A few thoughts on the extraordinary efforts that our punitive state now makes to isolate people who need state help:

Not long ago, I had ANOTHER altercation with a G4S security guard – this time at one of the East London jobcentres. You can hear some of that argument here (there’s a bit in it about a bicycle that you’ll need to read on to understand):

The dispute was about people’s right to bring a friend or supporter along to their jobcentre appointments. I was there to accompany a young woman to her first jobseekers’ allowance signon meeting. She had all sorts of complicated problems with her benefits, so I went along to take any notes that she needed. She also wanted someone along as a witness.

You’d think that was fair enough, especially at the moment. People need witnessess to their interactions with jobcentre advisers. That is because the whole jobcentre system is a fiasco. People get their benefits sanctioned for reasons that nobody understands, or they’re told to attend meetings that end up being on another day entirely, or they get in trouble for not turning up to appointments that another adviser has cancelled (I’ve seen endless variations on all three over the last year or so). Taking a witness along so that at least one other person understands what jobsearch activities and meetings are agreed is pretty important to survival. The DWP’s own responses to FOI requests about bringing a supporter along to JSA appointments seem to imply that accompaniment is perfectly fine. Other people have argued the toss about representation with the DWP and apparently won. Feel free to leave a comment, or email me, if you have any further insight into the rules. I’d ask the DWP myself, except that asking the DWP anything these days is so utterly pointless that I can’t actually find the motivation to lift my finger and dial the DWP’s number. I ring the DWP and I email the DWP and the DWP simply refuses to respond to my questions.

Which isn’t necessarily a huge loss in the greater scheme. The point is that people should be entitled to take a witness along to their jobcentre signon meetings. The other point is that nobody on the ground seems to know what the rules are anyway. People just say whatever suits them at the time. Some guards (they’re generally in the minority now) have said to me Yes, You Can Go In. The rest say No. That means that the majority of jobcentre security guards I see now are very quick to put a stop to someone’s right to any sort of representation. Their first response shouldn’t be No, but it is. It’s No for the hell of it. It’s No, just because guards can say No. I’ve probably attended around ten jobcentre appointments with people this year and reckon that security guards have said No to my going in at the start of more than half of them. One guy I just totally ignored. I pretended I couldn’t hear him telling me to stop and just kept walking. The rest generally backed down after debates about procedures and/or previous agreements which I largely made up on the spot, but fortunately convinced people existed. This says to me that nobody is very clear on the facts. Things sometimes seem to go better when guards think that I’m a claimant’s mother. I don’t know what it is about mothers. The problem is that I can’t be everyone’s Mum, especially when I turn up at the same jobcentre with different people. It is also a tricky call when claimants and I are around the same age. Continue reading →

Here’s a little something to carry you up to the election.

Excellent video and song by the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group. Share and enjoy! Might make the leadup to the election vaguely more tolerable than it has been so far. Getting wasted also helps.

Sign the petition and clog up Iain Duncan Smith’s email inbox! Okay, so he knows that he is destroying disabled people’s lives, but dropping a reminder of that into his inbox every second is still worthwhile. Heap it on his poisonous arse.

From Disabled People Against Cuts:

“As disabled people, we’ve spent the last five years enduring attack after attack – we’ve fought back in any way we can. But fear and anxiety are now part of everyday life. Over the past five years, we’ve seen our support and whatever security and peace of mind we once had being slowly and methodically being stripped from us. Through a combination of ‘reform’ and the notion of austerity we have been hit by cuts and have borne the brunt of the Coalition’s ideological determination to reduce the welfare state.

“It’s time all political parties came clean on further cuts to disabled peoples support,instead of false promises and lies.

Please, oppose any further cuts to vital support for disabled people and those with chronic health conditions by signing with us.”

Read the full post here.

April 5: Update on the election leaflets (well, there’s been one so far) that I’ve received – I got a Labour campaign leaflet from Lewisham Deptford’s Vicky Foxcroft that doesn’t mention this government’s astounding attacks on sick and disabled people as far as I can see. There’s no mention of Atos, Maximus and the work capability assessment, the months-long queues for Personal Independence Payment asessments, or the elimination of the Independent Living Fund. I can’t even see a reference to the bedroom tax. It’s almost as though people who need some sort of income support because of sickness or disability don’t exist or something. No mention of JSA sanctions, either. How about that. “The next election is a straight choice between a recovery that puts working people and the NHS first with Labour, or continuing with a government that is not listening to hardworking people,” Vicky tells us. Great. We can assume that people who can’t work aren’t entitled to representation from this party – ie, that nobody will be listening to them.

The really amazing thing about all of this is the extent to which the people who have taken the worst of the coalition government’s violent social security “reforms” are airbrushed from these mainstream political manifestos. People have died as a result of this government’s smashing of welfare benefits and unfathomable, utterly illogical eligibility testing. Iain Duncan Smith should be doing jail time because of that and Labour should be pushing for a prosecution. Instead, we get more of this utterly meaningless “hardworking” guff. Is anyone even buying the “hardworking” line anymore? What Vicky is really saying here is “work hard now. You’ll get fuck all if the day comes when you can’t.”

I love elections.

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Wonder which mainstream political parties plan to stand up for sick and disabled people who the DWP routinely harasses in the way described on this page (answers on a very very small postit thanks):

Here is ANOTHER letter from the DWP calling a person who is in the Employment and Allowance Support Group to a jobcentre interview:

This is the fourth letter that this person has received in three months calling him to one assessment or another to keep his ESA. I personally think that this non-stop correspondence from the DWP and its fitness-for-work assessors is harassment – particularly in the case of this man, who simply can’t deal with a barrage of official letters and contact. He is in the ESA Support Group because he has serious mental health problems. He finds pressure from the DWP very difficult to deal with and certainly sees these endless official letters as potential threats to his meagre income. People who are in the ESA Support Group are judged to have the most severe health problems. They are meant to be excused from all work and work-related activities. Unfortunately, they’re not excused from non-stop badgering by the DWP and its various private-company fit-for-work assessors. Plenty of people are getting these letters – Disabled People Against Cuts has even set up response-letter templates so that people who are harassed by the DWP in this way can write and tell the DWP to back off. There are days when I think that the DWP and the likes of Atos and Maximus are working in a pincer movement, closing in on people in the Support Group from all sides.

Take the guy who received the letters you see on this page. He got one letter telling him to attend at Atos assessment in about January (that appointment was ultimately postponed, presumably while the work capability assessment baton was passed to Maximus). Then in February, he got a letter which called him to a work-focused interview at the jobcentre. (even though people in the Support Group are excused from all work-related interviews and activities). In the last week of March, he received the letter posted at the top of this page which told him to attend a 40-minute jobcentre meeting with a work coach to assess the amount of ESA he receives. Then last week, he got a letter from Maximus – a letter which calls him to a rescheduled work capability assessment at the end of April. On and on it goes.

Each letter has caused this guy an awful lot of panic and required phone calls and further contact with the letter-sender – to confirm appointment times, to ask if assessments could be recorded, or changed, or to cancel appointments where they were not actually compulsory. People in the Support Group, as I say, don’t actually have to attend work-focused interviews. They’re just harassed and hounded into thinking they should. This guy’s wife says that she was told off when she rang the DWP to say that he would never attend a work-focused interview at the jobcentre (his mental health problems are so bad that he can hardly leave the house). She said the DWP told her not to say Never, because the jobcentre might get vindictive. Brilliant. Continue reading →

On Monday 9 March, people going into jobcentres were told that IT systems were down and that the problem was nationwide.

Here’s a picture I took of a sign about it posted outside Kilburn jobcentre that day:

The sign said:

“9 March 2015 Customer Notice
IT systems are down
This is a national problem ie contact centre, JCP, Belfast have no access
We do not know when it will be resolved.
All appointments today must be attended.”

I’ve wondered since then if anyone claiming JSA or ESA had had any trouble – particularly with any information taken down by hand that day not being recorded properly (or at all) when the systems were back up. I could see plenty of potential for sanctions threats here – certainly if changed appointments weren’t recorded and so on. I’ve talked to no end of people in the last year who were sanctioned because of confusion about appointment times and dates.

And wouldn’t you know it… I was talking today to a man who felt that his week got very close to ending in a sanctions disaster because the computers weren’t working last Monday. He’s 56, not in good health and in the Work Related Activity group for Employment and Support Allowance. Last Monday – the day that the systems were down – I sat with this man and a woman from the local unemployed workers’ group who helps him with his ESA paperwork. He had a letter calling him to a work-related interview at one of the northwest London jobcentres last week. The session was mandatory. People in the work related activity must attend work-related interviews, or face sanctions.

Anyway – he couldn’t make that interview, because he had an appointment with a specialist on the same day, so the woman we were with called the phone number on the letter and told the adviser who answered that the appointment would need to be changed. I sat there and listened as this conversation took place. The adviser told the woman that the systems were down, but that she’d make a note to cancel the appointment and arrange for a new appointment to be set.

Needless to say, those details never made it into the system. The appointment wasn’t cancelled and predictably, things started to hit the fan. This guy got a message from the jobcentre on the day of the cancelled appointment telling him to call the jobcentre quick. He told me that when he called the jobcentre, he got a right bollocking about missing the appointment – ie where were you, why didn’t you attend, don’t you know that these appointments are compulsory and all the rest of it. He was very worried indeed about getting sanctioned, not least because of the tone of the call. People are certainly sanctioned for missing mandatory ESA meetings.

In the end, things were only sorted out because the unemployed workers’ group rep put in some calls and made it very clear that the appointment had been formally cancelled. There was no sanction and another date for the work-related interview was set. We attended that meeting this week. This story has made me wonder, though. How many other appointments changes made last Monday were written down on a piece of paper that subsequently went missing, was ignored, or fell off a desk, etc? I wonder what recourse people have if they think that happened to them and if the DWP has said anything about it. Doubtless this is the kind of shambles we can expect regularly once Universal Credit is up and – err, “operational”. If that ever happens.

I wonder if Rachel Reeves knows what long-term unemployment looks like.

I do. Plenty of people do.

Last Monday, I spent a long time outside the Kilburn jobcentre with a guy who said his name was Chug, or Chuck, or something like that. His speech wasn’t always clear. He mumbled a lot and clenched his jaw when he spoke. He said he was 35. He was thin and jumpy, and so pale that he was translucent. Heroin, I thought. Maybe crack. I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. I see a lot of guys with that wasted, nervy look.

Anyway, we talked for a while. And here’s the thing. My heart sank early on in the conversation, as it often does now when I talk to guys in this sort of situation. This wasn’t necessarily because the life story this guy told me was harrowing. It was a bit, but I can usually hear people out when they tell these stories. Pity isn’t really my bag. The heart-sinking bit came entirely from the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing to be done for this guy – certainly as far as drawing major attention to his problems went. As soon as I saw him, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell of raising sympathy for him outside of the usual support-group channels. I certainly couldn’t think of anyone big to take his problems to. I couldn’t imagine a senior MP backing him, or a major mainstream media outlet campaigning for him, or whatever. He ticked just about all the boxes that Reeves and other welfare hardliners have on their shared hitlist. He was Romanian by birth (he said he’d lived in the UK since he was ten), maybe ill, a long time out of work and hanging around the jobcentre asking for cash (he asked me for money. People often do). He was clearly unwell, underfed and in a mess. He wasn’t coherent a lot of the time. That’s the reality of a lot of these situations. That’s what you get.

That’s the part Rachel Reeves needs to get, too. Probably she does. Probably she has for  while. The thing is that people in the sort of situation I’ve described above already have nothing as far as political representation goes. Those of us on the ground already know that Labour doesn’t care to represent people who are out of work, or to try and explain the complexities of long-term unemployment, or to accept that everyone is entitled to social security and representation, whether people are politically palatable or not. It’s a pity, that. The world needs to know that people in these tough situations exist. They exist, no matter how firmly Reeves clamps her hands over her eyes and pretends otherwise. That’s the point I keep trying to make. People who have serious problems don’t just disappear because nobody claims them. They don’t magically vanish because Reeves or Osborne or whoever decides to draw a line through them in some ledger in Whitehall. They exist. So do basic human needs. Continue reading →

Update 17 March 2015:

Although Andy Burnham committed to a meeting with disabled people about protecting Independent Living Fund recipients when the ILF closes (he made that commitment on Saturday – you can listen to him talk about it in the video below), he’s now said he can’t meet. I realise he’s busy and that Labour has an election to fight/screw up in the coming weeks, but honest to god. Can’t a single senior Labour figure commit to keeping that fund open so that the disabled people who receive it can live. The ILF is due to close in June. If Labour is going to commit to anything to protect those people, now is the time to do it. Can we take Labour’s refusal to make that commitment as evidence that disabled people aren’t people that Labour plans to represent?

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To the Labour Spring conference in Birmingham yesterday! – where a group of Independent Living Fund recipients, Disabled People Against Cuts and me did our best to get answers from Labour worthies about the party’s plans for disabled people’s benefits and funds. The aim was to hear from various horses’ mouths what will happen if Labour forms part of whatever monster administration we end up with in a couple of months, etc.

So.

It wasn’t a bad day out if you fancied a mid-morning cake. There were croissants, piles of those great little pastries with jam and icing, and awesomely big chocolate squares laid out on oddly morgue-y concrete slabs. Answers to the funding questions were a little harder to come by. The people I tried to speak to either ran away, stamped off when compared with Tories, or said they had families to get home to. Not to worry. Plenty of time left before the election (54 days they kept saying yesterday). I think I might get along to a few more of these junkets and hustings. Even the most committed MPs and parliamentary hopefuls can’t spend 54 days legging it from the rabble.

But let’s not carp about that. Let’s go to some of yesterday’s responses. The electorate requires a few decent responses on these issues. Disabled people have taken the brunt of austerity cuts. I personally feel that Labour needs now to be offering something a bit more substantial than “That’s Sad,” or “How Awful” (heard both yesterday) on the topic of this government’s disability funding slaughter. A rigorous commitment to social security from a party that ought to see the point of it would be nice.

We had two questions for MPs:

1) Would Labour scrap the hated and dangerous Work Capability Assessment for Employment and Support Allowance?

2) Would Labour change its mind and keep the Independent Living Fund (ILF) open – the ILF being an all-important fund that profoundly disabled people use to pay for the extra care hours that they need to live independent lives? The current government plans to close the fund by the end of June this year.

You’d expect a reasonably straightforward set of responses, given that the answer to both questions ought to be a resounding Yes. Unfortunately, things weren’t quite as simple as that, as you’ll see.

Out of the blocks (literally) in the video below was Yvette Cooper. I asked her for her views on the WCA and whether Labour would scrap it. She said to talk to Rachel Reeves, because she, Yvette, was in hurry for her next meeting. To be fair, this may have been true, although I noted that she went from walking to her next meeting to sprinting for it very fast when I tried to talk to her. I was asking “Will Labour get rid of it [the WCA]?” as she went. Not a lot of joy there as you’ll see:

Transcript for video (pdf)

No luck finding Rachel Reeves back at base, either. But not to worry, as I say. Am already on the search for a next time.

Onto Andy Burnham next. The great man was in the NHS corner in the top assembly room. In the video below, he speaks with DPAC’s Linda Burnip about the fast-approaching closure of the Independent Living Fund.

Burnham agreed that the profoundly disabled people who rely on the ILF needed protection when/if the funds closes. Which they do, to say the very least. Without the ILF to pay for the extra care hours they require, those disabled people will either be pushed into care facilities, or left at home to try and get by with dangerously low levels of care. It is no exaggeration to say that many won’t get by. The big problem now, of course, is that the ILF is due to close in a matter of months. It’s very late in the day for politicians to be wafting on in a non-specific way about protections for people whose lives will depend on those protections. As DPAC says in the video, Burnham’s integrated health and social care plan is still a long way off. There are also those of us who feel that in a general sense, Labour council attempts to protect social care budgets and facilities in the past five years have been beyond woeful, so putting further hope in widespread protection for disabled people could be a bit – hopeless. Burnham did commit to a meeting with DPAC and Inclusion London about the ILF/these “protections”, so I very much look forward to that:

Transcript for video (pdf)

Next up – I spoke with Liam Byrne about the Work Capability Assessment. God only knows why I decided to do this to myself. I’m starting to think that I may need to re-nose this aspect of my approach. Quite a lot of my life has already been wasted on conversations with fading worthies. You can actually hear my will to live leaving me via my voice in this one. Needless to say, Byrne thought that outsourcing assessments for disability benefits was still a good idea, despite the Atos experiment ending up as a pile of turds. One thing I will say for modern politicians – once they’ve chosen a disastrous ideology, they stick with it. They don’t flail through life looking for new ways to fail like the rest of us. I raised the ILF with Byrne, but didn’t get anything there, because he had to go and talk to some (possibly more important) blokes and also remembered he had to get home to the family:

Transcript for video (pdf)

What next. Oh yes. There was a “conversation” with Angela Eagle near the start where one of our number made a comment about Labour’s approach to WCA not being far removed from the Tories’. She apparently got all upset about that and left because she was a) genuinely angry or b) quietly delighted because she felt that the Tory comparison gave her an excuse (it didn’t) to leave, and on her high horse. Her Spad person told us to “send an email” as Angela marched off. I think I’ve got an audio from that one, but might go for a drink before subjecting us all to it. Definitely let me know if you’ve got hustings coming up in your area, though. Am right up for more of these face-to-face chats.