I think about this one quite a lot.

Over the past few years, I’ve had many conversations with left activists and plenty of others who hope and/or believe that austerity and adversity will bring out the best in people: that the majority of us will one day rise against social security cuts and the housing crisis, and pull together in common cause. The hope here is that austerity will end in revolt of some kind, perhaps very soon. This could happen, I guess. I doubt I’d see it coming, but then I rarely predict the big events. Turns in the narrative usually take me by surprise, especially when they’re positive. There is absolutely a chance that austerity, and the housing crisis in particular, will provoke widespread fight in addition to the fear. There is every chance that people will band together in a big way and help each other out. I already see plenty of evidence of mutual support.

The problem is that I see and hear plenty of evidence of a serious fracturing, too – a siding against, rather than with, people in the same boat. I tend think of talk along those lines as just the latest installments in a very long-running, anti-community, pro-self global narrative. Maybe I’m right. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know. I never find firm footing on this ground. I speak to people who are from this country and people who have come to this country from other places. Views are very different and very similar. I have quite a few conversations like the one I’ve transcribed below. I have conversations with people who are on the receiving end of government policy and who are largely sympathetic to government. I talk with people who receive benefits and say that government is right to crack down on benefit claimants. They clearly don’t believe that they’ll ever be in the firing line.

I’ve posted the transcript below as an example, so that you can get an idea of what I mean. The transcript below comes from a discussion with a person who claims unemployment benefits and has for a while. You’ll see that this person is strongly of the opinion that other benefit claimants are scroungers and that government is on the right track with benefit sanctions regimes. This is not a view that suggests unity. It is certainly not a view that suggests revolution.

“How can this be,” people say when they hear claimants taking this line. Members of the claimants’ union I was with on the day of the discussion below certainly wondered at the views being expressed. And who could blame them? I mean – how can this be? Benefit sanctions are extremely unpleasant. They’re particularly unpleasant to see. If you attend a jobcentre regularly, you see people being sanctioned. It ain’t pretty. I can tell you that for a fact. There is reason to feel a certain sympathy for people when they are sanctioned. There’s also reason to feel a certain fear. You can’t always predict who is going to be next on the sanctions list, even when you think you can. How can people imagine that they’re not in the firing line when they’re literally standing in the firing line?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. Perhaps you will.

Anyway. Here we are outside one of the northwest London jobcentres at the end of last year. We speak with a number of people. One woman we speak with says that she came here from Russia a long time ago (“it’s complicated”) and is nearly 40. She has lived in England for some years. She is unemployed at the moment and so receives jobseekers’ allowance. She says that she used to receive employment and support allowance, but lost that benefit earlier last year when she was found fit for work at a work capability assessment.

We talk for a long time. The woman says that that people are right to call some benefit recipients scroungers and that something in the local mindset leads people to believe that they are entitled to financial support from the state:

“I know it may sound a bit hard, because I am one of the people who come over here [to the jobcentre] to sign on [for unemployment benefit] but I’ve seen people who you would put into that [scroungers] category.”

“You see certain familiar faces. I just see that this person has no intent of looking for a job – has no intent of doing anything – and I understand why they are sanctioned. It may be not the right way, but otherwise, how will you make the person do something? How you can make somebody to actually search for a job if this person doesn’t want it?”

For herself: She says that she has told her jobcentre adviser that she can’t work for less than £22,000 a year, because she couldn’t afford to pay rent on a lower wage and would still rely on state support in the form of working tax credits. Continue reading →

Yet another disabled JSA claimant is told that his jobcentre no longer has specialist support for disabled jobseekers:

(You can read earlier stories on this same issue here and here):

Last week, I spoke at length with a 66-year-old woman who accompanies her son to his JSA signon sessions at a West Midlands jobcentre.

Her son has serious depression. His mental health condition can be so severe that he struggles to leave his flat and panics if anyone comes to his home. “That’s why I go to the jobcentre with him – because he just wouldn’t go. [If people don’t attend] then of course they get a sanction and they get no money.” This woman is her son’s appointee. He was receiving employment and support allowance, but was found fit for work after a work capability assessment. He is now on jobseekers’ allowance and is supposedly being “helped” to find work by his jobcentre and the DWP.

The problem is that this “help” is becoming very hard to find. At his most recent jobcentre meeting, this man and his mother were told that the disability employment adviser they’d been seeing for support was no longer working in that role at their West Midlands jobcentre. DEAs are/were jobcentre advisers who had extra training and time to support disabled claimants. DEAs are being removed from jobcentres. “She told me that she’s no longer the disability adviser, because they’ve stopped them. They’ve put her on the front desk with all the others. So basically, they’re disregarding disability now.” Her son has a sick note to excuse him from jobsearch activities for a set period of time. His mother said the adviser told her son that he might feel better and more able to look for work after the sick note expired. And there you have it: disability support at jobcentres for people who claim JSA and have serious mental health conditions. Continue reading →

The quotes below are from a transcript of a recording made at a jobseeker’s signon meeting at a London jobcentre in early October. The JSA claimant is a man in his early 50s who has learning and literacy difficulties. He has been out of work for about six years. I often attend jobcentre meetings with him.

The adviser is a man we see regularly. He’s always well turned out: he wears a nice suit and usually has a designer label displayed on one cuff. The man I attend with inevitably mentions the label and the suit afterwards – and not in an appreciative way:

“Him in that suit. He’s got a job. I should have a job.”

So, there’s that.

Another thing about this adviser is that he occasionally bad-mouths other JSA claimants. Some advisers do this. At this meeting, the adviser tells the man I am with that his attitude towards finding work is much better than every other claimant’s – that other people are the layabouts and the scroungers:

“You are one of the few people who come here who have something to tell me.”

“People come here and say nothing. They just want their money and go and come back next time. “

“They don’t understand that I’m here just to help. I can’t give them a job. They have to do 99% of the job themselves, but they don’t want that.”

This line always interests me. I hear it from time to time. Then, I think about it on the way home. It seems to me that freely dumping on a client group in front of strangers says a lot about a person’s ease with their own disdain for that group. I suspect that it says a lot about the DWP’s disdain for its client group as well. Jobcentres don’t always strike me as places where general professional courtesies apply.

Anyway. I wonder what advisers say about us when we’re not there. Most of the time, the guy I attend with can’t wait to get out, either (“they just want their money and go…”) He never wants to extend his stay. I can’t imagine why anybody would. Some advisers at jobcentres are agreeable enough (to your face), but the general atmosphere isn’t. Jobcentres are full of unsmiling security guards and people who are wondering if they’re about to be sanctioned. It’s always a relief to leave. The guy I attend with says that being at the jobcentre “makes me sick to my stomach.” Indeed.

While the world goes to hell in a handcart… Shepherd’s Bush jobcentre called the police today because a small group of people (five) from the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group were standing on the wrong part of the pavement as they handed out leaflets. There was a line between the sidewalk and the paving-stones on the entranceway that people in our group crossed when it started to pour.

Two of Fulham’s finest attended this incident. One copper told us that the police had received a report that our group was blocking the doorway. The coppers checked us out. “I can see you’re not blocking the doorway,” the first copper said.

I’m sure there’s a point about jobcentre and police priorities, and civil liberties, in here somewhere. Haven’t quite decided what it is. Might post some video later.

On being found fit for work and government indifference to the impact of the work capability assessment on mental health:

This story should give you some idea of the callousness with which the DWP treats people who it throws off disability benefits. The woman in this story is in her 50s. I met her at one of the northwest London jobcentres in July this year. She’d been receiving Employment and Support Allowance for about six years for long-term mental health problems. She’d been found fit for work at a recent work capability assessment.
As I wrote at the time, she was reeling. She had absolutely no idea what to do. This is the part of things that always stands out to me: the brutal way that the rug is pulled. Just a few days before we met, this woman had received the letter that I’ve posted below. The letter said that she was no longer entitled to Employment and Support Allowance, because she’d been found fit for work. Her last ESA payment had been made in early July – just a few days before we met. She was obviously extremely concerned about those payments ending. And you know – who wouldn’t be?

“They didn’t give me nothing [at the work capability assessment] – zero points. I got my letter, but I’m doing this with mental health problems. I can’t read and write very well,” she said. The letter she’d received was absolutely no help at all (we read through it together). The letter told her that she’d get no more money from early July and that “you should start looking for a job straightaway.” The letter gave a number to call to make a jobcentre appointment and offered one of the DWP’s standard little sermons on the so-called benefits of finding a job: “we know that most people are better off in work,” etc. That was it. That is always it. I’ve worked with a number of people who’ve received these letters and that’s generally how things go. That’s how the DWP tells people with mental health problems that they’ll no longer get money to live on. Anyone who hasn’t inherited a pile of money and needs some sort of income to live on (I’m guessing that’s just about everybody) should have an inkling of the way that feels. Bottom line is that the work capability assessment is about removing money. The system is harsh. Continue reading →

Any feedback on this is welcome.

(You can contact me here if you don’t want to leave a comment):

As readers of this site will know, I’ve spoken from time to time with people who have money deducted each week from their benefits. The money is deducted for social fund loan repayments and a supposed overpayment in one case (the person there says that the DWP’s overpayment claim is wrong and wants to challenge it). This repayment money is taken each week from people’s jobseekers’ allowance. Most people seem to be getting about £73 a week in JSA.

I want to know if there are limits to the amount of money that the DWP can take out of a benefit. I presume there are, but haven’t been able to get the DWP to confirm that, or to tell me how limits are decided, or to tell me much at all about the way that this system works. If I’m honest, I wonder why people are made to repay these loans at all, given that most people I meet can’t afford to. They take out loans because they haven’t got money. That situation hardly changes when they’ve got a loan to pay back. I suppose this “system” is about making sure that people who are unemployed a) get in debt and stay in debt and b) are regularly reminded that there’s no such thing as Something for Nothing, for them, at least. The amounts deducted from benefits are substantial in some cases. You can see here that this person was asked to repay nearly £20 a week at one point. At other times, the repayment was around £15.

Those amounts are a big chunk out of £73, to say the least. The amounts also seem to be completely random. Letters about repayment amounts pour through people’s doors. One letter will say one figure and another letter will say another figure and another letter will say another figure, and nobody knows what is going on and where the numbers will come from, or when. All people know is that they don’t have much to live on at all when these amounts are taken from their JSA.

This person has just been sent another letter. The DWP wants to raise the repayment totals again:

We called the DWP a couple of months ago and got the repayment figure knocked down to about £9 a week. I thought that the £9 repayment rate was supposed to stand for a while, but apparently not. Continue reading →

Update 11 November:

People have probably seen this story about 60% cuts to the number of disability employment advisers in jobcentres. It is OUTRAGEOUS for the DWP to claim in this story (as it has to me) that work coaches in jobcentres provide disabled people with a “tailored” service as a kind of replacement. That is an out and out lie. As I say below, on two occasions in the last few weeks, jobcentre advisers have told the disabled claimants I was with that they could NOT provide disabled claimants with support because their jobcentres didn’t have the time or the resources. I’ve even got a recording here of an adviser telling the disabled claimant I was with that his best chance of getting any jobseeking support was to move to the Tottenham jobcentre where disability employment advisers were still working. No disability support was available for the man I was with at his present jobcentre, because of the loss of that role.

How is it that the DWP is allowed to perpetrate this myth about work coaches tailoring services for disabled people?

Here’s the post I put up yesterday: this is a report from a meeting yesterday at Kilburn jobcentre where the woman I was with was told she’d have to wait ages for any disability support and that her best bet was to visit a jobs club run by a local trust to see if the trust could provide any disability support:

10 November:

More on non-existent support for disabled benefit claimants as Iain Duncan Smith plans to push more sick or disabled people off Employment and Support Allowance and into jobcentres:

Today, I attended a meeting at Kilburn jobcentre with a JSA claimant in her 50s who has learning difficulties. We were seen almost an hour after the appointment was meant to start. The adviser we saw was very apologetic: the jobcentre was badly short-staffed. The lack of advisers was clearly a problem. Other people were complaining about the length of time that they had to wait. We could see that staff were under pressure.

During the conversation, the adviser told us that the jobcentre’s Disability Employment Adviser – the person who is meant to give additional help and support to disabled claimants – was now so busy and oversubscribed that she didn’t have time to see everyone who needed support. The Disability Employment Adviser now worked across several offices and the wait to see her was very long.

“Weeks?” I said.

“Longer than that,” the adviser told us. She was clearly concerned about this problem. Nobody else at the jobcentre had the time or the skills to properly support disabled claimants. “She [the Disability Employment Adviser] has got the experience and the contacts.” The adviser said that our best shot at disability support was to turn up at a jobs lounge that is held regularly at Carlton Hall and to see if anyone there could provide any assistance – help filling in job application forms and that sort of thing.

“Basically, if someone has got support needs now [at this jobcentre], there is a problem,” I said.

“Big problem,” the adviser said.

Continue reading →

Here’s another short one from the “What is the point of jobcentres?” files:

I went to a JSA signon meeting with a claimant this week at one of the London jobcentres. The jobcentre adviser we saw was very keen for the person I was with to attend a jobs fair that will be held in mid-November.

“Bring CVs,” the adviser said. The person I was with only had one paper copy of his CV left, though, so I asked the adviser if the jobcentre could make some photocopies. The jobcentre adviser said No. The jobcentre couldn’t photocopy the CV, because the paper the jobcentre used wasn’t of a good enough quality. I wasn’t 100% sure what the adviser meant by that, if I’m honest. We weren’t demanding a parchment scroll, or personal embossing – we just wanted a few basic copies of a CV. If jobcentres don’t have the right paper for photocopying CVS – well, perhaps they should. They are jobcentres, let’s not forget. As it stands, we’ll have to get the CVs copied elsewhere, at our expense. I’ve done it before. I’ll be doing it again.

To recap, then: I asked an adviser at a jobcentre if the jobcentre could make copies of a CV for a jobseeker to take to a jobs fair, and the adviser said No. That may not sound like a major event in the greater scheme, but it does make me wonder. This sort of Absolutely Nothing Happens Here experience is so typical of the many visits to jobcentres that I’ve made over the past two years. If jobcentres won’t, or can’t, do the basics – help fill in job application forms, or copy CVs for people to take to jobs fairs – then the long-term unemployed are trudging backwards and forwards to jobcentres for the hell of it. I suppose that’s a political win somewhere. Very strange.