well turned out: he wears a nice suit and usually has a designer label displayed on one cuff. The man I attend with inevitably mentions the label and the suit afterwards – and not in an appreciative way:

“Him in that suit. He’s got a job. I should have a job.”

So, there’s that.

Another thing about this adviser is that he occasionally bad-mouths other JSA claimants. Some advisers do this. At this meeting, the adviser tells the man I am with that his attitude towards finding work is much better than every other claimant’s – that other people are the layabouts and the scroungers:

“You are one of the few people who come here who have something to tell me.”

“People come here and say nothing. They just want their money and go and come back next time. “

“They don’t understand that I’m here just to help. I can’t give them a job. They have to do 99% of the job themselves, but they don’t want that.”

This line always interests me. I hear it from time to time. Then, I think about it on the way home. It seems to me that freely dumping on a client group in front of strangers says a lot about a person’s ease with their own disdain for that group. I suspect that it says a lot about the DWP’s disdain for its client group as well. Jobcentres don’t always strike me as places where general professional courtesies apply.

Anyway. I wonder what advisers say about us when we’re not there. Most of the time, the guy I attend with can’t wait to get out, either (“they just want their money and go…”) He never wants to extend his stay. I can’t imagine why anybody would. Some advisers at jobcentres are agreeable enough (to your face), but the general atmosphere isn’t. Jobcentres are full of unsmiling security guards and people who are wondering if they’re about to be sanctioned. It’s always a relief to leave. The guy I attend with says that being at the jobcentre “makes me sick to my stomach.” Indeed.