Author Archives: Kate B

Capita wins tagging contracts – but who exactly do they plan to tag?

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Today, the Ministry of Justice announced that Capita will take over the electronic monitoring contracts that Serco and G4s have lost (ie been sacked from) because of “significant anomalies” in billing practices. A couple of months ago, I tried to find out from Capita how it would generate the £400m that the company claimed it would make from the contracts in an August press release. That £400m represents an awful lot of tagging. Who do they plan to tag in addition to people in the criminal justice system? Capita plans to roll the technology out beyond the MOJ – but to which public sector organisations and why? In the post below, you’ll see how difficult it was to get answers from Capita and how reluctant the company and the Ministry of Justice were to release any further information about Capita’s projected income.

September 2013:

I rarely use the words “fascinating” and “press release” in the same sentence, but:

This fascinating press release appeared on the Capita website recently: “Capita [is the] preferred bidder for electronic monitoring contract.”

So.

It seems that Capita has positioned itself (with three other companies) to take over the dire electronic tagging system run by Serco and G4S for the Ministry of Justice. By “dire,” I mean “very likely fraudulent”: Serco and G4S were recently slammed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for charging the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds for people they claimed to have tagged, but who turned out to be dead or incarcerated. Serco will participate in an independent “forensic audit” as a result. G4S won’t: according to the MOJ, they told Grayling No and were referred to the SFO. G4S, amazingly, told Robert Peston that it opted to call in the SFO itself. I am not sure what the real situation is there. All I know is that we get to keep paying for it.

And paying for it. We now have Capita as preferred bidder for a large electronic monitoring contract. Unfortunately, it is a contract that sets many alarms off itself. Chief among these Capita’s plan to make £400m in its first six years of the contract and its reluctance to explain in detail (to me anyway) exactly how it proposes to do that. I hope that they have decided against targeting the dead. Of even greater concern, though, is the extent to which they apparently plan to target and tag the living. Their press release says that the £400m in those first six years will be generated on the basis of an “anticipated increase in the use of tags beyond the current numbers of monitored individuals.” Early days, I know, but £400m is a lot of money, so we’re surely talking a lot of monitored individuals.

Continue reading →

Machine Guns vs Disabled People: Ministers quake facing the wrath of disabled people

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This is a repost from the DPAC site – be interested to see what response they get to the FOI:

From DPAC:

“For the past few months, we at Disabled People Against Cuts have been receiving emails daily from disabled people and disabled parents with children who are being left without any food or any money for heating. They have had their benefits sanctioned and all money taken away from them for a period of between 2 weeks and 3 months. Disabled people who have never committed any crimes in their lives are being forced into shoplifting simply to be able to eat or to feed their children.

The reasons they are being sanctioned are pathetic, looking for too many jobs, being late to sign on because they were at an interview for a job, having to help a pregnant partner before coming out and being 5 minutes late. Imagine being left utterly destitute in this way by a gang of uncaring, heartless millionaire politicians who think being starved will ‘encourage’ you to find one of the non-existent jobs. It is hard to believe that in a country which is still one of the richest in the world people are being deliberately and callously left to starve and freeze.

Surely democracy, if it exists, depends on government of the people by consensus rather than by the use of force or fear which is tyranny. Yet this week’s appearances by government ministers in front of the DWP select committee only highlights that no such consensus exists in the UK today.

And what of our own minister for disabled people – Mike Penning aka Machine Gun Mike and that DWP henchman Iain Duncan Smith. When the mere thought of being in the same room as a small group of disabled people exercising their democratic right to attend a select committee hearing drives DWP ministers to resort to mass protection by police guards heavily armed with machine guns pointed towards disabled spectators I think it is fair for all citizens to ask just what has this government become. Certainly they really cannot be viewed as democratic or legitimate in any way. Neither can they use the excuse that such ‘vulnerable’ people as us are in any way a threat to them – or are we?

One disabled woman who was there said

“we are being treated like terrorists because we are disabled people –  disgusting!”

and another said

“ A very disturbing sight to se an MP having guns pointed at 3 unarmed people in wheelchairs and about 8 other disabled people and carers who came peacefully to exercise their democratic right to sit in on a hearing.” Continue reading →

One for Autumn statement day: how the #bedroomtax wrecks lives…

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I’m posting this on behalf of campaigners at Leeds Hands off Our Homes, who have produced this excellent report on the effects of the bedroom tax on people in Leeds.

The report draws on evidence from 60 case studies of affected tenants and Leeds City Council statistics (acquired through Freedom of Information requests) to provide a detailed picture of the impact on the bedroom tax. The report demonstrates the awful effects that the tax has had on people’s lives – and the pressure that officials have put on people to pay it.

Winter and fuel poverty will only make this situation worse.

As campaigners say:

“The report shows how the bedroom tax infringes the right to adequate housing in multiple ways. Particular concerns include the way that the bedroom tax constitutes an unaffordable rent increase, targets disabled people and infringes the rights of the child and the right to family life. We also found many incidences of bullying and harassment by landlords and landlords agents (including Leeds City Council) that are causing distress for affected tenants, and evidence that a huge number of tenants are not being informed about their eligibility to Discretionary Housing Payments.”

The report authors observe that the financial hardship caused by the bedroom tax means that the “majority of the tenants in our sample reported cutting back on essentials such as food, clothing and heating. Many tenants suffer from serious medical conditions which make them particularly vulnerable to the cold, and with rising energy prices, we fear their lives may be at risk. The health of tenants is also at risk from poor nutrition. Some tenants have increased debts in other areas or turned to an illegal ‘loan shark’ to pay the bedroom tax.”

The impact on people with disabilities and illnesses has been devastating: “Almost 75% of our sample have one or more significant illnesses or disabilities. The vast majority of mental and physical issues reported were likely to be triggered or exacerbated by stress, and in most cases, the tenant would not have been able to cope with a house move.”

The report also details the impact of the bedroom tax on families and children: “As of August 2013, 3347 children lived in households affected by the bedroom tax in Leeds. Eleven of the households in our sample contained schoolaged children. Many parents reported distress about the impact of financial hardship on their ability to provide for the child’s wellbeing and education, or were sacrificing essentials to do so. Several cited anxieties about the effects on the child’s schooling or social/emotional development if they had to change schools due to a house move.”

It just warms the heart to think of all that money that Iain Duncan Smith has pissed away on Universal Credit. Oh – here’s a video of the amazingly flash house he hangs out in. Just the place to relax while you’re devising policies to make other people homeless.

Read the full report here.

Victory as court of appeal upholds ruling on ESA and mental health

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The Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling which found that the process used to decide whether hundreds of thousands of people are eligible for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) discriminates against people with mental health conditions, learning disabilities and autism.

The original judgment, at an Upper Tribunal hearing in May this year, was the result of a Judicial Review brought by two anonymous claimants with mental health problems. You can read the origins of the challenge and the story here.

This was an action brought by the Mental Health Resistance Network and is a tribute to that member-led group and the hard work that people who use services have put in – with little help from established charities or politicians. That should be said and must be said and I am not going to stop saying it. There is a press release on the issue and today’s announcement on the Rethink site, but I make the point again that the MHRN and the Public Law Project deserve all the credit here. I’ll say it again good and loud and why not – it is the member-led groups like Boycott Workfare on workfare and the work programme, Disabled People Against Cuts on issues like the closure of the Independent Living Fund and the Mental Health Resistance Network on the fight against the work capability assessment that are achieving the results in the fight against this government.

And that is the key point to make about resistance and results in our era. People are fighting a vicious government here and they’re doing it on their own pretty much. Just imagine how much further ahead we’d all be if those who had the resources and the political clout contributed those things to the fight.

Don’t start me.

Here are DPAC and MHRN campaigners outside the Royal Courts of Justice in October when the DWP took its case for overturning the initial ruling to the court of appeal:

Fighting #workfare and #sanctions: there is no negotiating with the political class or corporates

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Here are Boycott Workfare protestors outside Senate House today, defying police clampdowns on campus protests and making plenty of noise about the political class’ disgusting embrace of workfare and benefit sanctions…

….and inside the building, the ultimate rogues’ gallery of thieves and state-funded robber barons who are making a filthy pile out of workfare, taxpayers and the misery of people who find themselves unemployed or unable to work. ERSA, the trade body for the so-called welfare-to-work industry, was holding an annual workfare conference in the building today. The roll-call of attendees included: Esther McVey and Stephen Timms, the DWP’s director of social justice (ironic job title of the millenium there), the CE and director of Tomorrow’s People – the organisation that brought you the scandal where unemployed people were forced to work without pay and had to get changed under a bridge during the Queen’s Jubilee. There was also, apparently, a smorgasbord of plundering work programme providers – the likes of Avanta, Seetec, G4S, A4e and Pinnacle People. Joy.

Anyway. History will judge these people harshly. It’s just a pity that the political classes, and organised labour and Labour refuse to judge them harshly now. To date, it has been the member-led groups that have beaten the government and pro-workfare companies and charities back – on the streets, online and in the courts. Same thing with the fight to save the Independent Living Fund – member-led groups like Disabled People Against Cuts were behind that success and pretty much on their own fighting for it. Established charities and the political class ignored them. So. There are people who are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history here and I only regret that I won’t be around to see it. Workfare is absolutely a labour issue, but Labour was not to be seen today – unless you counted Timms, who was somewhere inside the conference, hoovering lunch up with the crooks. I counted a couple of Unite community flags at the protest, but really, there should have been a couple of thousand. And more. But there weren’t. Which was and is extraordinary, albeit totally expected… except the fact is that we’re seeing something very significant here. We’ve been seeing it for a while. We’re at a point (again, we’ve been at it for while) where the very notion of a wage for work is under threat and if things continue as they are, very few jobs will pay. Everyone will be under the boot of a sadistic corporate. As for decent terms and conditions to go along with some sort of wage – forget it. As one speaker rightly said today – the workfare juggernaut will end up driving everyone’s wages into the dirt. It’s bad enough that people on benefits are expected to work for free. It’s only a matter of time before everyone else will be. That has certainly been the case in America, which is something I’ve said before, but I might as well say it again. An example: several years into New York city’s workfare programme, District Council 37, a union which represented municipal employees, took Rudy Giuliani to court, saying that his workfare programme “had illegally replaced nearly 2000 unionised clerical workers with unpaid welfare recipients in three agencies.” That sort of thing. It’ll be that sort of thing all round.

And if you rely on a wage to get by – as opposed to a trust fund, etc – it’ll be that sort of thing coming your way soon, if it hasn’t hit you already. Meanwhile, the member-led fightback groups get on with the battle. They know that there is no negotiating with the political class and/or the major corporates that the political class represents. And they are right. Austerity governments of all stripes exist only to hand public money to the private sector. They will do that and do that until there is nothing left.

Ho hum.

Boycott workfare: join the week of action

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If you’re here, head over here to Boycott Workfare for a list of actions planned against workfare and benefit sanctions this week.

As Boycott Workfare says:

“Things are very wrong: each month 70,000 people face hunger and hardship due to benefit stoppages – ‘sanctions’. Millions of hours of work which should be paid are being replaced by workfare. But we’re taking action and having an impact.

This week, from 2-8 December,  join thousands of others across the UK to push back against sanctions and workfare – with action online and on your high street. Here’s the latest list of actions planned across the UK.”

Also:

Here are some longer interviews with people who have been sanctioned.

Here’s another story about a man who was sanctioned. I’ve compared this with the story of an MP who used public money to heat his horses’ stables. This is the world we’re living in.

Here’s a list of ridiculous reasons for sanctions

Here’s a very detailed CAB report on people who have been sanctioned and the problems that has caused them.

Join the protests.

#FuelPoverty: they’ll take our kids

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This video is from the UKUncut-DPAC fuel poverty action on Tuesday.

I’m posting this because it’s about women who are struggling to meet their bills and are worried that their kids will be removed by social services because of those financial problems. I hear this repeatedly. It one of austerity’s most sinister refrains – women saying again and again that they fear women their kids will be removed because they can’t make ends meet.

Later on Tuesday, I met with another young mother who told me that she deliberated for ages when it came to asking for a foodbank voucher, because she did not want to alert social services to her financial troubles. “There’s that constant worry that they will take your kids [if they think you’re not coping].”

The truly appalling part of all of this is that the reason people can’t make ends meet is because viciously unfair and unnecessary costs have been imposed on them by an out-of-control ruling class – and there’s no political opposition to that. People are dealing with wage cuts, job losses, the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, energy price hikes and plenty else besides. But the fact that people can’t magically produce a financial response to these attacks is something for which they are threatened and punished. So – mothers can’t ask for help with the financial problems imposed by the ruling class, because they fear the establishment will decide that the real problem is they’re unfit mothers who can’t budget. That is an awful position for people to be in. This is a feminist issue if there ever was one.

As the woman in the video says – (she’s from Single Mothers Self Defence in Kentish town):

“The big problem now we’re also finding is that there are so many children being taken into care, not just because of neglect, but because they’re struggling financially. It’s absolutely outrageous that the government can talk about taking your children from you, because you can’t do the most basic things such as feed your children and heat your home to keep them warm.”

She’s right. It is absolutely outrageous. But on it goes. You’ll remember recent stories about a Knowsley Housing Trust bedroom tax letter which said that social services would be advised if someone facing eviction for rent arrears had children.

I wrote then that women had also raised this concern when I was in the northwest talking to people for this article about the bedroom tax:

“The other concern people have is that social services will remove children from parents who are found to be struggling due to the extra cost. People say this a lot. “Nobody wants social services butting their noses into people’s business, because it’s a danger game when a mother hasn’t got enough money to feed her kids properly,” Jill says [at the West Everton Community Centre]. “She’s going to starve herself to make sure her kids are fed. You’re hearing about kids being taken away when they shouldn’t be.””

As I said then too –

“this put me in mind of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a Wisconsin woman called Pat Gowens. I’d rung Pat to talk about Wisconsin’s punitive workfare programme, which she had some experience of. She and other women had set up Welfare Warriors – a member-led campaign made up of people who were fighting the demands and sanctions of that workfare scheme. We talked about that and then our conversation moved onto other work the group was involved in. That work included representing women whose children had been removed by social services. “They come into your homes,” Pat said, “usually on an anonymous call, or [a call from] your husband. They decide you’re a bit crazy, or your house isn’t clean enough – a mother didn’t vacuum her carpets, or just swept them [or something like that]. Then, they take your kids away. You used to get them back in six months. Now it can be six years. If you want them back you have to do parenting classes, therapy, anger management, domestic violence therapy.”

It is time to do more on this. Why must women live in this fear? Why must women pay for austerity with everything? And why don’t the political or media classes give a shit?

Answer:

Because if it isn’t happening to the twitterati, it isn’t happening.

Our joint Mirror, False Economy and Moore Lavan film on the Independent Living Fund

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Mirror story today on the film that Ros Wynne Jones, Moore Lavan Films and me at False Economy have made featuring Mary Laver. Mary was an Olympics gamesmaker volunteer and torchbearer and is also an Independent Living Fund recipient. The ILF is a fund that severely disabled people use to pay for the extra care help they need to live independent lives like everyone else. Naturally, this disgusting government has tried to close the fund. Earlier this month, the Court of Appeal overturned the closure decision that the government made at the end of last year, but the government has not said what it will do next – ie whether it will make another attempt to close the fund and leave disabled people without the money they need to keep living. Mary has lost about three stone this year, because of the worry and uncertainty caused by the government’s closure announcement at the end of last year.

In this film, Mary let us film her and her carers working with her over a 24-hour period so that people could see what high-level care really looked like. She also went without her carers for some of that time so that people could see what her life would be like without that care:

MaryLaver’s Fight for Independence: Cameron’s Cruellest Cut ? from moorelavanfilms on Vimeo.

Public accounts committee to grill private contractors on “delivery” of public services…

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….or non-delivery, that is.

Tomorrow (20 November) at 2:15 pm, the public accounts committee will (hopefully) do this lot over for failures to deliver the public services for which we have forked out billions:

Witness(es): Ashley Almanza, Chief Executive, G4S, Paul Pindar, Chief Executive, Capita, Alistair Lyons CBE, Chairman, Serco and Ursula Morgenstern, Regional Chief Executive Officer, UK and Ireland, Atos.

Location: Room 15, Palace of Westminster

Tune in. Capita is taking over Barnet council as we speak so we might as well hear a bit more about how shit they are as they do it.

Oh yes and Capita is lined up for the electronic monitoring contract that Serco and G4S are supposedly in the dock for. So this is an excellent chance to hear from the companies that screwed us over with that contract and from the one that is about to.

Even Melvyn Bragg says the #bedroomtax is rubbish

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Don’t often do celebs here, but since this one pretty much fell across the lens and because everyone else is doing Brand and Webb and whatnot – here’s Melvyn Bragg saying the bedroom tax is a waste of space at today’s bedroom tax protest outside the House of Commons (sound quality is a bit crap as I was still faffing with the directional mic when Melvyn wafted into frame):

Said Melvyn:

“I agree with this demonstration. I think it’s (the bedroom tax) is doing a lot more harm than good. And I’m glad you’re here today. It’s a pity there’s such a panic on inside the House of Commons. I agree with this demonstration. It’s a tax on very poor people and often very disadvantaged people and it’s completely unfounded. The sooner they get rid of it, the better.”

Way to go Melvyn. Up yours, Cameron.

The panic Melvyn referred to was caused, apparently, by a bomb scare at parliament. I’d been queuing to get in to hear an hour of the bedroom tax debate (Iain Duncan Smith had already done a runner from it), but then security told us to leave and ushered the whole protest up the road. The police cordoned off the entire area, then un-cordoned it after about an hour. Have put a bit of video of that in at the end.

Here are the vote results. Grim. Time for Labour to instruct its councils and housing associations to simply refuse to collect the tax and to introduce no-evictions policies across the board. Been time for that for a while, of course. Ho hum.

And here’s a full list of Labour non-voters. Includes my own – Joan Ruddock. Have said it before and I’ll say it again – people are on their own with this. Political class doesn’t give a shit.