Category Archives: Universal Credit

Universal Credit is not the only horror show in town. The entire benefits system is wrecked. I’ll show you.

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Fact: Universal Credit is NOT the only benefit which plunges people into debt and desperation.

The entire benefit system is a wreck. Years of staff cuts, privatisation, jobcentre closures, sanctions, benefit delays and a brutal institutional contempt for claimants have left people reeling in a system that can’t even do the basics.

Universal Credit hasn’t gone wrong. It has gone exactly as planned. The application process is difficult. It excludes anyone who can’t use a PC, or navigate complex public sector bureaucracies. It has built-in delays which leave people in debt – rent arrears, in particular. Universal Credit strikes terror into anyone who might need it. Its depravity is entirely in keeping with welfare reform.

I understand why activists target Universal Credit. Universal Credit is a vicious ideological project which will adversely affect millions of working people (potential voters, that is). It has cost billions and will cost more. Its failures can be laid firmly at the door of Tory extremism.

The truth is, though, that every part of the safety net is in shreds. No politician will fix that easily. I’m not convinced that the electorate even wants the net fixed for a lot of people. Chaminda had that right. Destruction of welfare reflects an electorate view of the poorest. I’ve often spoken with people who are struggling mightily, but who agree with some degree of welfare reform. They receive benefits, but say that too many people get benefits when they shouldn’t.

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Computer Says No

Let’s take a look at a few typical experiences of people who sign on (or try to) at Stockport jobcentre. I attend Stockport United Against Austerity leafleting sessions at that jobcentre and interview people as they come out. Universal Credit rollout starts at Stockport this month. The jobcentre already has some UC claimants.

The interviews below were all made this year. I’ve picked three at random. Readers of this site will know that I have many others.

The theme of these interviews? – Exclusion. Each person went into the jobcentre with an issue and came out with the same issue. Nothing was fixed, or solved. People were no closer to answers to problems than they were when they went in. This is so commonplace that it is standard.

Here’s Kerry:

Kerry was in her 30s. She was out of work. She was trying to sign on for jobseekers’ allowance while she looked for work. Kerry Anne had a job interview set for the Tuesday after we met.

Kerry had filled in a JSA application form. Then, she’d received a DWP text which instructed her to attend a meeting at Stockport jobcentre to complete her JSA claim.

Kerry had turned up to the meeting – only to be told that her paperwork wasn’t adequate. An adviser told Kerry she needed three forms of ID to claim JSA. The meeting ended there.

When I met Kerry, she was standing outside the jobcentre trying to guess what the adviser was on about. Kerry didn’t have three forms of ID. Nobody does. The adviser had not explained what she’d meant.

Upshot: Kerry left the jobcentre no closer to JSA than she’d been when she arrived. She had no idea how to complete her application and no idea when – or even if – she’d get any money.

That sort of scenario is absolutely par for the course. One person after another leaves that jobcentre trying to work out what in hell to do next. There really are times when it feels as though people who try to claim benefits are forced participants in a hellish gameshow challenge – where the prize for navigating one obstacle is a cryptic hint about the next one. The thing is ridiculous. It goes on and on.

Next up: a man in his 30s called Steve.

Steve needed help to buy a cheap pram. Steve and his partner had a baby, but they couldn’t afford a pram for him. Without a pram, they just carried the baby around town.

On the day we met, the couple had asked the jobcentre for a social fund loan. The jobcentre said they couldn’t have one. Advisers said Steve was paying back another loan. Steve insisted that he wasn’t. This went on for a while. The jobcentre wouldn’t budge.

Continue reading →

Back next week. A few thoughts on Universal Credit until then…

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Back next week.

Will leave you with this thought about Universal Credit until then:

Universal Credit hasn’t gone wrong. It has gone exactly as planned.

The application process is difficult and convoluted. It excludes anyone who can’t use a PC, or who struggles to navigate complex public sector bureaucracies. It has built-in delays which leave people in debt as a matter of course – rent arrears, in particular. It really is no exaggeration to say that just about everybody I speak to at foodbanks and jobcentres these days is in debt.

Universal Credit strikes terror into anyone who might have to use it. That’s the whole idea. Its depravity is entirely in keeping with assaults on social security as we’ve seen them in the last decade or so. The replacing of DLA with PIP, the harshness of the ESA work capability assessment, the closure of the Independent Living Fund, the tightening of eligibility for social care, the caps to LHA – these so-called reforms have been as brutal. Universal Credit is the latest chapter in an evil story.

At Oldham foodbank, Universal Credit is the biggest problem by miles

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Was at Oldham foodbank last week (there’s a long interview from that session here).

I also had a long chat with Glenn, who is one of the foodbank volunteers.

He told me that:

  • about 75% of foodbank parcels went to people who were struggling because of Universal Credit problems. Rent arrears was a major issue.
  • the foodbank had seen about twice as many people this year as last year, largely for the above reason.
  • the foodbank came close to running out of supplies at times. People donated around Christmas and New Year, because there was a lot of awareness at that time, but things were different during other months.
  • more and more people who used the foodbank were in work. Glenn gave the example of people who were in cleaning jobs. Some people had two cleaning jobs, but could not meet their bills on their wages.

This certainly gels with service user reports.

I’ve published a lot of interviews on this site with people who’ve had to use Oldham foodbank in the last year or so. Literally everyone I’ve spoken to at each visit has been in debt – debts which have often run to thousands of pounds. Reasons have included rent arrears because of Universal Credit delays or LHA gaps, council tax arrears, court fines for arrears and PIP and other benefit delays. I’ve posted links to a few of those interviews below.

This welfare reform disaster has to be turned around one way or another. You can’t have people on the edge like this, especially with another freezing northern winter taking hold. Seriously. If the aim of welfare reform was to push people in poverty into debt, fear, agony and death, we’re at Mission Accomplished.

Enough.

#UniversalCredit, sanctions, rent arrears, radiation therapy, 8 people living in one small flat…what the hell does this achieve?

 

“I miss one bill [to] pay another.” Universal Credit and debt, debt, debt. More #foodbank interviews

 

When the stress of applying for disability benefits is dangerous to disabled people’s health…

 

Ten week Universal Credit start delay, rent arrears as a result, advance loan repayments, tax credit debt…How debt is built into Universal Credit

“I got sanctioned nine months altogether – sanctioned, sanctioned, sanctioned.” And £2k rent arrears. No money for fares to work. More stories from the foodbank

 

 

#UniversalCredit, sanctions, rent arrears, radiation therapy, 8 people living in one small flat…what the hell does this achieve?

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When will modern society work out that hating and bullying people in poverty doesn’t eradicate poverty?

Last Wednesday, I spent several hours at Oldham foodbank, speaking with people who’d come in for food parcels. I visit Oldham foodbank from time to time.

On Wednesday, I had a long talk with Mel (name changed), 47. There’s a full transcript from that interview at the end of this article.

I’m posting this interview for a specific reason.

Mel and her family were on the receiving end of a great deal of government and public bile.

I want to show you how that looks from Mel’s side of the fence:

Mel talked about being patronised by frontline officers and targeted by people in the neighbourhood.

Universal Credit officers dismissed Mel when she rang the helpline because her benefits weren’t paid: “He [the DWP officer] said, “there’s thousands like you. You’re not the only one.”

A neighbour had dobbed Mel in with authorities – I think for housing extra family members in her flat.

A secretary at a local school had called Mel’s children and grandchildren dirty: “I didn’t actually punch her…I’m not a violent person but…yeah.”

The list went on. It usually does.

That’s the point I want to focus on here.

I know precisely what government and a judgmental electorate would say about Mel’s family. They would call Mel and her family scroungers. They would hate on the family and think – “Job Done. That’ll Learn Them.” (It’s only a pity that bailed-out bankers aren’t punished as thoroughly for their money-handling problems). Such is our era. The general view is that all that people in Mel’s situation need to sort things out is a kick in the head.

I don’t believe that bashing people when they’re already down is a brilliant social policy tactic. What I do know is that Mel and her family were being crushed by the dysfunctional and abusive public sector bureaucracies that they relied on. That part was absolutely not Mel’s fault. That part was society’s fault. Society approves of institutional aggression towards the worst off and likes to describe people in poverty as barbaric if they respond badly to that aggression. That’s how things roll for the Mels of the modern world.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Mel was ill. She said that she was having radiation therapy. She looked sick. She was tiny and gaunt, and her hair was thinning. She kept saying that she looked old. She was upset about it.

“I’ve got two weeks left of radiation… two weeks left of treatment, three times a week. I look old.”

There were other problems, too – like Mel needed them.

One problem was that Mel was receiving Universal Credit. Universal Credit’s defective payment systems had caused Mel no end of grief. For example: Mel had rent arrears. She couldn’t understand why, because the housing costs component of her Universal Credit was paid straight to her landlord. Her rent should have been covered. It hadn’t been at one point or another, and she didn’t know why. Mel kept getting letters from First Choice Homes about the arrears. She couldn’t repay the money. She would never be able to repay the money. The demand letters kept coming. This happens too often to mention. The threats roll in and roll in. There’s no respite. The debts never end.

So, there was that.

Another problem was that Mel’s flat was overcrowded. Her children and grandchildren were staying with her, because they had nowhere else to go.

Mel said she had seven (sometimes eight) people living in her two-bedroom flat. There was Mel, her five-year-old daughter, her 26-year-old daughter, the daughter’s partner and their three kids (and sometimes another daughter, I think Mel said). The 26-year-old daughter and her family had recently been evicted from their flat, because the landlord had wanted to sell.

There was more.

At the moment, the family relied on Mel’s benefit money to pay for food and clothes. Mel’s daughter had applied for Universal Credit, but had only received one payment in ten months. Continue reading →

Universal Credit, not allowed to use jobcentre phones to secure work, sent on a course called Changing Attitudes…

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Here’s another example of farcical jobcentre operations. How many of these have I got:

I recently attended another leafleting sessions at Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity.

I spoke at length outside the jobcentre with Mark, 46.

Mark had been on Universal Credit for two years.

Mark was fuming.

Mark had been given a number to call about voluntary work at a Stockport Homes cafe – but the jobcentre wouldn’t let him use the jobcentre phones to call the number to arrange an interview. He couldn’t believe it. Well – he could believe it, because being told to get lost is par for the course at jobcentres, but you know what I mean.

Said Mark:

“I can’t get even get a fucking job as a fucking roadsweeper… do you know what I mean? Volunteering… I thought that having that on my CV it would be better than [nothing]…[but] they won’t even let you use the phone…”

There was more.

Mark said that the previous week, he’d had been sent on a course called something like Changing Attitudes, or about changing attitudes. Something cute like that.

The course was about changing Mark’s attitude to unemployment. It was not, alas, about changing the DWP’s attitude to unemployment. Stories about not allowing unemployed people to use jobcentre phones to set up voluntary work suggested the DWP was in urgent need of its own course. The DWP does get these things arse-about.

Still, Mark decided to enter the spirit of the course. He decided to ask around for voluntary work. Unfortunately, the DWP’s rigid refusal to provide the most basic services had turned Mark’s morning into a trial.

I find this so often at jobcentres: people wandering around outside, trying to understand what just happened, or didn’t happen, inside the jobcentre and why they are no closer to work, or even solutions to basic problems, than they were when they went in. They are told to Go Away as soon as they step in – to go away and find their own phones, or to go away and get another bank statement, or medical certificate, or piece of paper to prove an address, or to go away and look online for answers to their problems.

The DWP does not prioritise sorting people’s problems out. The DWP prioritises pushing people out the door. The DWP is good at that part.

Mark said:

“They put us on the training course last week… it was changing attitudes to it all [laughs]… [They said] instead of thinking outside the box, think inside the box – so I’m thinking I might just become a volunteer instead of signing off. Everything has been for nothing.”

Never was a truer sentence spoken. Everything people do at the jobcentre is for nothing. If you’re wondering why the average bloke in the street is so pissed off at the world at the moment, it is because everything people are told to do is for nothing. I gave Mark my phone to use for his call. It turned out the number that he had was wrong as well. What a circus. Continue reading →

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 →

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 →