Category Archives: Benefit systems

Benefit claimants without a past or history wanted. Really.

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A few thoughts:

I was at a thing last week which had a media session.

One of the speakers made a pertinent, but dispiriting, point.

The speaker said that it was important to make sure that people who received benefits didn’t have a problematic past if they decided to speak to the media – that those people didn’t have a history of fraud, or unsavoury behaviours that the rightwing might dig up.

It’s a line that depresses me. A lot of the people I interview have a past. Everybody has a past. My own past wouldn’t stand scrutiny at all. With the people I interview – there can be drug and alcohol problems, jail records, histories of broken relationships, a list of jobs started and lost – all kinds of things. Life is harsh. It gets a lot of people.

The main thing these people have in common is that they don’t have any money. They don’t have the sort of money you need to paper over cracks. They don’t have rich parents to live with when a job goes, or money for smart lawyers if they get caught dealing, or stealing, or whatever.

Point is – these people are utterly excluded from public conversation, for the very simple reason they don’t measure up in a spotlight. They’re thought to make the social security cause look bad. That angers me.

The political class, meanwhile, bursts with fraudsters – thugs, crooks, charlatans who flip houses and bullies who don’t declare properties and don’t pay tax, and all the rest. They get a free pass on it all.

Nobody tells that lot to avoid the limelight.

This is really starting to irritate me – the rules regarding who should and shouldn’t be heard.

Used and abused: inside a failed UK workfare scheme. Will Universal Credit claimants be pushed into schemes like this to make up labour shortfalls after Brexit?

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The post below – based on Kyla’s story (named changed) – is an excerpt from a collection I’m working on.

The project collects interviews I’ve made since 2014 with people directly affected by benefit cuts and welfare reform.

This collection is being made possible thanks to a Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust grant. I’m posting extracts from this collection here as I work on it.

Amiel_Melburn_logo

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Workfare: how government gets something for nothing out of people in deep poverty

This article is about workfare – that failed (for workfare workers), but electorally-popular concept where benefit claimants must work for unemployment benefits.

Tory, coalition and Labour (and American, Australian and Canadian) governments have been keen advocates of workfare schemes for decades – even in very recent decades, when the widespread failure of workfare as a means of placing people in ongoing paid jobs has been extensively reported.

I’ve written about workfare in the UK and in America many times in the last five years.

To my mind, politicians persist with workfare schemes for one reason when it comes down to it: harsh workfare programmes, with their punitive street-cleaning and charity-shop workfare placements, and tough benefit sanctions for non-compliance, give politicians a chance to crack down on the unemployed for show. Governments are desperate to prove to welfare-skeptic electorates that people who claim unemployment benefits are made to toil for their dole.

“Toughlove,” is the word that workfare’s advocates like to use when they talk about forcing people who are out of work into gruelling workfare jobs on the threat of sanctions.

A Clinton government would “end welfare as we know it,” pledged Bill Clinton on a campaign promise which led to the game-changing (not in a good way for the poorest social security recipients in particular) Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act with its exacting work-for-welfare conditions in 1996.

Clinton said that as though ending welfare as people knew it was a good thing. The reality was that PRWORA, with its strict time limits for social security eligibility and tough workfare and sanction conditions pushed thousands off welfare rolls and into dire poverty. Workfare schemes such as the Wisconsin (W2) programme and the New York (WEP) scheme became notorious for such exclusion, particularly as millennium recession deepened. Lockout from social security was no joke as escape from poverty through any type of paid work became harder.

Workfare’s champions didn’t care. They didn’t care where society’s poorest went as they were excluded from much-needed state support. No matter that society’s poorest went into dangerous and illegal activities such as selling blood and food stamps, skipping meals, shoplifting, scavenging and returning to violent partners to make ends meet. Social security is a numbers game for movers and shakers in the modern age. All that mattered and matters is that the number of people claiming support drops.

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Workfare in the UK

This article is based on in-depth interviews with forced participants in a recent failed UK workfare scheme: George Osborne’s Help to Work programme with its Community Work Placements.

Community Work Placements – CWP – were workfare placements, mostly in charities, aimed at people who were long-term unemployed and thought short of workplace skills, whatever that meant. Actually, the people I interviewed on CWP tended to be older and short of decent work opportunities, rather than skills, but government didn’t talk much about that.

Neither did government talk much about learning from the failure of American workfare schemes, or about the dangers of imposing strict workfare schemes and benefit sanctions on in-need people in a recession.

CWP was rough. It wasn’t tailored to meet people’s circumstances and needs. Some participants I spoke with were older people who were pushed into hard physical work from which they gained nothing, except confirmation of their own suspicions that they were being punished. That “work” included walking around with charity collection buckets in freezing cold weather, or standing all day to sort and clean donated clothes in charity shops.

CWP was memorable for the two reasons that such blunt workfare schemes so often are.

The first was that it was launched at great cost (£300m) with a shifty and strident politician (Osborne) banging on in the foreground about long-term unemployment being a fault of a widespread benefit claimant sense of entitlement (“no something-for-nothing any more“), rather than the economy.

The second was that it failed spectacularly. Launched into jobcentres in 2014, CWP was shut down just two years later after falling short most of the way along of its own modest targets for workfare placement companies to place 15% of CWP “graduates” in jobs. CWP was ditched not long before Osborne was.

Continue reading →

You can’t have this job because you’re too old. We also deduct £200 from wages because these jobs are apprenticeships. What.

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This one is for anyone out there who thinks that people who sign on have it easy. They don’t.

Have posted the recording below to demonstrate again the (often costly) obstacles that are planted in the way of people who look for low-paid work while signing on.

Some of the treatment by employers experienced by the woman in the recording is downright discriminatory and probably illegal. Certainly should be illegal.

I leafleted outside Stockport jobcentre this Wednesday with Stockport United Against Austerity.

I spoke at length with J, a woman I’ve spoken with before.

The recording below is from that interview. J has a son with autism (he’s in his early 20s) and a ten-year-old daughter. Her son’s PIP was stopped recently. J lost her carer’s allowance. She signs on for JSA and is looking for work.

J has been to six job interviews in the last few months.

Only one organisation ever bothered to get back to her about the job she was interviewed for. That was a nursery job.

Here’s the audio – J describing the experience (there’s a transcript at the end of this post):

The woman who called J about the nursery job told her three things:

  • J didn’t get the job
  • J didn’t get the job because she was too old
  • If J had been given the job, the company would have deducted £200 from her (minimum) wage over several months to pay back apprenticeship costs, because the job was an apprenticeship. I thought that any apprenticeship cost or levy was supposed to be paid by employers. I’ll be doing more work on this, but feel free to comment if this is an area you’re familiar with.

J was also told that she would have to pay for a DBS check. Last time I posted about this, people tweeted to say that employers should pay for such checks. I find mixed advice on that one.

The point is that I keep meeting people at jobcentres who can’t get their employer or their jobcentre or pay for DBS checks. The cost – between about £50 and £70 – lands on the newly-employed person. That is no joke for someone who only gets £70 or so a week in JSA or Universal Credit. The jobcentre says No and the employer says No and the person concerned begins to worry that they’ll never be able to start work, because nobody will help pay for the DBS check that the person can’t afford. Continue reading →

Newham council tells homeless mother to move to Birmingham. Council says friends and family are not essential to her welfare

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Update 27 June:

New mayor of Newham Rokhsana Fiaz has emailed Sara to say that she will look into Sara’s housing problems asap. I will post any updates.

There’s a bigger issue here for Labour, though. When are Labour councils going to start telling government that they simply refuse to house people away from jobs and support networks? How are Labour councils going to stand up to LHA caps and prohibitive market rents? What’s the strategy? Where’s the militancy? When will Labour councils get stuck in?

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Original post:

I want to show you the sort of letter that councils send to homeless people who are desperate for local housing. I want you to see where things are at.

The excerpts below are taken from a letter sent by Newham Council to Sara Abdalla, 30.

Sara is homeless. She has two children. The eldest is six and the youngest is just 18 months. The family lives in temporary accommodation in a Newham hostel.

The letter is from an officer who reviewed Sara’s decision to decline a council offer of accommodation in Birmingham. The officer upheld the council’s decision to send Sara to Birmingham.

Sara turned down the Birmingham flat, because she was and is desperate to stay in London.

She has good reason for that. Her son is settled in school in Newham. She has a local job. The review letter was written before she got that job – but Sara says the council won’t factor her employment into her case. She has vital support in Newham – the friends and contacts that women with young children rely on.

This whole situation is the usual poisonous mess. I’d ask Newham council to comment on it, but the press office has blacklisted me. Nothing doing there.

This letter gives some insight into council justifications for sending homeless people away – insight, if you like, into council interpretations of homelessness guidance in this era of intolerable pressure on housing. You’ll see where some of the bars are set.

Here’s the first excerpt. This stuff really is cold-blooded.

The excerpt says that Sara’s support networks of family and friends Newham are not key to the family’s wellbeing.

The officer writes:

“I accept that it would be disruptive for any family to have to move away from an area where they have established social links over a number of years and away from their family, and that this may be more disruptive for a family with young children like yours. However, I do not accept that the support of your family, friends or local community is essential to your household’s welfare.” (My emphasis).

There’s more.

The council concedes the move to Birmingham would be a wrench, but says that Sara’s family and friends could visit – for all the world as though occasional sightings of friends make up for the loss of daily contact and support. No mention is made of prohibitive travel costs, or the difficulties that some people would have travelling that distance:

“Google maps has confirmed that the distance from the Housing Needs Service in Newham to the accommodation… is 136 miles, clearly a distance likely to prevent you travelling back to Newham on a frequent basis. However, you can always commute by train to London and your relatives and friends could also in turn come to visit.” (My emphasis).

The state as we have it really is vile. Continue reading →

When you’re older and unemployed, the DWP actively takes the piss. More interviews from the jobcentre

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Have posted below a transcript from another recent interview at Stockport jobcentre. I’ve been leafleting there with Stockport United Against Austerity.

The interview was with Brian (name changed), 54.

Brian was signing on for JSA.

I’m posting Brian’s story to show again the senseless demands that the DWP makes of older unemployed people who really haven’t got a hope in hell of finding work – especially using the jobcentre’s failed methods.

I meet a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who sign on for unemployment benefits.

A lot of these older claimants worked in manual jobs in their day. Brian did. He left school at 15 and went to work building dry stone walls. He joined the army. Then, he worked as a security guard.

Employers cut manual workers loose as they get older. Their health often starts to deteriorate (Brian was disabled after an accident at work. He’d been found fit for work at a recent ESA assessment). People can’t compete for manual jobs with applicants half their age.

That’s one of the many reasons why their chances of finding decent work and pay are zilch.

People know this.

Brian certainly did. “The trouble is that once you get past 50, you’re knackered,” Brian said.

He felt that people from his sort of background – without education and literacy skills – really struggled as they aged:

“..what really knackered us up… [was that] we had poor schooling. Really bad.”

Jobcentres know how the land lies, of course – but still they force people in Brian’s situation to take part in so-called jobsearch activities.

Jobsearch activities never lead to employment – they can’t, by definition – but people must still trudge to their jobcentres to complete them. “Pointless” doesn’t begin to cover these perverse drills. This is the DWP making older, sick or disabled people dance for its entertainment.

Brian was one of many people I’ve spoken to at Stockport recently who had to attend the jobcentre to engage in a famously meaningless activity – to sit at a computer and apply online for tens and hundreds of jobs while jobcentre staff watched.

Nobody I speak to ever gets a job this way. EVER. People don’t even receive an automated acknowledgement a lot of the time. They just sit there clicking Send buttons on job applications until staff say they can stop.

Thousands of people at jobcentres around the country are forced to apply online for jobs this way each week. They must even pay for the privilege. At Stockport, people have to fork out £4 for a bus ticket to and from the jobcentre. People must travel in from miles away.

Said Brian:

“[In the days] when we had the [paper] job applications, I could hand those in. I would hear something back in a couple of days. I either got the job, or I didn’t get the job. [Now] I’m applying for five times as many jobs, [but] never hear a thing…it’s all on the computer. You’re not going to get a job just on internet.

Even job coach…she said, “I can’t understand why you’re not getting replies.”

I said, “when I was back in the 80s, 90s, it was about 15 to one [applying] per job at a rough estimate. Now you’re going for 350 to one. Everybody’s applying for the same fricking jobs, but half of you won’t hear….

It’s crap, honestly, what they have in there [at the jobcentre]. It’s not worth the space it is written on…there’s just not enough jobs out there…you’re applying and you get no replies… the system’s broken.”

It certainly is.

It is definitely broken for people who’ve been written off – older, disabled people who the system has decided belong on the scrapheap forever. Brian told me another story. He said that the jobcentre wouldn’t help him cover costs for his security badge, so that he could work in security again. He’d paid the money himself.

Renewing a badge costs about £220 – money Brian had struggled to find. God knows what goes on with these security badges. I find the whole system bizarre. It seems that sometimes, jobcentres pay for badges and sometimes they don’t. I’ve spoken to people whose badges the DWP has paid for and to people who’ve had to pay for their badges themselves.

Brian said he’d done a “different” course. Perhaps it wasn’t a DWP approved course. Or perhaps the DWP had decided that Brian’s age and health didn’t warrant a financial outlay.

Whatever the case, nothing was easily fixed. Nothing is ever easily fixed at jobcentres.

Brian was stuck where he was. Forever.

Everyone in these situations is stuck – stuck in this mindless plod between home and jobcentre every day, or week, or fortnight, or whatever, to go be seen applying online for hundreds of jobs that very likely don’t even exist.

There’s no exit from this terrible path. I feel very strongly that government conspires to keep people on it. It’s a criminal waste of time and lives.

Brian said that his work coach told him that the jobcentre would put his name forward for a careers’ course – but that he’d have to wait to find out if he’d been selected:

“…[my work coach said] Your name’s got to be picked out of a hat…I’ve got more chance of winning lottery than getting on that…” Continue reading →

Don’t care if you have to pick your child up from school. You must attend the jobcentre so we can watch you apply for jobs you won’t get

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Another story from recent leafleting outside Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity:

JSA and Universal Credit claimants say the jobcentre is presently forcing claimants to attend the jobcentre at least once a week to sit at computers and apply online for job after job. Jobcentre advisers watch while they do this.

People say they weren’t told why they had to attend these sessions in the first instance. They were just instructed to get to the jobcentre at a set time, or else.

Such regimes are not new. Most people who sign on are forced into these compulsory attendance activities. I interviewed people at North Kensington jobcentre who had to attend the jobcentre every single day to sign on. It really is Big Brother stuff – the DWP forcing claimants to a location where they can be seen. Can’t be long until government decides that people who sign on should be tagged.

None of this is about helping people find work, of course. It’s about a government department standing over people who are already trapped.

At these compulsory onsite jobsearch sessions, people just sit at computers and send off one job application after another. They literally never hear back about any of them. Often, they don’t know if the jobs they’ve applied for actually exist. People have to engage in this perfectly meaningless activity on work programmes and at work courses as well. I’ve sat with people as they’ve done it.

“Petty tyranny” is the phrase.

The depth of this pettiness (if there is such a thing as deep pettiness) never ceases to amaze. Jobcentres find any excuse for it at any level.

At Stockport recently, I spoke with one woman who’d just started these compulsory attendances.

She was on edge as it was. Her son had autism. His ESA had been stopped. So had her carer’s allowance and housing benefit. She was signing on for JSA to try for some income.

Now, she had another problem.

Her jobcentre adviser had set her next mandatory jobsearch-at-the-jobcentre session at exactly the time when she had to collect her ten-year-old daughter from school.

She said the jobcentre knew perfectly well that she had a schoolage daughter, but refused to change the time for the compulsory session:

“I’ve got to come here at three o’clock – but how am I supposed to pick my daughter up? They [the jobcentre] don’t care.

This is the only jobcentre [in Stockport]. If I walk, it will take me about 45 minutes. It took me an hour today on the bus, because of the traffic. What I’m going to have to do is take my daughter out of school early to come here. She’s missing out on her education.”

I’ll have to make some excuse up [to tell the school].”

I have a great many conversations like this with benefit claimants: stories about the DWP making already difficult situations even more difficult for people in agonising ways. Still, the DWP gets away with it.

This woman had problems enough. She was appealing the DWP’s decision to stop her son’s ESA. She was trying to sort out problems with his PIP and carer’s allowance.

Now, she had to drag her child out of school, and lie to the school about the reasons why, to get to a jobsearch session that in itself was pure charade. Non-attendance at that session would very likely mean a sanction.

This incident may sound small, but it absolutely wasn’t. It was part of a picture. Once the DWP has people, it never stops putting the boot in. Every part of their lives is fair game.

All hail the DWP – actively making it near-impossible for people with no money to start or keep work

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Talked to two people about the above while leafleting with Stockport United Against Austerity at Stockport jobcentre today.

The first woman had just got a job as a careworker – but the jobcentre wouldn’t pay £60 for the fastrack CRB check she needed. With that fastrack CRB check, she could start work in about a fortnight. Without it – she wasn’t sure what would happen.

That £60 was a lot to her – “it’s about a week’s JSA,” she said. That kind of money is make or break for a lot of people. This woman was heading into the jobcentre to argue the toss again.

The second woman was in part-time work. She needed Personal Independence Payment for support because she had severe epilepsy. She was finding it impossible to get PIP, though. She’d had a lifetime Disability Living Allowance award, but government, of course, cancelled lifetime DLA awards and forced those DLA recipients to apply for PIP.

She made a PIP application – and had been waiting three months to find out whether or not she’d receive PIP. She was still waiting. The DWP had told her the wait would be longer. The stress of the wait and not having enough money was making her epilepsy worse. She’d had to cut her hours down, because her health was deteriorating badly.

So it goes at this end of austerity. Government likes to say that anyone who signs on is a loser and a wastrel by definition. In fact, government and the DWP play an active role in making sure that people who have nothing crash out entirely. It really does feel like that.

Mental health problems – but benefits sanctioned. In hospital with asthma – but benefits sanctioned. No money – but benefits sanctioned. ENOUGH.

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On benefit sanctions:

Leafleting on Friday at Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity, I spoke at length with two (more) people who have been left destitute this year by benefit sanctions.

Craig was in his 20s. Anne was 50 (I’ve changed both names).

Craig was a Universal Credit claimant. Anne received jobseekers’ allowance.

Craig said he’d been sanctioned twice this year. His current sanction would run into June. He said he was getting about £30 a week to live on.

Anne was trying to survive on hardship payments of £40 a week. Her sanction was from March until June.

Both Craig and Anne had appealed their sanctions. Both had lost their appeals.

This Just. Never. Ends.

It’s still all too easy to find people in these situations – people who are forced to live on the edge because their benefits have been sanctioned. They can barely afford food. They certainly can’t afford to heat their homes adequately.

These are human rights issues. So is the fact that inflicting such hardship on people who are out of work and money is widely considered acceptable and even desirable. The world needs to wake up to that abuse.

Sanctions achieve nothing. They don’t address the real issues – the lack of work (especially for people who are disabled, or older), the failure of support (particularly for people with mental health issues and/or support needs) and the malaise that inevitably defines an outlook when people have been unemployed for a while and know that every single one of the DWP’s compulsory jobsearch activities is a charade.

I can’t make that last point strongly enough.

Attending jobcentres meetings, or pointless work courses, or compulsory websurf session where you must sit at a jobcentre computer and send endless CVs to people you’ll never hear back from – none of these mandatory jobsearch activities go ANYWHERE for so many people. Just about everyone I’ve talked to at Stockport so far has mentioned these aspects of jobsearch.

Every meeting, course, or web session is a slap in the face because of that.

Sanctions as punishment for people who are trapped in this circuit is out of all proportion to the “crimes.”

Stopping people’s already-meagre incomes and pushing them further under the breadline for the minor sins of missing jobcentre meetings, or forgetting sicknotes, or whatever, is the real criminal act.

Still, the state enjoys it. It certainly gives itself free licence.

Like most people I meet in these situations, Craig and Anne relied on friends or family when their money was stopped.

Craig said:

“Basically, I’ve been living off £120 a month since January… [It’s] dreadful. If it weren’t for my mum and dad, I would be…[he shrugged].

Anne said:

“It’s £40 a week [I get in hardship money]. I’m on Pay As You Go [for] gas and electric – ten pound a week on them two. Then you’ve got £30 a week on food… I even had to borrow £4 off her [Anne’s daughter] to get up here about my money [the bus ride to Stockport jobcentre from Anne’s place cost about £4]. I went to the bank on the Wednesday and I thought “Oh No.” I didn’t even have the £4. I had to borrow it off her. Don’t like asking, but what can I do.”

Continue reading →

Behind the scenes with frontline service users in austerity: excerpts from interviews and covert videos and recordings

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The post below – Linda’s story – is an excerpt from a story in a collection project I’m working on.

The project collects interviews I’ve made with people directly affected by benefit cuts.

It also collects covert recordings I made from 2014 when I accompanied people to jobcentre meetings, ESA and PIP assessments, and council homelessness meetings.

My aim is to show you how benefit and service cuts have ravaged the lives of people who’ve been among the most marginalised by welfare reform and austerity.

The videos and transcripts from the meetings that I recorded between people in need and frontline staff demonstrate how utterly dysfunctional frontline services have become.

The project also shows how people respond personally and politically to a brutal austerity state.

I’ll post more extracts from this project as I work on it this year.

This collection of interviews and transcripts is being made possible thanks to a Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust grant. 

Amiel_Melburn_logo

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The rest of this post is an extract from a story about a Kilburn woman I call Linda.

I met Linda and her partner Eddie (name also changed) in 2014.

Linda and Eddie were in their 50s.

Both had learning and literacy difficulties, and worsening health problems.

Both received jobseekers’ allowance. I recorded their jobcentre meetings for about three years. They attended Kilburn jobcentre when we met.

The post focuses on a particularly difficult experience that Linda had at Kilburn jobcentre at the start of 2016: Kilburn jobcentre erroneously closed Linda’s JSA claim when she was ill and missed two signon meetings.

She was left without income or rent money for months.

The video and transcripts in this post show:

– the problems that people with learning difficulties had meeting the DWP’s strict signon criteria and the excessive punishments people faced if they did not meet DWP demands.

– jobcentre advisers admitting that people in Linda’s situation were vulnerable to sanctions and claim closures, because the DWP had removed the specialist disability staff who might have intervened when people with support needs were threatened with sanctions. Disability Employment Advisers were removed from jobcentres as part of austerity cost-cutting at that time.

– Linda’s distress at her illness and at not being able to to find a jobcentre staff member to help her restart her claim

– the DWP’s general institutional contempt for people who relied on benefits.

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Let’s go in at the deep end.

This article starts with a description of that devastating time for Linda: the months in late 2015 and early 2016 when Kilburn jobcentre closed her JSA claim and left her without income or rent money.

Video: Linda at Kilburn jobcentre on February 26 2016.

I called Linda in Feburary 2016, because I hadn’t seen her for a while.

Linda told me she hadn’t received any money for weeks, because the jobcentre had terminated her JSA claim.

Jobcentre advisers said they’d closed Linda’s claim, because Linda had missed two JSA signon meetings.

Linda said she’d missed the meetings because she’d been too ill to attend (she found out later that she had thrombosis). She told me that she was still very unwell and couldn’t walk far.

Closing Linda’s claim was an obscene decision by any measure.

The jobcentre knew Linda well. Advisers knew her story. Linda had signed on at Kilburn for more than seven years. Hers was a familiar face at the jobcentre.

Advisers knew that she had learning difficulties and was in poor health. They knew Linda relied on her JSA. They knew that her age, learning difficulties and deteriorating health meant she wouldn’t find work – that she hadn’t suddenly stopped attending JSA signon meetings because she’d found a job.

They also knew that Linda would only miss a meeting at the jobcentre if she had good reason. Linda often said she hated the jobcentre, but she attended her appointments there religiously – possibly because the jobcentre was a place she knew and could go to.

Advisers knew all of this, but still they closed Linda’s JSA claim. Such were and are the times. Advisers told us that the rules said two strikes (two missed meetings) and you were out (your claim would be closed). Some staff were sticklers for the rules.

Finding someone at the jobcentre to take responsibility for restarting Linda’s JSA claim was a nightmare. Continue reading →

“[MPs] don’t worry about money. They don’t worry about where the next electricity is coming from. You never see anyone like that knocking down at foodbank.” #UniversalCredit

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Have posted below a longer transcript from recent interviews at Oldham foodbank with Michelle, 38, and Jeanette, 53 (I published excerpts earlier here and here).

Like so many interviews I post on this site, this transcript highlights two important points:

1) Political and press obsessions such as government, voting and Brexit barely register in many lives.

I asked both woman for their views on government and Brexit.

Michelle said:

“I ain’t got a clue me, I don’t understand it. I really don’t.”

Jeanette said:

“Neither me…You never see anyone like that knocking down at foodbank…They don’t worry about where the next electricity coming from.”

2) The benefit systems that people in poverty rely on are in tatters, but that fact is ignored. Nobody cares.

Politics refuses to intervene, or to offer constructive answers. Mainstream politics is fixated on Brexit and central politics to the exclusion of everything. Meanwhile, people in poverty are being dragged down by failing state bureaucracies. Online benefit application forms fail. Helplines are hopeless. Claimants go months without money, which makes debt inevitable. The idea is, of course, that anyone who has ever received a state benefit deserves the worst. Dependence on the state justifies aggression from the state.

Michelle had rent arrears, because the DWP took ten weeks to make her first Universal Credit payment. She was also repaying a tax credit debt that she disputed and an advance loan that she took out to buy food during that ten-week wait for her Universal Credit:

“Oh God – it were a nightmare signing on for Universal Credit. You have to do it online and I had to [keep] ringing the jobcentre. I had to keep ringing them, because it were so hard.”

Jeanette had had a stroke in 2009. She struggled with balance and speech. She’d recently applied for Personal Independence Payment application, but missed an award by five points. She’d decided not to appeal that decision, because the appeals process was too complex and wearing:

“Too stressful. I’ve got to think of my health. Just rely on family and friends to get me around.”

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: no part of this mess helps people find stability, or work. Quite the reverse. Any stability people had has been torpedoed. Prevailing government theory is that destabilising people by throwing them off benefits motivates them (whatever “motivates” means). It does not. These broken, maddening public sector bureaucracies mire people in debt. Unfortunately, that fact is below the radar.

Transcript: Oldham foodbank, 7 March 2018.

Michelle:

It hasn’t been this bad before. [They] moved me over [from Employment and Support Allowance to Universal Credit] in October last year. They made me do it, yeah.

They told me… I applied for ESA again, but they said because I was in the catchment area for Universal Credit, that I have to have that instead…but I went for [an ESA face-to-face] assessment on 25th of October [2017] and I’ve still heard nothing…nearly six months. [The assessment was at] Albert Bridge House, yeah.

I don’t sign on. I just have to go and see my advisor at the jobcentre every few weeks.

Oh God – it were a nightmare signing on for Universal Credit. You have to do it online and I had to [keep] ringing the jobcentre. I had to keep ringing them, because it were so hard.

[I] could do one bit of it, where they told you to do your details, but then it told you to do something else – a separate thing which is a new ID thing what they’ve set up. You’ve got to do that to prove your identity. You’ve got to choose which company to do it with.

I did mine with the Post Office. Got to set that account up and then go back to Universal Credit [with the registered identity details] Oh, it is horrible. Then, you’ve got to get an appointment to go up to the jobcentre to do the rest of it there…

You just do it [the identity proof] online while you’re filling your form out. It just takes you to another site and it tells you choose which one you want to use, so I clicked Post Office. Then you have to like create an account with them just to prove your identity, because they’ve got more information on you then – so that they know that it is you, because there are a lot of people trying to claim benefits under different names, so to try and stop that basically.

Had to give my passport, yeah, because it was online…

I had no money for about eight, ten weeks. They let me have an advance payments, but it were only for £200. I’ve got two kids and got behind on all me payments and everything. It were horrible…

Jeanette: It puts you behind with your rent.

Michelle: Yeah, I’ve been having to pay extra each month, because of my rent was in arrears and it wasn’t my fault. It was horrible. [I] rent with First Choice Homes…arrears, about two months, about £700 I think. I have to pay about £20 every month on top of the rent, because the rent’s £330.

They [the DWP] are deducting [money from my monthly Universal Credit payments] for advance loan – about £40 a month. They are taking [repayments for a] child tax credit [overpayment], because when I went onto Universal Credit, the child tax credit stopped, because it all goes in with that. Then after I had been on Universal Credit for a few months, [the DWP] decided to say that they had overpaid me [tax credits] and I owed £300. So now, they’re taking £49 a month off me for that as well.

[So that’s] £49 [taken out each month] for child tax credit debt, £40 for advance payment and £20 for arrears. Not much left at the end of the month once I’ve paid my bills and gone shopping. Only have a little bit left. If my girls need anything, I can’t…do it. Once that little bit of money has gone, I’ve got to wait another month again. The only other thing I get is child benefit, but that is £34 a week. That goes on the stuff like I need like the gas and electric. I can’t give it to my girls. Girls are [aged] 17 coming up and nearly 13.

[The DWP never contacted me to negotiate deduction amounts I could afford]. Oh, no, no, no. They just tell you. They don’t ask. They don’t discuss it with you. They just tell you.

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