Category Archives: Benefit systems

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.

Labour’s coercive control of people who claim benefits

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Here’s my latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut benefits for sick and disabled people:

“You know how you get these sick bastards who abuse their partners by controlling the family’s bank accounts and throwing a few coins at Mum for food and clothes if she behaves?

Liz Kendall is just like that on taking money from benefit claimants – you know, “this might hurt you sweetheart, but I’m doing it for your own good.”

Feelgood abuse is what it’s all about.

Domestic abuse charities call this behaviour coercive financial abuse, but in political circles it is known as mission critical welfare reform.”

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In this episode, we talk about failed back to work schemes, money wasted on voracious private “employability” companies and how so-called “tailored” back to work support for disabled people can feel more like a tailored attack.

If Liz Kendall wants to improve working options for disabled people, people with mental health issues and everybody else tbh, she needs to raise the national living and minimum wages to £20 and more. People would be a lot less depressed if they could earn enough to meet their bills and then some.

Then Labour needs to tax major corporates like Amazon for the kind of money that would pay to make every workplace and space accessible.

The benefits system actually causes serious mental health problems

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In my latest podcast episode, we take more piss out of Liz Kendall and Keir Starmer’s barely-watered-down plans to cut PIP and disability benefits.

We talk about the fact that one of the reasons that people claim PIP for mental health problems is that life is so difficult for so many people. Wages are low and rents are impossibly high, and people can’t cope. Hardly a surprise, is it.

Why don’t Kendall and Starmer focus on that?

 

We also talk about the fact that a lot of people can’t work because the support they need doesn’t exist.

I talk to Megi in the podcast. Megi is the mother of a profoundly disabled autistic 8-year-old. This girl is bladder and bowel incontinent, non verbal and has violent meltdowns every single day. She barely sleeps.

She is dangerous to herself and others. She can’t be left alone for a second, including through the night. Megi had to leave a good job to become her daughter’s fulltime carer. She now gets a measly £300-ish a month in carer’s allowance. Great.

Liz Kendall will protect disabled people who are “most” in need from benefit cuts? Do me a favour.

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My latest podcast episode on Liz Kendall’s plans to cut disability benefits and support money:

“Forget Kendall’s bollocks about protecting disabled people who are “most” in need (whatever that means) from her vicious benefits cuts.

Because the truth is that governments actively go after people who are most in need.

 

I would also like say that it is my considerable experience that when you cut support money for sick and disabled people, a lot of them just get sicker and often, you know, die – as opposed to rushing out and enthusiastically looking more work or whatever it is that Liz feels greater poverty motivates sick and disabled people to do.”

The benefits heist: how sick and disabled people have paid the price for the anti-welfare craze

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Hello all 🙂

Here’s season 2 from my podcast. This season takes a close and hopefully scathing look at the vile Liz Kendall and her plans to cut disability benefits and the personal independence payment.

That woman is revolting. Her poison trickles down, unlike wealth, sadly.

This first episode features a report of an interview I did with a universal credit support worker who actually said that sick and disabled and homeless people needed to pull themselves together and model themselves on Elon Musk. True story.

That’s the kind of person that the DWP is putting out there to make decisions about who gets disability support.

I’d be interested in hearing what you think – about this episode and also about Liz Kendall. What a shower.

Surprise, Liz – people actually die when you leave them nothing to live on

I’ve made this podcast series to talk about the unspeakable effects that 15 years of cuts to disability benefits and support have had on disabled people.

And now we have Liz Kendall – another elected member who does not have the vision or even the attention span to devise social policy and welfare policy that brings out the best in us, rather than the worst – one of the myriad politicians around the world who try to swing attention from their own astounding uselessness and insatiable love of freebies by telling us all that it is benefit claimants who are bringing Fanny Adams to the great Western experiment.

The irony of that.

For more than 15 years, I’ve been interviewing and spending days and weeks with sick and disabled people who have taken the brunt of god knows how many years of global anti-welfare cuts and attacks.

Benefits are difficult to get, Liz

It needs to be said that claiming benefits is actually HARD to do. The whole process is humiliating. People are constantly assessed and picked on by bureaucrats. The facts are that most people just give up.

That part of the story needs to be heard. It is a major part of the story. It is a much bigger part of the story than the part which says everyone who claims is on the make.

Let’s tell it like it is, because Liz Kendall is talking out of her behind. Ain’t pretty.

#Disability benefits have already been destroyed, Liz friggn Kendall

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As a person who has been campaigning for benefits and decent housing for all for more than 20 years, I have to ask – does Liz Kendall not realise that the job of destroying disability benefits and disabled people has already been TOTALLY done? 14 years of Tories mate.

It is already very, VERY hard to get PIP thanks Liz. How about you try it. And it is also very difficult to get benefits which don’t require you to work when you cannot, or to regularly attend useless jobcentre ‘courses’ on putting a CV together for the 1,00000000th time. Give me strength.

Here’s me ranting about that. Enjoy and please rant yourself.

And in case anyone who knows eff all turns up here to say that disabled people who really need support still get it – do me a favour. People who are most in need are the people whose support is targeted most aggressively, because the government feeling is that those people can’t fight back.

If you want a good example, let’s take a moment to remember the Tories’ slaughtering of the independent living fund not so long ago. That fund paid for 24/7 care support for profoundly disabled people who required that support to live their lives. The government went after them anyway.

So – time to piss off, Liz. You’re playing an old tune which was garbage in the first place.

And if Liz actually wants to hear from a real person, here’s Niki, a mother of a disabled son, talking about the absolute farce that has been trying to get benefits and support for her disabled son. She explains that getting this support is actually now her full time job. She also says that most people she knows give up trying to get benefits and housing help because it’s just impossible.

Bleeding more cash out of homeless people

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We go back to Marlin Apartments in Stratford, where homeless families live 4 and 5 to a single room – around which they are pursued by militias of rats, mice, bedbugs, cockroaches, tiny flies and other pests that I didn’t care to view closely at the time. There are pictures and stories here if you can stand it.

Being eaten by bedbugs was plenty to be getting on with, but now, there is more. It turns out that the above vermin aren’t the only ones in pursuit of Marlin residents. Energy and water companies are after them, too – for money that the residents neither owe, nor can pay. No surprises there, of course. You don’t get much time off from your life as prey when you are poor. Your whole day is lousy with bloodsuckers, muggers and vultures who can’t wait to chew you out. You get down to bone, but your tormentors will still charge in to gnaw it.

Which is not to say that they don’t form a type of queue. In any list of voracious wankers, water and energy companies invariably make their way to the top. In a stampede for your twitching carcass, they will bullock past the rest in the race for your soft parts. Which they’ll get.

So it is at Marlin Apartments. Recently, while thumbing through mail that the rats had yet to fully consume, residents found water and energy demands for several hundred pounds. In some cases, these demands were for more than £500:

Image of water costs bill showing a demand for £531.82

At the same time, Marlin residents received letters from Newham council which said that they had to set up their own accounts with energy companies, and pay the usual exorbitant power bills directly to those companies.

image from letter about changed conditions for charging for energy bills at Marlin Apartments

As I understand it (I don’t entirely), up until September, bills were included in residents’ rent – one bill for the lot, residents say. I suppose that makes sense given that Marlin Apartments were once serviced apartments for city-visitor management types, who probably paid an all-inclusive bill for a stay.

Now that the apartments are used as temporary accommodation for homeless people, things have changed – to bring Marlin residents in line with “arrangements that are made with all residents of temporary accommodation,” according to the above letter from the council. I say, “as I understand it,” because the council has not responded to my requests for clarification on the new and old charging “systems.” Also, the text in the council’s letter is about as clear as catflop. I tried hard, but there are sentences that are taking a while to stick:

“As a result of the rising energy costs, it has been agreed with Marlin apartments that the cost of water heating via the gas supply to the building will be made by them directly to you.”

I think that means, “as energy costs go up, homeless tenants will be hit for the lot.”

So, that’s great for residents. As we all found out last year – and a long time before in many cases – knowing that your heating bills will increase in winter, and as dangerous damp and mould set in, is not especially hilarious.

National and local government like to argue that billing homeless people like the rest of us (ie, violently) is character-building and the path out of dependence. This argument tends to circumnavigate the fact that problems with meeting bills are generally less about a lack of character than about a lack of money, but we must grow where we can, I guess.

I suppose that there is a bit of bright side, in that worrying about impossible energy bills could be a refreshing change from worrying about being eaten alive by bedbugs. Then again, maybe being slowly gassed by anti-bedbug pesticides is a better way to go. As I say, you look for positives where you can. Every aspect of council homelessness provision is so terminally stuffed that I now tend to rate problems by degree and length of torture. When looking for answers to problems, you really do find yourself asking questions like – is sitting in a damp room and choking on mould particles over several winters better or worse for body and soul than being munched on by bedbugs and mice? What should you deal with first?

People living in temp housing get both, of course, Such are the times. If you are homeless in 2023, housing success is not about finding somewhere comfortable, or safe, or clean, or even habitable. It’s about finding a place that you and your kids might survive.

Anyway. I imagine that some people who read this won’t give a toss, logic being that we’re all stuck paying huge water and energy bills, so why should homeless people miss out. Also, heaps of people get random batshit demands for hundreds of extra pounds from energy and water companies, so, I can see some people thinking – welcome to the club. I got a random demand for £2,000 from Southern Electric once. Amusingly, they ended up paying me £600 after I started blogging about it.

My point, though: when the squeeze is put on homeless people, you see again that there are no limits. End-stage capitalism hunts for money where there is none. It would be kinder, and certainly prettier, to throw homeless people to actual sharks.

Why you can’t rely on getting a sympathetic DWP work coach

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A few thoughts on now-legendary government plans to have jobcentre work coaches decide whether people are fit to work and how hard:

There are many problems with this hogwash, but the one we’ll talk about today is the pot luck element (already a problem). Sick and disabled people in such a system will have to rely on fair treatment from work coaches (already very much hit and miss). Put simply, people will have to hope that they get a work coach who isn’t a punitive twat.

Which isn’t always a sure thing. Some frontline officers are decent. Others, alas, really are out to lunch.

I’ve been thinking about this, because I recently had a long conversation with a frontline DWP officer who, just a few minutes in, struck me as totally gone.

This person was a universal credit case manager who, funnily enough, was on a Stockport PCS picket line, striking for better pay. I was interviewing strikers and talked with this case manager at length. Actually – this person talked to me at length. I mostly stood there wondering why I’d been born.

This caseworker couldn’t have channelled Mel Stride better if they’d actually been Mel Stride. The caseworker said it all: benefit claimants were lazy, their mental health problems were bogus, that anyone could be a millionaire if they tried (wasn’t sure about this, given that the strikers were out for a few measly percent) and – slight tangent – that social media turned people into turkeys (have to say I agreed with that one).

Anyway.

The red flags went up early on, but the one I’ll start with waved vigorously at me – when the caseworker said that benefit claimants should model themselves on Elon Musk.

“[When] Elon Musk started out people were saying, “electric cars, mate – that’s not going to take off.” He’s now outstripping Toyota, because he showed up. That’s all we ask claimants to do.”

Oh goody, I thought. Bet this plays well. As a caseworker, our comrade here had the power to start (or not start) benefit claims, to stop payments, to read about people’s health and their personal circumstances, and to make decisions about their incomes on the basis of that.

Knowing this and hearing the Musk thing, your hopes for a fair world tank. When you spend hours with claimants who have literacy problems, health problems, age problems and work-related injuries, etc, the last person you want to hear from is another frontline clown who believes that getting work – and getting Musk-rich for that matter – is entirely a matter of the right stuff and backbone. No matter if your backbone is crumbling, or full of arthritis, or whatever it is. No matter if you apply for job after job, but can’t buy an interview because of your age. Our caseworker didn’t really touch on the many and often complicated reasons why people don’t work, apart from suggesting that too many of them arse around on facebook.

“Anything is possible,” the caseworker said. “They talk about the American dream. The dream is all around you.”

Continue reading →

Jeremy Hunt: curing old age and disability one cadaver at a time

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To the real world then! – and the “time to boot lazy old and/or disabled benefit claimants into work” concepts launched at claimants yesterday by legendary civic thinker Jeremy Hunt.

Can’t wait for this. A “voluntary” (don’t laugh) back to work scheme for any disabled people who weren’t bumped off during austerity’s first pass, an over-50s apprenticeship thing to keep not-rich older people grinding in harness so that they drop dead before pension age, and the now-famous plan to force claimants to jobcentres repeatedly for back-to-work meetings with overstretched job coaches who already don’t have time to see clients for more than ten minutes. What’s not to love?

The subtext, of course, is that the only reason people don’t work, or don’t work until their hair bleeds, is because they’re lazy. Disability, old age, mental health issues, sickness – in Hunt’s mind, that stuff is all just panto.

Except that it is not. It really is not.

The “lazy claimants” innuendo is actually the laziest part of Hunt’s gobfest. I can say that for a fact, because as luck would have it, I’ve recently been speaking at length with benefit claimants at a job club in the Stockport suburb of Brinnington (I’m interviewing people for a new book I’m writing).

Intriguingly, this job club has not served up the legions of idlers that Hunt would have you believe are lying around in places like Brinnie and enjoying your taxes via the medium of weed. Actually, the main activity that most people I’ve met are involved in is trying to exist at the rough end of a world run by gobshites and sociopaths such as Jeremy Hunt.

The people I’ve spoken with so far have been older and/or ill (one with a heart condition, but recently employed as a cleaner, and one guy in his 60s who’d been working at McDonald’s), or facing age bias from employers after 40+ years of work and then redundancy, or, in one case, trying to avoid being murdered by Putin. I spoke last week to a 26-year-old Ukranian woman called Nataliia who showed me a picture of a pile of rubble where part of her hometown once stood. She was working as a translator for Stockport council and looking for a permanent job in her field of expertise.

On older people though: You find a lot of older people at these jobs clubs, for the simple reason that the pension age keeps disappearing over the horizon and some people manage to cling to life as it moves.

For example – I spoke at length last Friday with M, who is 64. M had worked for nearly 50 years – the last 34 of them in for the same employer in retail in a curtain manufacturer’s showroom. But then, “my boss decided to retire and went into voluntary liquidation. There was 9 of us [working there]. In January this year, we were unemployed.”

At 64, M was still a way off pension age. This is a garbage situation in itself. Anyone who is even partly civilised knows that when you get to 60, you should be able to retire if you want to, or if you need to. You shouldn’t be forced to scrabble around for painful ways to drag yourself over a ever-fading finish line. “I’m struggling in lots of ways, because I don’t have a lot of computer skills,” said M. She’d signed on for new-style jobseekers’ allowance, because when she was made redundant, she expected to find another retail job pretty fast.

Except that she hadn’t. There were 2 problems here: age bias and health. “I’ve applied for lots of retail jobs [even] before I became unemployed,” M said. “I do think they look at your age. There have been times when I’ve had to send my passport off to prove who I am – and then I don’t get any contact.” Continue reading →

Taking bets on when this council block will collapse

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We return today to Brassett Point, the waterlogged Newham council block where the pipework down one whole side of the building is so wrecked that daily life for residents is an actual shower of shit.

Wet ceilings, leaking sewerage and water pipes, and buckets and towels all over – see residents’ vids below. Doesn’t look good. I admit I’m no engineer, but I don’t think you have to be. Can’t bode well when your building turns into a sieve.

Bucket collecting water in Brassett Point

Bucket collecting water in Brassett Point

 

You also start to wonder if the council has given up when you tell them that pipes over your loo are bust – and their suggestion is that you pee in a bucket.

Readers of this site will remember a recent story about the council giving a Brassett Point resident a portaloo to use when the leaks raining down on her toilet became tricky to swerve while perched.

The resident wasn’t thrilled with this arrangement. I think we can all agree that having to sit on a bucket next to your friends in your lounge is socially kind of blunt.

Really – MPs and the council need to get onto this in a big way before the whole sodden building collapses with everyone in it, etc.

The council fixes one leak here, only for another couple of leaks to spring over here. Can’t see this lasting for long.

Water coming through the ceiling

Water coming through the ceiling

More on this soon, but for now – and I do mean now – let’s get moving on this before whatever is still holding the building up finally dissolves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And the portaloo, just as a reminder of scenes late last year at Brassett Point. I took this picture when I visited:

Portaloo in Newham council flat

Portaloo in Newham council flat

 

And one more video. Why not: