A few thoughts on Labour’s plans to cap credit card interest payments to ease card debt:

I feel that the debt troubles of a particular group of people are being sidelined in the recent flurry of mainstream news stories about debt (have written about this in detail in recent times)

We’re hearing a great deal in the mainstream about student loans and student debt, and about credit card and car payment debt  – debt that particularly concerns the middle and voting classes, as people on twitter have observed.

We’re hearing a lot less about the debts that are crushing people who are most marginalised:

Examples of those debts and costs:

– The council tax debt and outrageous court costs that are added to debts when people are summonsed to court for council tax non-payment

– The bailiff costs that rise by tens and hundreds of pounds each time a bailiff hammers on a door to demand council tax and other debt repayments

– The impossible landlord demands for rent shortfall money when housing benefit or Universal Credit don’t cover escalating rents

– The exorbitant court charges people must pay when eviction battles go to court (£355 for a woman on Income Support in this example).

– The DWP deductions from benefits for loans and advance payments that people must request to cover costs, Universal Credit start delays and all the rest.

– The sudden loss of income when Employment and Support Allowance recipients are found fit for work and told their ESA payments will stop.

Student loan debt and credit card debt are of course important topics. They’re not exclusive to the middle and/or voting classes. They just affect people who have a voice and use it. My point is that the crushing council tax demands, rent shortfall problems, benefit stops and delays, and court costs that keep the poorest people in debt are equally important. Payday loan regulation hardly addresses those problems.

If we’re going to talk about devastating debt which destroys lives, let’s include everyone in the discussion. Policy must be written for people who are the most marginalised, as well as people who are likely to vote. Such policy should be promoted and publicised as enthusiastically as any call for a card interest cap.

Throwing marginalised people a lifeline is not “being soft on welfare,” you know. It’s being humane – and fiscally responsible, I would have thought.

I have an article on the debts people owe in austerity at politics.co.uk today:

Student debt dominates headlines – but why don’t we hear arguments for writing off debt for people who austerity has crushed with council tax charges, DWP loan repayments, sanctioned benefits, rent arrears, court fines and all the rest? Where’s the political sympathy for writing off debt for these people? Where are the headlines for that?

“Staying housed, battling bailiffs, fighting councils for housing, sorting out benefit sanctions and paying rent arrears, fines and DWP loans really is a full time job. Benefits are constantly threatened and sanctioned by the DWP. Housing benefit and paying rent becomes a mess when people shift their claims to Universal Credit. People end up with rent arrears because their local housing allowance doesn’t cover their private sector rent. They are charged court costs for eviction and struggle to get council help for a new place… People are paying council tax arrears. They’re paying back loans to the DWP which go on and on. The letters and demands pour through the door. They’re in hock to the state and its providers forever. That’s the point. The system isn’t helping these people. It owns them. They can’t get out, because they’re not allowed out. It’s time that the political class stopped insisting they try.”

Read the rest here.

Feel free to email your views and experiences on this if you don’t want to leave a comment. I know many of you have canvassed this topic in recent times:

In the past fortnight, I’ve called the DWP’s 0345 600 0723 Universal Credit line twice to ask about the best place to send the sick notes (DWP calls them fit notes I think) which excuse benefit claimants from jobsearch activities. Sick notes are crucial when a Universal Credit claimant is sick or injured. They explain why people can’t work or carry out jobsearch activities. Benefits can be sanctioned if people miss job activities without a medical note.

Problem is this. People raise concerns with me about sick notes and other communications to the DWP not being properly recorded, or taking ages to process, or being processed out of order, or apparently not even arriving when posted to the DWP. God knows what’s going on with all of this. You should see the masses of paperwork that goes to and from the DWP and benefit claimants. Keeping track is a nightmare.

Last week, I called the DWP after speaking to a volunteer at South Chadderton foodbank. Her 40-year-old son had his Universal Credit sanctioned in June. He’d been about to start a warehouse job in May when he broke his wrist. His sick note from his doctor should have excused him from the placement and jobsearch activities. Something went wrong. He was sanctioned. His mother wondered if there’d been a problem with the processing of his sick note. Nobody was sure at the time of interview. The DWP still hadn’t sent a letter explaining the reasons for the sanction. People were still trying to guess what had happened.

Because I’d spoke to this woman and because others have raised this issue, I decided to call the Universal Credit line to ask general questions about the best place to send sick notes. I especially wanted to know if people everywhere could drop their sick notes in at their jobcentres, or if they should send them in to the DWP’s Freepost address.

Four points emerged from those phone calls (one made on 14 July and the other on 17 July). All four were cause for concern, so I’m putting them here. Feel free to weigh in.

1) The DWP seems to have a sick-note processing backlog of some description, so claimants must allow time for sick notes to be processed. The officer I spoke to last Monday said that UC claimants should allow up to seven days for sick notes to be processed: “because obviously they’re [staff are] so busy.” People online report delays of ten days for DWP mail processing.

That “obviously they’re so busy,” is a line I’m sick of hearing. Why are delays in this area considered so acceptable? Why must benefit claimants always wait and wait before their information is dealt with? The people who use these so-called systems are on extremely limited incomes. Those incomes depend on the right paperwork getting to the right people IMMEDIATELY. Everything can go wrong if it doesn’t. Claimants could be sanctioned if they missed a jobsearch activity while an explanatory sick note was stuck in a pile. If there are processing delays because staff are “so busy,” someone needs to hire more staff.

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Be interested to hear if this has happened to others:

I’m working at the moment with a man whose Disability Living Allowance was stopped in April this year.

He applied for Personal Independence Payment, but says he never received a letter or a text to tell him when his face-to-face assessment for PIP would be.

What he did receive a couple of months later was a letter to tell him that he wouldn’t get PIP because he didn’t attend the face-to-face meeting. As he says – he didn’t attend the face-to-face assessment because he didn’t realise that it was on. He didn’t get a letter or a text telling him where and when it would be.

So he applied again. A time and date for a face-to-face assessment was set up for last Friday. I was going to attend the assessment with him. Unfortunately, that assessment was cancelled at the last minute, because the assessor called in sick.

Two people have told me that they’ve recently had this experience. They received a letter advising them that they wouldn’t get PIP because they didn’t attend a face-to-face assessment – a face-to-face assessment that they say they were never told about. In these cases, the part of the comms which tells people they’re not eligible for PIP seemed to work better than the part which tells people when and where to show up for eligibility tests.

It seems unlikely that either person simply chose not to attend. Applying for PIP is a form-filling nightmare. I doubt very much that anyone would go through all that and then not attend the face-to-face assessment when given a date and then apply for PIP again for the lulz.

Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? If you have and don’t want to leave details in the comments, feel free to contact me here.

Am also interested to hear from people who had their face-to-face assessments cancelled at the last minute.