Category Archives: Podcast – disability and benefits

How the government and the DWP made PIP cuts on the hoof

Posted on by
4

In this podcast episode, we return to the government’s recent attempts to make the personal independence payment much harder for disabled people to get.

I speak with renowned benefits journalist Chaminda Jayanetti about the data he sourced which showed who cuts to PIP would really hit – namely, people with conditions like inflammatory arthritis, serious heart conditions and multiple sclerosis.

The government of course happily imagined that the cuts would be felt most by people with autism and mental health problems – the “snowflake” conditions that government doesn’t really rate.

Neither the DWP nor the government bothered looking at the numbers before announcing their plans for PIP. Hope Stephen Timms is thinking about this as he “consults” (ha ha) disabled people in his current review of PIP.

We also talk about the gentrification of mental health and autism – how celebs rattling on about their sufferings and autism as their “superpower” has made mental health issues and conditions like autism appear to be fun, lightweight and lucrative when they’re nothing of the kind.

Interview with a Homerton paediatric doctor: Hackney council’s housing team is putting a disabled boy at grave risk

Posted on by
Reply

In my latest podcast episode, I speak with Hannah Caller.

She’s a paediatric doctor who recently made a formal safeguarding referral to Hackney council social services to try and stop Hackney’s housing team from evicting a disabled and autistic boy from his council home.

I’ve been podcasting about Hackney council’s aggression towards this family for a couple of months.

What is a safeguarding referral?

A safeguarding referral is a formal alert sent to a council’s social services team.

Referrals are usually made by doctors and other professionals who believe that a vulnerable person like a disabled child is at risk of harm and abuse and so forth.

Social services must put together a team of professionals to investigate safeguarding referrals. They have a legal duty to investigate.

But what was the first thing the council did when it received this referral?

It closed the referral down.

How is Hackney council putting this boy at grave risk?

In this case, the boy is believed to be at risk of harm from the housing department of his own council. You could say that Hackney council is the abuser. That’s because the council insists that this family must be evicted and the boy must be torn from his home and school, and put into temporary housing.

The boy can’t cope with change or stress. He melts down on public transport – and he’d have to get public transport to travel from temporary housing to his school.

At the moment, his school is just across the road from the council house that Hackney wants to evict the family from. The boy has 1-2-1 specialist support at the school and an EHCP.

He is familiar with his school, his teachers, his neighbourhood and his routines there. If the family is evicted, he may be out of school for some time, because of his problems with travelling.

The council could grant the family a tenancy and let them stay, but the council refuses to do that.

This is not the only case I’m dealing with where professionals are making safeguarding referrals to raise the alarm about council and housing association behaviour towards disabled children. Interesting times.

Proving an autistic boy has meltdowns by prodding him into one

Posted on by
7

Update Sunday 15 March: my story re: this young disabled and autistic boy being forced to get public transport has been picked up here.

———-

Today, my podcast returns to the ongoing story about Hackney council’s attempts to evict a disabled and autistic boy and his family from their council home.

Bailiffs were due again to evict the boy and his family on Friday just gone, but fortunately, a court saw sense and suspended the bailiff’s eviction warrant for 8 weeks because of the risk to the boy’s health.

In the meantime, the council has come up with a gross idea to test the boy’s behaviour on public transport.

The council’s proposal is to stick this boy and his family in temporary housing 10km* away from the school where he is settled. He’ll have to get public transport from the temporary housing to this school.

The boy’s teachers and medical supporters all say that the boy can’t cope with public transport and has bad meltdowns on it.

The council doesn’t believe them. It is proposing that an assessor of some sort takes the boy on public transport to get “direct observational evidence” of what happens.

In other words, the council wants to put the boy in an environment that he can’t cope with to record him not coping with it.

Is this actual abuse?

*Had 10k and missed off the m. It’s 10km.

Do too many people claim PIP for mental health problems?

Posted on by
5

Answer to the question in the title is No.

One thing I really love is this government’s heavy implication that anyone who claims benefits for mental health problems is taking the piss.

So, in this latest podcast episode, we hear from Mel. Mel claims the personal independence payment for mental health issues.

Mel explains how and why her mental health problems developed – and how one ongoing event in particular pushed her over the brink.

I’m a taxpayer and I’m more than happy for PIP to be awarded to people with mental health conditions. God knows we live in an era that seems designed to drive us all up the wall.

No nationalism here: Trashing benefit claimants is a global sport

Posted on by
13

To our last podcast episode for this year:

This episode is about useless millennium governments that are devoted to attacking benefit claimants and cutting disability benefits for votes.

Doesn’t matter if they are so-called Labour or Tory. The (shopworn) political idea is the same across the world – if you go after people who claim benefits, people who don’t claim benefits will vote for you. Even people who claim benefits will vote for you.

Problem is: the so-called numbers on which governments perch this very shaky thesis are garbage. The argument that people who claim benefits are all pisstakers is a complete myth.

In the home country of New Zealand, for example, the conservative government has imposed tougher benefit sanctions in the last year, including a money card where 50% of your benefit is put on a card which you can only use in approved shops for approved groceries.

But – the facts are that fewer than 2% of people who claim benefits do something “wrong” and get lined up for a sanction. Doing something “wrong” often means things like missing a meeting because you hadn’t been told about it.

This 2% is a small group of people with big issues like serious literacy problems or addiction. It’s a tiny group of people who need support, not greater poverty.

It is a group that barely exists – but governments still attack people in it with sanctions.

Governments like to give the impression that harsh sanctions are needed because too many benefit claimants are gadding about instead of looking for work. Actually, more than 98% of benefit claimants in NZ do exactly as they’re told when it comes to jobsearch activities.

The truth is that anti welfare rhetoric around the world is now based on behaviour that is literally nowhere to be seen. It is only a matter of time before global governments start generating layabout benefit claimants via AI, just to keep the [fabricated] numbers up and the anti welfare playbook going.

Fit for work? The DWP sure isn’t.

Posted on by
16

Latest podcast episode – in which we look again at a benefits system in terminal shambles.

New DWP head Pat McFadden says he’s going to put jobcentre advisers into GP surgeries to target sick and disabled people for work. Righto, Pat.

That idea in itself is cack, but another important point is that the DWP will screw it up whatever happens, because things already go amazingly wrong. They mix up people’s files, lose their medical evidence, scan it upside down, lose sick notes – the works.

In this episode, we hear from Michelle Cardno who is a benefits lawyer at Fightback for Justice in Bury.

Michelle tells an interesting story about the DWP scanning people’s medical evidence the wrong way up, so that a tribunal judge at appeal only had blank pages to look at.

She also talks about the way that the DWP randomly allocates PIP – ie, awarding PIP to one individual, then taking it away from that exact same person even though their situation hadn’t changed at all.

There’s also a covert recording from a meeting between a social worker and a homeless woman where the social worker reads from the wrong file entirely – it’s another family’s file altogether.

Public sector systems have been decimated by years of cuts. McFadden needs to look at that and make that work before he gets into his other big ideas.

ANOTHER leaked email telling support workers not to help disabled housing and benefits claimants

Posted on by
9

In my latest podcast episode:

Another professional has leaked an outrageous email to me – the second in as many weeks.

In this email, a Hackney council officer tells an education specialist to stop writing support letters for families with disabled children who need to be moved out of terrible housing.

This officer works with autistic and SEND children. Their families need these support letters to tell their councils why they must be rehoused. Some letters say that children are at high risk of death in their current housing.

Pat McFadden – the new fibbing head of the DWP

I also talk about Pat McFadden, newly-minted secretary of state for the DWP.

I’m intrigued by the lies Pat McFadden is telling about people being able to declare themselves longterm sick to claim benefits. This is rot. People cannot declare themselves long term sick to claim benefits. They have to go through a humiliating work capability assessment and then wait for the DWP to decide if they should get benefits. Often, the DWP decides they should not.

I talk with Latoya Wray in this episode. She works 3 minimum wage jobs and claims a bit of universal credit to stay afloat.

When she’s not doing that, she’s living in fear of her 8 year old autistic son falling to his death from their flat in a Hackney highrise council block. She has medical and education reports saying that her son is at high risk of death and that the family urgently needs rehousing.

Unfortunately, as seen in the leaked email, education specialists have been told not to write letters to tell that council to rehouse families with autistic and disabled children who are at high risk of death in their housing.

Pat McFadden needs to take his fingers out of his ears and pull out the one he has in his butt, and listen to Latoya. This is what life is really like when you need to claim benefits and help with housing.

We’ve shut your benefit claim with no warning at all – how the #DWP does #disability

Posted on by
22

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

Posted on by
18

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.”

.

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.