I wonder about this a lot these days.

I’ve posted the letters below to show again the deluge of mail, DWP demands for money, and bailiff and eviction threats received by people who have absolutely no money at all.

I want to give people an idea of the relentlessness with which debt is pursued and the way debt stacks up for people who have no chance of paying any of it. I’ve wondered before about the sort of endgames that the political class has in mind for people in these situations. Will we see lots of people in debtors’ jail? Permanent homelessness? A lifetime chained to unpayable fines? Deportation? Who can really say. I think something might have to give at some point. I certainly see a few people in this kind of shit.

The young woman I’m writing about in this post (and wrote about here) is facing eviction for rent arrears caused by a rent shortfall that she was never able to pay, bailiff threats for outstanding fines and mounting court costs that she can’t meet, and benefit deductions for a loan and supposed overpayment of a couple of hundred quid a year ago.

The debts grow and grow, while the money she has to repay those debts stays the same (she gets about £73 a week in jobseekers’ allowance, which she also must live off). This equation is clearly never going to add, but her debtors keep going for it anyway. This young woman has been homeless in the past. She’s had a very difficult domestic situation to deal with this year. The main point here, though, is that there’s no way out of these sorts of problems if people don’t have money to throw at them. It doesn’t matter why they don’t have that money, or whose fault it all is, or whatever the hell people want to say at this stage. If people don’t have the money, they don’t. And – that’s it.

Nonetheless, debts are chased incessantly. It’s as though debtors expect people who are in this kind of trouble to suddenly come into thousands of pounds. Or something. I don’t really know where those on the collection end really expect things to end up. One of the letters below is a bailiff demand for a travel fine and extra costs. A couple of weeks ago, the bailiffs turned up first thing in the morning at this woman’s flat to collect. Meanwhile, the DWP piles on the pressure with a barrage of letters about benefit deductions and fund repayments. These letters are almost impossible to follow most of the time. I like to think that I have a reasonable grasp of these things, but I just DO NOT understand some of the figures that the DWP arrives at with these calculations. Different totals are set for deductions – from month to month it seems at times. The deductions are taken from benefits at source. Sometimes, this woman has been left with about £40 a week to live on.

Here’s one of a number of recent eviction threats this person has received. For several complicated reasons, this young woman has a housing benefit rent shortfall of about £40 a week and rent arrears of more than £1600 because of that. The Housing Trust has since sent another note to apply for this woman’s eviction:

We’ve met with the trust and the council and will have a shot at sorting things out by applying for a discretionary housing payment. The young woman has been told not to get her hopes up on that score, though. So – yeah. Helpful.

Here is a bailiff’s letter demanding more than £700 for the travel fine (as I say, the bailiffs have since visited again in person):

Meanwhile, the DWP continues to deduct loan and overpayment money from this woman’s jobseekers’ allowance at source. No matter that she has the rent and arrears problems, and is facing eviction and homelessness. None of that appears to be factored in. Letter after letter arrives, advising her of these seemingly random amounts for deduction:

Here’s another one:

Plenty more where those came from, too.

A few weeks ago, I rang the DWP to explain the situation and to try and get some of the deduction rates reduced. The DWP agreed to cut one repayment amount by three pounds and the other by about six pounds. That frees up around a tenner. I suppose we should all be grateful for that.

I’m not sure what is meant to happen next. The DWP can spew out letters as often as it likes. Government can bleat on about scroungers and Taking Responsibility For Yourself as loudly as it wants. None of that changes the fact that people crash. It really doesn’t. I think we’d all know by now if it did.

• Thanks to the CAB adviser who got in touch last time I wrote about this. Advice was appreciated.

So.

A lot of disabled people used the Independent Living Fund to pay for the extra support that they needed to get to work and college, and so on. You’d think a government that was so obsessed with getting disabled people to work would have kept a crucial fund that allowed a lot of disabled people to – err, work. Nonetheless, the government closed the ILF earlier this year.

Makes you wonder what the government agenda for disabled people really is.

Photo from the jobcentre by http://photos.snapsthoughts.com/blog

I wonder some days.

Here are a few more stories:

Leafleting at the Kilburn jobcentre yesterday with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group, I spoke for a while with an older woman. She said that she was 62. She was very confused about benefits and her entitlements. She said that she’d received a call the day before from the DWP. The person who’d called had either told her that she wasn’t eligible for employment and support allowance, or that an existing employment and support allowance claim would end. She was agitated and not entirely clear about the call, or the instructions. “They told me I had to ask them about JSA,” she said.

She had brought paperwork from her doctor. I think she had an idea that she could take the paperwork into the jobcentre and that someone there would look at the doctor’s letters and help her sort her benefits out. Nothing of the kind happened, of course. I don’t see too many jobcentres providing an on-the-spot service, even for people who are older and clearly struggling. At best, people are given DWP contact centre numbers to call and told to go outside and call them on their own phones (some of them cost to call. I made a whole lot of 0345 calls to the DWP yesterday. Wonder how that bill will turn out).

I went into the jobcentre with this woman and we were stopped straightaway by security. The security guard we spoke to wasn’t as antisocial as some, but he was adamant that this woman couldn’t see an adviser until she rang the DWP and sorted out an appointment. There was no other option. It didn’t matter that she was in her 60s and obviously concerned. Requests to see someone were just met with a blanket No. The woman had scrawled a number on her doctor’s letter when the DWP had called the day before. The security guard told her to go home and call the number from a landline. That was the end of that. Continue reading →

Any input on this appreciated. Haven’t dealt with social fund repayments before.

Feel free to contact me here if you don’t want to leave a comment.

I spent about an hour on the phone to various parts of the DWP today (more on that exercise soon). I was trying to a) work out why money was being deducted from this young woman’s JSA and b) if the rates of these various deductions could be lowered, seeing as this woman is in an impossible place financially. She has a weekly rent shortfall of a considerable sum each a week, rent arrears because of the shortfall (her Housing Trust said that it might accept a reduced repayment rate on arrears, but that she still has to find the shortfall, of course) and social fund repayments of about £15 a week – a seemingly random amount that was announced by DWP letter about a fortnight ago. These deductions and repayments mean that she will have almost nothing left out of her JSA when all payments are made. That clearly won’t work no matter who thinks it should, so we rang the DWP to try and get the social fund repayment rate lowered. The thinking here was that maybe some of that money could go towards the arrears and help prevent an eviction. The whole thing is a total mess and the paperwork is unreal. No wonder people ignore calls and letters when this shit starts happening. There’s no way to fix it if people can’t pay any of it off, so they ignore it for as long as they can. I’d say that this was the point where people needed the most help sorting things out in a way they could manage, but what would I know. No doubt this is the point where loan sharks come in. I can picture a scenario where people go to loan sharks because the DWP is deducting money from benefits for its own loans – money that people can’t afford to lose each week. Or something. Bloody hell. How does this even work.

Anyway, the woman at the DWP said it would take between two to four weeks to decide whether or not to reduce the repayment terms – with the emphasis on the four weeks end of the scale. That’s an impossible length of time to wait for a decision in this sort of scenario. Two weeks is bad enough. If people are struggling to repay a loan right now and inching ever closer to homelessness because of rent arrears, they’re sure as hell going to be closer to the edge in four weeks’ time. If only outstanding contributions from tax dodgers were pursued with such enthusiasm. That’s the sort of money that would make a difference.

On this government’s ideas about cutting benefits to drug and alcohol users unless they agree to treatment:

Don’t think that punishing drug and alcohol users cures drug and alcohol addiction. If only.

I’ve reposted below a transcript from an interview that I did in 2013 with a guy in Stroud called Darren. When I met him, Darren was trying to beat a years-long heroin addiction. I have a number of interviews with people with serious addiction problems who I’ve spoken to over the last five or so years – people whose supported-living hostels were closed, or who were in and out of street homelessness, usually because they had serious mental health and addiction problems. The Marah organisation in Stroud introduced me to Darren. When I met him at a drop-in lunch, he told me that he’d walked from Cheltenham to Stroud to escape the Cheltenham drug scene. He was living in a tent that Marah had given him, if memory serves. It didn’t sound as though he was having the greatest time in the world. Nobody does when it comes to addiction.

So…this notion that you can push, threaten, or somehow menace someone out of addiction: the main reason that I doubt that’ll work is because I’ve tried it. Everyone who has an addict in the family has tried it. A lot of the time, you try very hard. You certainly try many things. You scream a lot and deny money and affection, and all the rest of it. You run away and come back. You go to Al-Anon meetings for Families Of, decide the key to coping is to change yourself and get nowhere much with that. You do all of these things and often reach commitments, and even as everybody is agreeing to those, the person with the addiction problem steps out of the room and goes off and gets slaughtered.

Continue reading →

…that they all know exactly how bad things are for people who need social security. Their surgeries must be full of people who can’t meet the rent, have been sanctioned, must live in shitty housing, are being treated badly at jobcentres, can’t get support workers, or enough carer hours, or can’t meet an energy bill, or have massive forms to fill in to claim a benefit and so on. They must absolutely know how things are.

I can say this, because I know a lot about the way these things are myself. I get heaps of emails and contacts from people who need help with these things. I’m just one blogger and and I can’t keep up with the number of people who need some kind of help. I’m not even sure what to tell people anymore. People just get angry if you suggest the CAB. They say that they’ve tried and the CAB is oversubscribed. I don’t even reply to some emails these days, because I just don’t know what to say and I end up making a sort of non-decision to do nothing. I haven’t got anything helpful to say. Everyone I know who works in these areas – paid workers, volunteers, campaigners – is overstretched beyond belief. I talk about it with people all the time. People burn out all over the place.

MPs know this. They see it. People who need social security don’t just disappear because parliament tells a small voting public that they should. I find that the more people government strikes from the Deserving list, the more people get in contact for help. Everyone who is on the ground knows that. Pity there’s nowhere to take that knowledge.

Here’s yet another post about the crappy callousness with which the DWP treats people it finds fit for work and throws off disability benefits…

We’ve heard plenty of stories like the one below in the past few years and I imagine we’ll be hearing more of them as more and more people on the Employment and Support Allowance disability benefit are forced to look for work. At jobcentres recently, I’ve found more people who were either on ESA and recently found fit for work, or who are in the ESA work-related activity group (the group for sick or disabled claimants who are thought capable of some type of work in future and of attending work-related activities*) and being forced to attend the jobcentre for work activities, even when their jobcentre advisers happily concede that those work activities won’t lead to jobs. These few people don’t make a trend, of course, but I’m inclined to think they suggest a direction of travel – a DWP crackdown on people in the ESA work-related activity group and ESA in general. As you’ll know, George Osborne targeted new claimants to that work related activity group in his July 8 budget, so ESA is certainly in his sights. I already know people in the ESA Support Group who have received letters telling them to attend work-focused interviews (the ESA support group is for sick or disabled people who are supposed to be excused from work and work-related activities). I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again and why not: I think the government’s ultimate plan is to eliminate disability benefits, as well as the idea that some people just can’t work.

Anyway, I do sometimes wonder what the fallout from a crackdown on sick and disabled claimants in the ESA WRAG group will be… I can say this for sure: the DWP continues to remove benefits from people who have mental health conditions in a particularly shitty and cold-blooded way.

Take this latest example. At one of the Northwest London jobcentres a couple of weeks ago, I spent time talking to an older woman I call Mary in this post (this woman did say I could use her real name, but I decided not to at the last minute here, because I’m getting more and more nervous about DWP vindictiveness to claimants). Mary was not in a very good way. Mary said that she had long-term mental health problems and had receiving ESA because of this. She’d been on the benefit for about six years. Mary said that she had been in the ESA work-related activity group until very recently. A few days before we met outside the jobcentre, she’d received the letter which you can see below – the letter which told her that she was no longer entitled to Employment and Support Allowance. She’d been found fit for work after a June work capability assessment. Her last ESA payment had been made on 2 July – just a couple of days before we met. She was obviously very concerned about that money ending – as anyone would be – and had no idea what to do next.

“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.” As you can see below, the letter that Mary just received from the DWP told her that she’d get no more money from early July and that she’d better pull finger and start looking for a job: “you should start looking for a job straightaway.” If she couldn’t get a job straightaway (and it seemed unlikely that she would at that very moment, given her age and history) the letter gave a number to call to make a jobcentre appointment. That was the end of that. Other than those mostly useless pointers, all this letter offered was a few of the DWP’s now-unavoidable odes to the joys and supremacy of work: “we know that most people are better off in work,” and blah blah blah. These letters are as sanctimonious as they are unhelpful. There’s a repulsive smugness about the DWP when it pulls the rug on people in these situations.

Which is the thing. I’m not talking about Mary in particular here, or her history. I don’t know enough about her history to go into it. I’m talking about the system Mary is stuck in, the way this bureaucracy behaves towards people who use it and the assumptions it makes about those people. I’m talking about a system which removes people’s small incomes at the stroke of a pen, and the amazing callousness that the DWP shows when it throws people with mental health problems off ESA. There’s no “We Get That Mental Health Conditions Are A Real Thing” going on in this letter, or even “We Get That Stopping Your Income Might Devastate You.” The assumption in this letter is that people who are found fit for work have been taking the piss and that everyone who is found fit for work is robust enough to deal with a major blow like a sudden and total loss of income. This, presumably, is how the DWP continues to “fix” people with mental health conditions and indeed to “fix” anyone who claims a disability benefit. Forget about eligibility for a minute, or whether or not people are “deserving,” so-called (nobody’s deserving as far as this government is concerned, so that conversation is barely worth faffing around with). The point is that this is how people are handled when decisions to stop their income are made.

Sightings of letters like this one and of people in Mary’s situation reeling around outside jobcentres are among the reasons why I await the outcome of Mike Sivier’s request for benefit deaths statistics with interest. There’s absolutely no concession in the above text-heavy letter to the fact that the sudden stop of ESA might have a very bad effect on someone with mental health problems, or that such a letter might make those problems worse. There’s certainly nothing at the front of the letter about help to sign on for jobseekers’ allowance for some income in the first instance, or help to navigate the difficult path to jobseekers’ allowance, or how someone who once claimed ESA might deal with JSA’s difficult, demanding and punitive jobsearch regimes (I don’t count the provision of the Jobcentre Plus phone number on page 2, or the warbling on about Work Coach help at a jobcentre as immediate and intensive support). For her part, Mary was going to try and appeal the fit-for-work decision: “I’m on medication,” she said. “I’m going to my doctor now to get the letters.” I gave her my number and have her address: hopefully, we can catch up and find out how things went. Suffice to say for now that I expect to see more and more people clutching these letters outside jobcentres as Osborne and the boys target ESA – and the people who collect it – for destruction. Cute, innit.

*Update Monday 20 July: sentence with * changed from “thought fit for some type of work” to “thought capable of some kind of work in future” as original could be interpreted as “fit for work” as in a WCA decision to end an ESA claim altogether. Also added “and of attending work-related activities” inside the bracket, as agree with commentator below that the work-related activities requirement for WRAG should be made clear as part of that sentence. Good ESA WRAG definition here.

So…

Just after the general election this year, I stayed in Dorset and visited the Soul Food kitchen in Weymouth at breakfast-time one Friday. Soul Food does meals for people who have benefit problems, or who are in and out of street homelessness. I spent a lot of time with people there a couple of years ago. When I visited in May this year, I recorded an interview with an older woman who I’ll call Leanne for this post. Leanne was a wheelchair user: cerebral palsy, she said. We talked for a long time. She spoke about the government’s harsh application regime for employment and support allowance. She talked about her social housing flat, which she said she’d been living in for years. She revealed a deep dislike of the social care types who she seemed somehow to answer to: “ I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” she said. Anyway, since we’d just had a general election, I thought I’d ask Leanne who she’d voted for. She told me that she’d voted for the Tories. “Doesn’t make any difference,” she said.

I don’t know why I’m telling you this story, except to say that life rolls this way outside of twitter. I meet up with people and they say things, and there we are. I speak to a lot of people who genuinely think of political engagement as a luxury enjoyed by other people. Their own minds are busy elsewhere: mainly caught up in a series of run-ins with bullying bureaucrats as far as I can tell (“I’m always told I’m spending other people’s money,” etc). That’s where the main action is. People read the papers and follow the news, but they don’t imagine for a second that their experiences count towards anything that goes down there. I think that’s why this latest wittering about Labour as the party of welfare has not engaged me. It seems a while since people I hang out with talked about Labour as social security champions.