Category Archives: Public spending cuts

Fit for work? The DWP sure isn’t.

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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.

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.

Temporary housing? – not for the cockroaches

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We return this morning to Marlin Apartments, the Newham temporary housing hellhole where homeless families with very young children are “placed” (deposited?) for years at a time.

As I wrote last week, the building is overrun with bedbugs, cockroaches, mice and rats and their many offspring, and other crawlers, biters and slimers that absolutely nobody I know would want chewing through the family’s food and feet.

I gave the bedbugs a writeup last week, and posted pictures of some of the injuries that the bedbugs and other vermin are inflicting on very young children – children who have, in some cases, lived in these terrible flats for several years. If you think that those kids are going to grow up in good shape, or grow up at all, it might be time to think again.

This morning, I’m posting pictures of some of the many cockroaches and maggots that roam and writhe through and around Marlin Apartments. It goes without saying that something major needs to be done about all of this.

One idea would be to fill a skip with several Marlin Apartments cockroach swarms, road trip them up to North Yorkshire, and dump the lot into Rishi Sunak’s lunch and bed.

The cockroaches in the pictures won’t be going, but there are plenty more where they came from (the pics are from the flat of a family who have a toddler and 4-month old baby):

Here are bugs crawling round the baby’s crib. Mum threw the crib out, because the baby was being bitten. The family can’t afford a new crib, so now, the family sleeps on the floor.

Bedbugs on crib - Marlin Apartments

And video of maggots out the front of the building – the residents say that the communal bins overflow. There are too many people living in too small a space, with too few services.

 

And I haven’t even got to the serious overcrowding problems in Marlin yet, or the new problems with energy bills that residents face. They used to pay their bills as part of their rent, but now must set up individual accounts. A number of people showed me letters which demanded several hundred pounds for outstanding bills which absolutely nobody can understand.

I’m getting to that.

To finish – this picture is of one of the single rooms that families live in. I have a vague memory of someone on twitter saying that these ex-serviced apartments couldn’t be single rooms, but at least 3 of the ones I saw were, so there you go. In these single rooms, there was a bug-infested double bed (or 2 single beds pushed together), a bug-infested couch and a cot all in one space with a small kitchen at the top end.

Picture of a single-room Marlin Apartment.

Picture of a single-room Marlin Apartment. I”m holding the camera. There is space behind me for a couch and that’s it.

No doubt these apartments were all very nice when they were properly serviced and rented to single businesspeople who were enjoying week-long London jollies, but things have taken something of a slide since the council arranged to rent them from Marlin for homeless families. The “serviced” bit sort of disappeared from the “serviced apartments” idea.

I’ve asked Newham council for comment on this, but they’ve stopped answering. Probably nothing to say that’ll make any of this all right. Would like to see every member of Sunak’s cabinet living and working in this building, though. Lock them in the place for a year, then torch it.

Your Newham Get Me Out Of Here Bushbash Challenge – rising to a slug infestation

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Well – this is revolting.

I’ve been sent the slug gallery below by a resident of a flat in Newham.

R and their family (including a toddler and a very young baby) were homeless. They were living in the Newham Brimstone House emergency homelessness hostel. After a while, Newham council placed the family in the flat in the pictures below.

That was the good news. The bad news is that the family isn’t the only crowd there. Slugs have also made the flat their home, sliming their way across floors, walls, the baby’s room and cot, and over kitchen utensils, sponges and containers when they want a novelty ride. Seems as though even slugs are sick of the rain and parked-up jetstreams and are moving their operation inside. There are gaps in walls and holes to the outside, which the slugs clearly see as some sort of invitation to intimate dialogue.

The family reported the problem to the council and landlord months ago. Pest control has apparently been around, but clearly may as well not have been. The council did send the family some links on slug combat, but a bit of a surf isn’t really the same as being rehoused to somewhere habitable, and you start any fight against slugs a long way behind if they have multiple routes inside. You can napalm them with actual crap, or whatever you like, but they don’t care. They just find another door.

Here they all still are. Isn’t grinding poverty and homelessness fun.

Perhaps someone will respond to these photos:

 

 

 

 

 

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.”

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