Category Archives: Public spending cuts

Why we’re on strike: Eastern Avenue jobcentre staff out against jobcentre closures

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Staff at the Eastern Avenue jobcentre in Sheffield are on a PCS strike today in protest at the government’s proposed closure of Eastern Avenue jcp and a raft of other jobcentres around the country.

People are furious about these jobcentre closure plans. As readers of this site will know, local people who claim benefits have told me that they can’t afford to travel to jobcentres in other towns, that public transport to other jobcentres is patchy at best as transport is cut and disappears, and that they worry they’ll have no access to computers to use locally to search for jobs if local jobcentres close. People say they can’t always afford internet access on their phones.

Local people also say that these non-stop closures of public services in their towns are destroying smaller places. Post the Brexit vote, government is supposed to be deeply concerned about people in the regions who feel left behind, but you wouldn’t know that from government’s ongoing removal of local services.

Clare Goonan, PCS rep and Eastern Avenue jobcentre worker (she is jobcentre’s disability employment adviser and has worked at the jobcentre for 12 years) said on the phone from the strike this morning:

“We [at the Eastern Avenue jobcentre] offer a personalised, one-stop service… people can pop in from local, whereas if it was closed, they’d have to get on a bus, or two buses, and go online. We have a lot more interviews than what they would do if they were in town.

“And the jobsearch and computers – we’ve got 12 computers [at Eastern Avenue] that customers can come in and use if they want on internet. What people would have to do [if the jobcentre closes], is to pay to go into town, because there is no other services around here.

“There is a library, but the possibility is that the library won’t stay open, because of cuts, so if we don’t – we [at the jobcentre] send a lot of people around there [to the library], so if we are not sending people around there [if the jobcentre closes], they [the library] may not stay open. [We have] more a personalised service than town.

“It costs £4.90 a day to go into town [on the bus]. The cheapest ticket is £15 a week, is the cheapest one to go to town.

“Not sure on the reimbursement of travel… in town, there would be a lot more reimbursement of fares. If we get a customer to come in and it’s not their signing day, then it would be to their expense, so they would have to claim it back. [People need to pay for a ticket themselves first].

“[We are striking] to show management that we are standing together. At the moment, there are no members gone in [to work past the picket line] as yet. We’ve not seen any staff go in, apart from higher management that usually go in, we’ve not seen any staff go in as well. The office is not definitely open yet. We want to show management that we’re serious about it, we don’t want the community to lose the last public services that around here. If it’s [the jobcentre] is closing, then this area, which is one of the most deprived areas of Sheffield, will lose its last public services.

Continue reading →

Meanwhile in the real world… rent arrears and Universal Credit

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For all those wondering about causes of homelessness and housing problems in Manchester, Oldham, etc…

Below is another example of fallout from government’s brilliant (not) decision to pay rent money directly to tenants rather than landlords when people claim Universal Credit. I’m working through a collection of recordings I’ve made this year with people who have benefit and rent problems. Thought I’d post this one, because it’s an example of the sort of silent fall that people in the real world continue to take while elections rumble on and online factions scream at each other:

A couple of weeks ago, I visited one of the Oldham lunchrooms which is attended people who have benefits, housing, addiction and money problems. A charity gives out a free lunch at this location every week. I go along to talk with people as they have their lunch. I’m being vague about the location and charity on this occasion, because the woman I recorded the conversation with below said that she already had problems with people in the area following her and targeting her:

“I’ve had every Tom, Dick and Harry in my flat… They’ve robbed phones, robbed money and they even took the food out of my cupboard… it’s me own fault with my head being a bit…”

This woman was small, frail-looking and cold – as in not dressed warmly enough. She’d come to see if there was a winter coat among the free clothes that the charity sometimes hands out. I took some pictures of her in a coat she found. I might pixelate and post them another time.

Anyway. This woman – let’s call her Kelly – was 49. Kelly was in trouble with rent arrears. She said that she her debt was £400 and counting. She also said that she had a letter which told her that eviction was on the cards. Her conversation was hard to follow in places. Kelly was confused, under the influence and obviously unwell. She was struggling to cope, she said, after a recent bereavement.

Kelly said that her rent situation started to become a problem when she was moved onto Universal Credit. She’s paid a lump sum of benefit money directly each month and must pay her rent out of that.

Kelly said that she was finding this level of management too hard:

“What they have done is they have changed my benefit. They put me on Universal Credit. [I’m] struggling. I got to pay the rent and I’m in arrears. They pay me every month.”

I asked Kelly why money management was difficult for her. She kept saying, “because of my bereavement… It’s my head… because of my bereavement this year…

“My rent is about £380 a month. I need to talk about a repayment plan… with my bereavement and that, my head’s all… I haven’t got children.”

The conversation was hard to follow, as I say. These conversations often are.

Continue reading →

DWP: “Closing jobcentres will improve the service.” People who use jobcentres: “No it won’t”

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Another interview from people who use jobcentres:

I recently went back to Clay Cross, where the DWP plans to close the local jobcentre.

People who use and work in the jobcentre are furious about the closure plans.

On the day I attended just before Easter, Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre people were collecting signatures for a petition to keep the jobcentre open. It was one of the easier petition exercises I’ve been involved in over the years. Everyone signed. Even the jobcentre’s G4s security guard was happy to see people out the front collecting signatures.

“Oh, good,” he said when the petition was revealed.

The reason for this unity was obvious. People are angry about service closures in the area. The jobcentre is not the only local target at the moment. The Clay Cross Lloyds bank branch is due to shut. People also said that they worry generally about the local library staying open in the long term and/or about library hours being cut, because local councils are under such pressure. I got the impression that a lot of things feel tenuous.

Not that the architects of such closures give a damn about that, of course. Those people don’t even make sense a lot of the time.

“We’ve been clear that this is about improving the services we deliver, while making best use of taxpayers’ money,” the DWP told me when I asked last month about the impending closure of Clay Cross jobcentre.

Closing a service improves it, eh? I love this sort of line from officials who are trying to justify service closures. I really do. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I would argue that it’s not actually possible to improve a much-needed service by closing it – certainly, locals never think it is – but government is always keen to argue that such a concept is perfectly logical everywhere. I’ve been interviewing people about service cutbacks for over a decade and I’ve never once heard anyone who uses jobcentres/libraries/banks/hospitals/whatever say “Yay – our local jobcentre/library/bank/hospital is closing. That’s a step forward for the town. That’ll make life easier.” Closures don’t make life easier for people who actually use the services. No doubt that’s the point.

Certainly, locals think that’s the point.

Take Mark, 46, at Clay Cross. I spoke to Mark outside the Clay Cross jobcentre for about half an hour (there’s a transcript from this conversation below).

Mark signs on for JSA at Clay Cross. He said that he would have to travel the half-hour by bus to Chesterfield to sign on if Clay Cross jobcentre closed (the return trip costs £4.20 and Mark did not think he’d be reimbursed for every trip. The DWP says that people won’t be reimbursed for signon trips: “claimants will only have to pay fares when they sign on – on other occasions if they are called into the jobcentre, fares will be reimbursed,” the department told me. I’m not sure how people who must sign on daily and so on will handle this. I suppose people who make a trip to a jobcentre to ask a question or get a form, etc, particularly when they can’t get through to the DWP on the phone, will have to fund their journeys themselves. There can be no doubt that people with support needs will find themselves on the rough end here. It’s definitely my experience that people with support needs who struggle with the DWP’s complex phone and form systems prefer to drop in to local jobcentres to try and get face-to-face help. Continue reading →

You can’t apply as homeless without an address. What.

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This week’s bureaucratic classic:

Yesterday, I was in First Choice Homes in Oldham with Paul, 67, who is homeless. He lives in a caravan at the moment (see pictures below). Joy.

Paul had to make a change to his homelessness and housing register application/record (they’re both on the same form, we were told). He needed to add medical information, because he had a new letter about his health from his doctor. He had to do this online as you must do most things these days. We were ushered over to First Choice’s computer bank as soon as we mentioned the change of circumstances at reception.

So.

Not long into the computer session, we hit a screen which demanded Paul’s address (again). There was, of course, a big and very immediate problem with this. Paul doesn’t have an address BECAUSE HE IS HOMELESS (he wasn’t able to fill in the House Type field either, given that there was no Caravan option in the menu). An address field on a homelessness form would surely be an optional extra in his case – and for the many people I meet who sleep rough, or sofa-surf all over the place, or whatever.  But no. The form would not submit unless the address fields were filled. This is the point where you have to cast about for any old shit that might work in the form fields – maybe a friend or relative’s address, or an older address if you have one. That hardly reflects your situation, though. It doesn’t give you much confidence in the process, either, given that the process doesn’t give accurate insight into your situation.

SIGH. Here’s a shot of the screen not working. It’s fuzzy, but you get the idea. The red fields and exclamation marks are as usual:

I can’t tell you how often my head is done in by public service applications and screens these days. There really does not seem to be a single benefit or housing application process which doesn’t involve a major hurdle or nine. Phone calls to the DWP and councils take ages/go nowhere. Online forms don’t work, or they demand information people can’t easily give. Some processes look and feel as though they were built in technology’s dark ages.

You can set aside a whole morning or afternoon to make calls, or fill in forms these days and get absolutely nowhere (I’ve set aside two afternoons this week for such calls and forms, and emerged no further ahead on both occasions). You inevitably conclude that all aspects of the system are designed to put people off applying. Certainly, very little seems to be designed with the real-life needs of real service users in mind. Can’t wait to see how much further things deteriorate as more and more public money is diverted into endless Brexit departments and projects. Out in the real world, this is how life goes. Continue reading →

“Rich get richer and poor get poorer… The greed is becoming demented greed.” More views from people on benefits

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More views on politics and benefits outside the bubble:

Each Tuesday from 11am, a group called The Ark puts on a few hours of free sandwiches, coffee, cake and bible readings at the Salt Cellar resource building in Oldham. There’s a pool table in the room which is popular as well. People from all walks attend. Some are in and out of street homelessness. Some have alcohol and drug addictions. Some have mental health problems. All worry about money.

A sign at the salt cellar

Image: A sign at the Salt Cellar

Many people at the sessions are affected by welfare reform. They have problems with housing, benefits and paperwork. I attend the Tuesday sessions every few weeks to record interviews on these and other issues. We talk about all kinds of topics: politics, Brexit, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, benefits, service cuts, housing, street homelessness, addiction, jail, family, aspirations – the works.

The transcript in the second part of this post is from a February interview with James, 50 and Paul, 47. I’ve spoken with James and Paul at length before.

For this post, I wanted to ask the guys for their views of people who must live exclusively on benefits – people such as themselves. Everyone else in the world has very strong, and often very negative, views of people who receive benefits. I like to ask people on the rough end what they think.

This can be hard. Not everyone wants to talk politics. Westminster is a world away much of the time.

When I arrived at the Salt Cellar, James and his friend Vance, 43, were out the front of the building, pushing bottles and belongings into their rucksacks.

Vance, James and I have known each other for about six months (you can read more about their stories here). They often ring me very late at night for a chat.

We all laughed as they put their bottles in their backpacks.

“It’s my Lucozade,” James grinned.

We sometimes meet outside the building. People who drink must drink their alcohol outside and behave when they go in. They don’t always. They get chucked out of lunchrooms if they’re pissed and/or aggressive, or when they bring in booze in backpacks. Different lunchrooms have different views on enforcement.

I’m for turning a blind eye to the boozing. I understand that people who run lunchrooms need to keep order – people bring babies and little kids to these places and you can’t have people smacked out on spice or booze or whatever – but there are dimensions that are hard to ignore. Sickness is one. Vance is definitely getting sicker. He’s lost so much weight in the past six months that I don’t like to ask him how he’s going any more. It’s obvious how Vance is going. His health sits in the mind. He’s skeletal. He looks pinched and pained around the eyes.

There was something else going on around Vance’s eyes that Tuesday, too. He had deep, bloody scratches under both of them.

“Jesus,” I said, pointing at Vance’s face. “What happened?”

Vance laughed. “Fuckers threw a cat at me,” he said. “If I find that cat, I’m going to fucking eat it.”

“He coulda lost his eyes,” James said. “That cat is really scared of the owner.”

“Bet it is,” I said.

Vance and James have neighbour problems. They live in a central Oldham flat. Vance was placed there by the local homelessness office in 2016 after years on the streets. James has lived at Vance’s for several months. Before he moved into Vance’s place, James was street homeless. Vance found James trying to sleep on the concrete landing outside of Vance’s flat, so Vance invited James in to stay. Says Vance: “He [James] was sleeping outside on the landing. I can’t see that, because I’ve been homeless meself…It is very cold and wet. You can’t sleep.”

There are dealers, users and all sorts in the neighbourhood. Smooth sailing is rare. A few months ago, a bunch of guys beat James up and threw him out of the flat (you can read about that here). I don’t know how the cat incident came about. I do remember that a couple of weeks after it, James turned up to lunch with a black eye.

“Relationship breakdown,” people usually say when I ask how people end up street homeless.

Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Image: Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Continue reading →

“Towards Work” activities to get a DHP and stayed housed. How big is conditionality going to get?

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Throwing this one out there for your inspection:

Recently, I came across strict, new-ish Derby City Council conditionality rules for people who apply for Discretionary Housing Payments, Council Tax hardship payments and Local Assistance help.

Those rules are here.

For those who don’t know the territory: Discretionary Housing Payments are short-term payments to help people cover housing-cost problems such as rent shortfalls. Local Assistance Schemes buy items like furniture and fridges when people can’t afford them. Council tax hardship payments are, obviously, for people who struggle to meet council tax bills after council tax support.

Since November 2016 in Derby, this help has come with hefty conditions for some applicants. Of course – it is not unusual for councils to ask people to engage in an activity such as debt advice in exchange for a DHP, etc. That’s happened for ages. The Derby list sets out more hoops to jump through. That’s why I’m posting it. I found it while I was searching for help generally for a single mum. Other councils may have similar. No doubt more and more will as time goes on and more funding is cut.

You’ll see from this page that people who apply for DHPs, Council Tax help and Local Welfare Assistance and fall into certain categories: “must be willing to take up and remain engaged with appropriate support recommended by the council.”

This “support” may include:

– money advice
– budgeting support
– access to banking products
– access to digital skills support
– access to job clubs
– training and housing advice

Failure to participate could mean you get and/or keep nothing:

“If you do not engage with your support programme, any award that you receive from the Single Discretionary Award Scheme may be at risk.”

“Towards work” requirements are among the conditions as you can see.

So.

You may think this is all perfectly fair.

I do not.

This is the kind of list which gets on my nerves very badly. It smacks to me of gatekeeping and of the state’s ever-tightening grip on people who are in extreme financial hardship. Conditions for receiving benefits and hardship help become more and more invasive and exacting, as anyone who signs on for JSA or Universal Credit will tell you. Anyone who requests state help these days automatically loses all right to autonomy. Continue reading →

No heating or hot water, because no spare money for problems. This isn’t going to change, is it

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Am posting this because I talk to so many people in the exact situation described below. I feel that the ongoing nature of these occurrences needs noting while mainstream press and political worthies devote attention and resources pretty much exclusively to Brexit and Labour infighting, etc.

I talk again and again to people in this sort of situation. Nothing seems to be changing very fast:

Here you see gas and electric fuel cards belonging to Patrick, a pensioner I spoke to at a foodbank and kitchen lunch in Oldham at the end of February.

Short story, this. Patrick had run out of fuel credit. Upshot: he didn’t have working heaters or hot water in his home. He’d come down to the soup kitchen, because he’d heard foodbanks and kitchens had fuel topup money and vouchers.

Patrick said he thought the boiler in his place might have sucked through more fuel credit than usual. Point was – he didn’t have the money that he needed to get the fuel supplies going again, or to keep supplies going for a reasonable length of time while he sorted the trouble out.

Which is the thing.

I know government doesn’t give a damn about this, but I’m saying it anyway. Again. There are people who don’t have £10 or £20 or £30 or £100 or whatever to throw at everyday financial difficulties. When the problems come, they’re major by definition. As soon as these problems hit, people find themselves trying to live without the basics in the space of a day or two.

A new boiler guzzles a few extra quid on a metre and that’s a big worry. People lose a tenner or £20 walking down the street and they’ve got a problem. They miss a rent payment for whatever reason and end up with rent arrears that they’ll never escape. Long story short: there’s a whole bunch of people who can never buy themselves peace of mind for even an hour.

As I see it, people fall into one of two groups these days.

There’s the group of people who always have a few quid spare to throw at life’s everyday crises: unexpected fuel costs, charges for a doctor’s letter, lost money, a lost phone charger, extra phone costs, a torn winter coat, lost trainers, extra housing costs – whatever.

Then, there’s the group of people who don’t. People can either pay their way out of a problem, or they can’t. And that’s it.

You can forget popular political binaries such as The Deserving and The Undeserving Poor. That sort of thematic populist crap couldn’t be less relevant to reality. All that matters in reality is whether or not you have enough money to buy distance from life’s curveballs. There’s a big gap between people who do and don’t. Still.

The very personal information you must give in public if you need state help

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A short post on the state and petty humiliations:

Posted below is a list of questions taken from a recorded conversation between a woman affected by the recently-lowered benefit cap and a Basildon council housing options officer last week.

This woman is already in significant rent arrears because of the lowered cap. She went to Basildon council to ask what would happen if she couldn’t pay the arrears (the answers, which you probably can guess already, are at the end of this post). I went with her.

Basildon has an open-plan public services hub: council services, the library and the jobcentre all in one enormous ground-floor room. Security guards roam the place. You take a ticket and wait for your number to come up on a computer screen.

“There’s no privacy,” the woman I was with said when we got there.

She was right. There wasn’t. There were a few private rooms off to the side here and there, but you weren’t invited to use one. There were open cubicles all over the place across the floor. You could hear absolutely everything that was going on in the ones around you. At one point, we sat next to a guy who was explaining to an officer why he was struggling to pay his council tax. We might as well have been attending his appointment with him. We could hear every single word that he said. Continue reading →

Look at the state of this flat. Here is independence vs neglect in austerity

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These recent photos show the mould and mess in a one-room Haringey flat that is occupied by a man his mid-50s (I’m withholding his real name in this story).

This man has learning difficulties. He also has diabetes, which he struggles to manage, and is in poor health. These photos were sent to me recently. I visited this flat a number of times a while back and have known this guy for several years. His living conditions are usually atrocious.

He is about to be evicted from this flat, because it is in such an appalling state. He received a court notice last Thursday. He brought the notice in to show members of the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group at their Thursday afternoon meeting (he also had other photos of the mould in the flat, which he showed us).

Some history:

This man lived with his mother until she died over a decade ago. While his mother was alive, he always had work as a general and kitchen assistant in hotels and kitchens.

This man was made redundant from his last job about nine years ago. He signed on for jobseekers’ allowance and has been put through the DWP’s usual Work Choice/Work Programme mill, with no results whatsoever. He has not found work again. His health has deteriorated to the point where he needs to apply for Employment and Support Allowance. Members of the Kilburn group are helping him with his forms.

Since his mother died, housing has been a major challenge for this man.

So.

There are two main problems for people in this sort of situation.

The first is accommodation itself – finding places in the private sector which people can afford to rent when they rely primarily on housing benefit. Continue reading →

Benefit cap arrears and eviction threats for women and children. Already.

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Another short post on impossible situations:

Here’s a rent arrears demand recently received by a woman who lives in a Basildon flat with her three young children (the arrears have increased since she received this letter).

It appears these arrears have come about because of the recently-lowered benefit cap.

This woman’s benefits exceeded the Out of Greater London limit of £384.62 by about £100 a week. As a result, at the end of last year, her housing benefit was cut by about £100 a week from about £188 a week to to £87 a week (think the sums are correct, looking at the paperwork. Give me a shout if you think the totals need looking at. Maths problems with these things are not at all uncommon).

Basildon council recently gave this woman a discretionary housing payment of £20 a week to cover some of the rent shortfall. That helps a bit, but only a bit. She only gets the DHP for the short term, too. After that, she either finds the full whack each week, or moves house again (this time with a serious arrears history) and takes the kids out of school again (she was recently in temporary accommodation in another borough)… or she ultimately gets evicted, I guess:

“I don’t know what to do,” she says.

I don’t really know what to do either, if I’m honest. Which is not particularly helpful.

What I do know is that I spend an awful lot of time these days with people in different parts of the country who show me demands for rent money they can’t pay and/or which say court and eviction are on the cards. As I write this, an email about a looming eviction in Haringey has landed in my inbox. I go to foodbanks and foodbank-lunches and inevitably end up talking to at least one person who is clutching a folder of letters about rent arrears.

Continue reading →