Utter chaos last night as Ealing’s overview and scrutiny committee considered the cabinet’s 22 January decision to close two important services for people with learning difficulties – the Learning Curve training-to-employment service and the Stirling Road daycentre. I haven’t seen such a shambles for a while, which is saying something in this cuts environment.
There was outrage as the chair tried to restrict a presentation by speakers from the Power Group – a group made up of people with learning difficulties who the council is specifically supposed to negotiate with – to three minutes. (By startling contrast, the chair later told members of the public off for not giving director of adult services Stephen Day adequate chance to speak when he was rattling on about the “savings” these closures will purportedly achieve).
In the end, people from the Power Group got five minutes or so to state their concerns about the closures and the shoddy manner in which they’d been “consulted” about the council’s plans, before they were hurried off stage. That was as repulsive as anything I’ve seen. Everyone should be entitled to speak and if people need a bit longer, they should get that. Everyone who has something to say should have the chance to say it.
People were trying to say that they didn’t approve of the closure decision, didn’t feel they’d been given anything like enough time to consider it (“we were told about it, but we weren’t told about it until it was too late” said one speaker), were worried about the overwhelmingly negative response to the closures from people who use the services and their families, and felt the council had often failed to provide the large-print and illustrated explanatory literature that some people require. They should have been given an hour to speak if they’d wanted it. That would certainly have beat hearing from Stephen Day ad infinitum. The whole thing was an absolute wreck.
Unions revealed that people at Learning Curve and Stirling Road and their families had been given even less notice and time to consider the closures than staff – about 25 days, it was said. There were gasps as it became clear that the council had yet to formally needs-assess people who attended Learning Curve to confirm the personal budgets they’ll be entitled to – and horror as speakers confirmed that up to 100 people who attend Learning Curve won’t be entitled to paid support or services at all.
As I note in the post below this update, the council claims in cabinet papers that after closure, it will “provide individual budgets for all eligible customers. People will be able to choose either a council-managed or cash-budget option and will be offered professional guidance and advice to develop their support plans, and arrange their services.” The very big problem with this is that a lot of people won’t meet the council’s criteria for “eligible customers.” According to the council’s own cabinet reports (page 3, point 2.6.5), at least 96 of the 144 people at Learning Curve won’t be eligible. Some live out of the borough and will need to apply to their own local boroughs for support. Others who live in the borough won’t be eligible, because their needs won’t be considered serious enough. This is crucial. Many people who attend Learning Curve have, or will be, placed in the Moderate or Low needs categories when the council assesses them against Fair Access to Care criteria – the standards councils use to determine eligibility for funding for care and support services. Ealing council – like so many others in this harsh funding environment – no longer funds people in the Moderate or Low needs bands.
Council officers said they could push through all assessments by about the middle of year. A disability assessments officer stood up to say that was rubbish – that the assessment process was too complex and extensive for that and that she knew at least one person who’d been waiting for an assessment for two years. Some expert or other was trucked out to inform everyone that the days of “institutional”-type facilities like daycentres were behind us. This is the usual “this isn’t a cut – it’s an advance in social ideology” line that councils inevitably try and run at these things. It’s generally rubbish.
For one thing, as one parent whose son has completed two computer-skills certificates there said, Learning Curve is a training-to-work service – it aims to help people acquire skills that will lead to employment. She was very sure that Learning Curve was not an “institution.” She saw it as the service that might just help her 28-year-old son into a job, which is something she desperately wants for him.
For another thing, not everyone will be entitled to the personal budgets that the council keeps trying to assure everyone will release people from “institutions” like daycentres and allow them to “purchase” replacement services. Saying that these cuts are all about embracing the future is disingenous in the extreme. People won’t be “freed” from an “institution” when Learning Curve closes. They’ll be left standing on the side of the road with stuff-all. As we’ve already seen, by the council’s own admission, at least 96 of the 144 people at Learning Curve won’t be eligible for financial support. There was also a great deal of debate about the purchasing power of personal budgets – I’ll be posting more on this, but it was said last night that personal budgets weren’t substantial enough to allow people to buy equivalent services from the private and third sectors.
So. It was rowdy, it was angry and it was a complete bloody shambles. Council leader Julian Bell turned up to say a few words (largely some cowardly rot about having delegated responsibility for the closure to officers) and was given very short shrift. His “central government cuts are forcing our hand” line went down like a cup of the cold proverbial. As well it might. People are sick of it.
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Update Wedneday 23 January: in front of a full gallery last night and with a lot of verbal handwringing, if you can have such a thing – “it’s with a heavy heart that we make this decision,” etc – the cabinet voted for the closures. People who use the centres and their families were furious. The decision now goes to Overview and Scrutiny in February. I spoke to the chair of that committee briefly after last night’s meeting and he seemed worried. Parents are complaining about the council’s consultation processes with people with learning difficulties – they feel the consultation was rushed, not adequately geared towards people with learning difficulties and that feedback from representative groups was ignored. More on this soon.
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Original post:
This is the first in a series of posts I’m planning on Ealing council’s plans to close a training organisation and a daycentre for people with learning disabilities. The aim is to broaden this out into wider reporting about the consulting and treatment of people with learning disabilities as further council cuts are made and as the government continues with the ESA work capability assessment and brings in the overall benefit cap, the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, DLA to PIP testing and universal credit. In the past few months, a number of people with learning disabilities and parents and carers have been in touch to talk about their growing concerns.
On Tuesday 22 January (see meeting item 7 here), Ealing council’s cabinet is due to make a decision that will radically affect the lives of a group of adults with learning disabilities, and their families and carers.
Learning Curve is, in the council’s definition – “a fully accredited training centre, which provides training in basic skills, preparation for work, job seeking skills, office practice and retail and information technology… it also supports disabled adults in work and can help find work experience placements…its aim is to help people obtain the skills needed to get into work.“
Stirling Road “provides a wide range of services… sport and leisure, health promotion, community based projects, work-based training and travel assistance. The service is provided to promote and support people to become more independent and access their community through community-based projects.”
It won’t for much longer, though – unless people can kick up enough rough to stall the juggernaut.
“There’s nothing else like it. I didn’t have to explain anything to them – the staff understood his needs,” said the mother of a young man who has earned computer skills certificates at Learning Curve and wants to work towards paid employment if he can find it (I’ll be posting more interviews and feedback from people involved as things unfold).
On 15 and 16 January 2013, the Upper Tribunal is due to hear a claim for judicial review brought by two disabled people supported by the Mental Health Resistance Network. They are arguing that the Work Capability Assessment discriminates against people with impaired mental, cognitive and intellectual functions (called “people with mental health disabilities” for short), and that the DWP should make adjustments to the Work Capability Assessment process to minimise the disadvantages that people with mental health disabilities face in being assessed for ESA.
The reason that the ESA process discriminates against people with mental health disabilities is that the process requires ESA applicants to self-report how their ability to work is affected by their disability. While this is challenging enough for many people with physical disabilities, it can be a distressing, and sometimes an impossible task for many people with mental health disabilities. This is because some people with mental health disabilities do not always have insight into their condition, and others may find it difficult to articulate the effect of their disability on their fitness to work for reasons of shame or otherwise. Continue reading →
This is the third article from my series of interviews with people around the country who are affected by this appalling government’s social security cuts. This report is from the northeast and incorporates interviews from June to December 2012. There’s a second article with more interviews to follow.
The interviews are with people who are dealing with a range of issues – employment and support allowance work capability assessments, the bedroom tax and so on. Most of the people interviewed for this article have mental health illnesses. There’s also an interview with a woman who is severely disabled with rheumatoid arthritis and who depends on the soon-to-be closed (the government has just announced this) Independent Living Fund. Mostly, I’ve chosen to interview people who are not in work, or who have been in and out of work throughout their lives – the people who both the Tories and Labour like us to think of as the shirking, non-striving, undeserving poor. You’ll see that things are not quite as simple as all that.
The names of people going through Atos work capability assessments have been withheld and marked *.
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The realities of Atos, work capability assessments and being thrown off employment and support allowance for people with mental health illnesses:
I am no expert and that is for certain, but there are a few things that I can say for fact. One is that we’d probably know by now if isolating people, throwing them off their meagre benefits and threatening them with homelessness and destitution cured mental health problems.
I’ve yet to see that miracle performed and I’m not the only one who thinks that we’ll be a long while waiting for it.
In the video below (from a Hardest Hit meeting in Newcastle in June 2012), for example, is chief executive of the Mental Health Northeast consortium (MHNE) Lyn Boyd outlining the dire realities of the phonecalls and feedback about social security cuts, employment and support allowance applications and Atos work capability assessments that MHNE has dealt with in recent times.
“A lot of our member groups [MHNE has over 300] were getting in touch with us and saying that they were really concerned about the people that they were working with and the impact that work capability assessments were having,” Lyn Boyd told that Hardest Hit meeting. “Individuals who didn’t belong to any organisation were getting in touch with us in very distressed states – not knowing where to turn or where to go for help.”
The threat (and reality, for some) of losing vital benefits and fears of not being believed in assessment were pushing people to dangerous places. A 2012 MHNE survey showed, among other things, that clients feel like ending their lives as they felt unable to cope with the stress of appealing [Atos] decisions [to find them fit for work]. “I have one lady,” Boyd said, “who was engaging in some voluntary activity. This person was doing extremely well and would probably have been fit for work and looking for work…but the assessment has made that person actually suicidal and now they’re needing more support than ever.”
Anecdotal evidence of long queues for help is not hard to find: “The community mental health team is overwhelmed…I’ve had to fight for what I’ve got so far, even when I’ve had a relapse and the police have been called and things like that,” Steve, 54, tells me in an interview below. (In my last article, just as a comparison I talked to a group of men in Weymouth who were on a nightmare roundabout of joblessness, ESA and jobseekers’ applications, compulsory job club attendances, homelessness and breakdown – one said he’d been so stressed by unemployment and homelessness that he’d gone into the local council and asked for a lethal injection).
MHNE staff remain so concerned about the feedback that they are getting about effects of Atos work capability assessments on people with mental health problems that they’re now running a second survey to collect more information about people’s experiences of the employment and support allowance application process in the northeast as cuts deepen.
Even the courts understand that this picture needs a long look. Next week, a case begins which, if won, will put the onus on the DWP to make sure medical evidence from practitioners is sourced from the start of the ESA application process for people who have mental health problems. “It may be,” as the Public Law Project’s Ravi Low-Beer told me for this New Statesman article, “that conditions fluctuate in seriousness, or [people] cannot easily talk about their disability” – which means people can be found fit for work and then pushed into a notoriously stressful appeals process.
And so you have it – support for people with mental health problems in the millennium. History will not rate us highly for it.
In the meantime, you get this:
Steve*, 54, Newcastle.
Just outside of Newcastle, I attend, as a friend, an Atos work capability assessment with Steve, a man in his mid-50s who I have known and been regularly in touch with for about a year.
Steve was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was 18.
We meet for his WCA appointment at the sprawling concrete business park in which his local Atos assessment centre is housed. The building isn’t as tawdry and hard-to-access as some, although it hardly screams High-End Medical Centre. Harley Street it is not. There’s a reception window, a large, slightly shabby waiting-room filled with chairs and a couple of public toilets at the back.
Such is outsourced medical assessment for disability benefits in the millennium. The message is pretty clear the minute you enter one of these buildings. You may have multiple sclerosis, or arthritis, or cancer, or schizophrenia, or depression, but government is not inclined to stand on ceremony for you. As far as government is concerned, you are a number. You are here to join the back of the queue from the arse-end of the pile.
Steve knows all of this too well. He is a still, observant sort of character: shy, political, mature and affable and easy to talk to once he’s comfortable. He has been on a difficult road – in and out of care and outpatient clinics, part-time jobs, training, voluntary work, phases on benefits – for more than 30 years. He could do without the Tories making his final stretch the hardest, with their incessant blathering about “scroungers” and hardline view that anyone on social security is dross by definition.
“I tell people that I’m a member of society, but I feel on the fringes of it, as if I’m an outlaw.”
Steve has been taking the antipsychotic drug Sulpiride since he was diagnosed. He feels that the decades of medication have worn and slowed him down. He also suffers from severe depression. He says that some days, the drug-fog and depression mean that he struggles to get out of bed – not because he’s tucked up in bed behind “closed blinds, sleeping a life off on benefits,”, as George Osborne would fondly imagine, but because “I hallucinate [especially at night]…I see things like giant squid and things like that…I think I’m being eaten alive. The Sulpiride I take – it’s got quite bad side effects in that my limbs shake every night when I go to bed and keep me up half the night.”
Steve often says that he’d like a job (at the moment, he’s working as a volunteer at a mental health support charity), but he doubts that he’ll be chosen for one, especially in Newcastle as things stand. Unemployment rates in the northeast are among the country’s highest and: “I’m in my 50s. [There are] huge great holes in my CV which have been covered by little bits of volunteering. I’ve either worked part-time, or gone into full-time education, or been on training schemes, or been on the welfare state. The labelling [as someone with schizophrenia] stigmatises and discriminates against you in the minds of employers….as soon as they see your mental health history, you’re out.” Already – “the job centre treats you like something they found on their shoe.”
Not surprisingly, his most productive (to use a word our output-obsessed, striver-fixated political class would applaud) years were the ones when he received the most help.
The first of these constructive stages took place when he worked for his father after his schizophrenia diagnoses and early hospital admissions. “When I first got out of hospital, when I was 18, I was given a job by my dad, so that he could look after me day to day and see how I was doing.” The second good run came when he studied for an ecology degree at a university which offered him counselling. “The university, thank god, picked me up through student services and gave me counselling every week and gave me help to write essays. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have got my degree.”
Perhaps needless to say, things began to fall away as the support did. “I’ve rarely seen psychiatrists since 2004. It was a succession of different psychiatrists who just wanted to go back into the past – what medication I was on and so on.” Now, he says,, the local community mental health team is stretched to its limits and Steve’s behaviour is not viewed, he thinks, as serious enough for priority attention.
“The community mental health team is overwhelmed…I’m not as ill as others, I acknowledge that, but I do think that I need some help and I get very little. I’ve had to fight for what I’ve got so far, even when I’ve had a relapse and the police have been called.”
All he needs, he says, is “to see someone to talk to on a regular basis, just for motivation and reassurance. And to be able to have enough a personal budget to employ someone like a gardener and a cleaner, because I’m conscious of the fact that the neighbours have done most of the garden and I find mowing the lawn very hard – not just physically, but mentally – getting round to it and doing it. I’d also like a psychiatrist just sort of in the background in case things get worse.”
He’s been dreading his WCA. He knows the descriptors that Atos will use to judge his fitness for work and is concerned that they won’t cover the real impacts of his schizophrenia and depression.
So it proves.
The assessment is perfunctory. The room is small and forgettable – it’s bare, except for a desk, a computer, few mismatched chairs and, behind the chairs, a plain gurney. Steve and I sit in two chairs on one side of the desk. The assessor – a friendly-enough individual – sits behind the computer and directs a range of questions to Steve: “Did you get a lift here, or did you come on the train? (On the train). Tell me a bit about how you manage, getting up and dressed in the morning.” The assessor asks Steve to touch the tips of each of his fingers to his thumb. Then, he’s asked to lie on the gurney and to raise one leg and then the other. The whole test takes about 40 minutes.
It’s the vapidness of these tests that is their most striking feature. They are a snapshot of a person’s ability, on that day, to “behave” well enough and to perform basic tasks which an employer might – might – pay someone a small salary for. There’s almost nothing of the wider picture here – certainly little of the fluctuating nature of Steve’s mental health. Steve’s schizophrenia, his terrible depression, his hallucinations, his problems with sleeping, his patterns, his illnesses’ slow grinding down of him over the decades, his struggle to function and to keep his home clean without professional help – these truths are not priorities. Some days, he can cope with change, get about and cope with social engagement. Some days, he can’t.
He receives his final report several weeks later. He is awarded no points in his assessment and is told to apply for jobseekers’ allowance. He says that he plans to appeal.
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Paul *, 55, Newcastle
Paul is thin, greying, chatty and, sometimes, a little jittery. The first time we meet, we sit for an hour or so in a small room in an old hospital building in Newcastle. Rain creeps down the windows and neither of us is looking forward to the moment when we must leave the warm building. So, we stretch out the chat.
Paul has brought a lot of paperwork and bags with him – he’s carrying folders, boxes crammed with papers and a couple of old Tesco shopping bags that are filled with plastic takeaway boxes.
We start by talking in a general way about housing (he lives in a council flat), benefits and his fears about the employment and support allowance application form that he expects to receive (the “brown envelope of death,” he calls it). Then, Paul says that he has something to show me.
He pulls an old notebook and a several crumpled photographs out of one of the folders, and passes them to me. The photos show the Tyne and Wear Bridge. A series of small crosses have been penned in black ink here and there on the photos.
Paul points to the crosses. “These show the places where people have jumped off the bridge,” he explains. “Here, here and here. That’s what is happening today.” He says that he has written the dates and times people when have jumped from the bridge in his notebook. “This is where I’m going, too,” he says. “I’ve had kids round the back of my house, hassling me and they destroyed my garden. I have been very psychotic for last few weeks.”
He says that he’s saved up several thousand Gabapentin and other pills to kill himself with. He opens one of the old Tesco shopping bags to show me the stash. It’s impressive. The plastic containers in the bags are crammed to bursting with huge yellow and white pills. Paul also brings out two enormous blister packs that are filled with tablets. He says that he’s getting all these on repeat prescription. The fact that he has this pile at all is the striking point. I have no idea if he will or won’t kill himself, but he’s certainly ready to if he decides to. At the very least, it’s clear that he hasn’t taken this medication for quite a while.
I think about this a month or two later when Iain Duncan Smith, via the ever-discerning Mail, blathers on again about punishing benefit claimants who use drugs and alcohol. Paul isn’t in that category, but cynic in me can picture IDS devising one for him. When the great day comes and the DWP starts testing buckets of piss each morning for evidence of claimant substance use or whatever it is they’ll be doing, I can just imagine that them hauling out a strip of modified litmus to catch out people who are supposed to be on drugs, but aren’t.
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Steve
A few days after he decides to appeal the Atos decision to find him fit for work, Steve, the Newcastle man who has schizophrenia, calls. He’s riled, all right. He’s just been told by a receptionist at his local surgery that his doctor will not write him a sick note (now called a fit note), because Atos found him fit for work. The sick note would sign him off “work” (that is, declare him unfit for work) while he waits for his appeal to be heard and would mean he is eligible for some ESA payment during that time. Without the note, he’s fit for work and not eligible for ESA.
He emails:
“This is an email to confirm that a receptionist at my GPs’ surgery phoned me to say that the doctor had refused to sign any more ESA sicknotes as the DWP, on the basis of an Atos report, had found me fit for work. I was claiming I needed a sicknote on the basis of a chronic psychotic illness – namely schizophrenia, which other GPs were happy to sign before the Atos report. I have not yet seen the disability forum or the local jobcentre on this issue yet as I’m still reeling from the fact that I’ll get no more benefit after today. Please help!”
Steve’s pretty stressed, as anyone would be. He thinks his money is about to be stopped and he has bills to pay. It’s a total shambles. Fortunately, he’s able to get help from the charity he volunteers with. Calls are made and a welfare advisor agrees that Steve is eligible for a fit note and a partial ESA payment, because he’s appealing Atos’ original “fit for work” decision. Steve’s surgery is contacted and a doctor agrees to write the fit note.
The mess takes several days to fix and Steve’s depression, insomnia and night terrors are not helped by it. “They want to punish you [for being on benefits] and get you any way they can,” he says. So much, too, for George Osborne’s imaginary shirkers closing their blinds and sleeping off a life on benefits. In your bloody dreams, George. Most of the people I speak to, like Steve, spend their lives with their hearts in their mouths and wondering who’ll be after their tiny income next. They don’t get much sleep at all.
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This is a little story about the efforts a small group of us have made to try and get a meeting with Atos mental function champions:
“The short training course in mental health that Atos assessors receive is proving nowhere near adequate to allow them to accurately assess applicants,” MIND was quoted as saying in the review.
Harrington recommended that Atos provide mental, intellectual and cognitive champions in each medical assessment centre, to “spread best practice amongst Atos healthcare professionals in mental, intellectual and cognitive disabilities.”
Fast-forward, then, to November 5 2012, when Mark Hoban, the minister of state for work and pensions, made this rather dazzling announcement:
That’s AMAZING (as in surprising) news, said MHNE’s Lyn Boyd and Kathryne Wray and Alisdair Cameron from Newcastle mental health user-led support group Launchpad when we spoke about it. A mental function champion – a trained person to give support and advice on complex issues as per Harrington’s recommendations – in every assessment centre in the country?
It sounded too good to be true.
And it was.
“There is not a champion in each Atos assessment centre,” the DWP said when I emailed to find out more. “Instead, there are regional champions, with all [Atos] healthcare professionals having access to a telephone advice line where they can access advice from a champion.”
Talk to Atos if you want to know more, the DWP said.
Boyd, Wray, Cameron and I decided that we did want to know more. As we’ve already discussed, they’d long been concerned about the effects of work capability assessments on people with mental health illnesses. They wanted to know how mental function champions worked for those ESA claimants.
So, we contacted Atos and asked to meet with northeast champions to talk about their work. I emailed Atos’ PR manager. She asked for names and questions, which I sent. She didn’t respond, so I sent another email. She didn’t respond to that, so I called her just before Christmas. I couldn’t meet a champion, she said, because I was a journalist, but she would arrange for someone (a “stakeholder liaison officer”) to contact the others.
We’ll keep you posted on that one and see how things unfold. I’ve posted Atos’ response to questions about the role of mental function champions here.
NB: for the record – if Atos does allow MHNE and Launchpad a visit with mental function champions, Boyd, Wray and Cameron want to make clear that they would not consider any such visit a consultation of any kind, or a condoning of the process. They want simply to find out more about the work that these champions do, so that they can report back to their members.
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Michael*, 43
Back in meeting-rooms in Newcastle, I spend an afternoon talking with Steve and a man called Michael. Michael is 43 and is on incapacity benefit and disability living allowance. He has borderline personality disorder, severe depression and anxiety and panic attacks.
It seems unlikely that those problems can be bullied away by a punitive government threatening work capability assessments, benefit sanctions and a bedroom tax. One of the reasons I say that is Michael feels that bullying caused a lot of his problems in the first place. Michael comes from the sort of background that the Tories would have us believe everyone can rise to: family violence as a child growing up on Gateshead’s Springwell estate, gang aggression, a young adulthood spent in youth training schemes and so on. Like Steve, he’s been on a hard road for much of his life and like Steve, he feels this government has made it a lot harder.
“I know that this is going to come across really strong, but I think that it’s a social cleansing what they are doing, with the likes of us on benefits,” he says as we talk. “If this was happening in Kosovo, there would be uproar.”
Right now, Michael is concerned about the bedroom tax. He lives alone in a council flat and has a spare room that he may have to pay for. The irony is that he was moved to the flat by his local council in the first place. He was shifted to a new part of town when local gang members found out that he’d he reported their violent behaviour – it wasn’t safe for him to stay after that. “Every time I was going out, I was getting gangs of kids from 15 to 18, effing and blinding and wanting to do us in. When my brother came across one time, they came and attacked him and the double gate and they picked up half of it and put it through the window. That’s how I got moved from where I was.”
His worry now is that he’ll be hounded out of his flat and neighbourhood again – not, this time, by gangsters wielding busted double gates, but by Iain Duncan Smith brandishing the bedroom tax regulations. He wants to stay where he is. “My doctor is there [where he lives]. They know me history. I’m settled there.”
He doubts he’ll work again. Who would employ him and how?
“When you put your [job] application form in, you must declare everything,” Michael says. “If you don’t and they find out that you have got a mental health illness, they can give you your cards.”
“That’s why I always declare it and don’t get interviews for that reason,” Steve says. “You can’t really grasp that there’s hardly anything out there and if you admit to a health problem, you’re basically automatically classed as different anyway and not worthy of things.”
“All I’ve known for the past 30 [sic] years is benefits,” Michael says. “If I was to go to a job now, it would kill us, because I would be frightened. [You need something to help] ease you in.”
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This next section is about the government’s plans to close the Independent Living Fund. The fund was set up to help people with severe disabilities. I’ll be writing more on this:
The ILF was set up to pay for extra care for people with severe disabilities so that they could continue to live independently. Laver was one of the people to benefit from the fund.
She developed rheumatoid arthritis more than 25 years ago and now relies entirely on carers to wash, feed and clothe her and get her to the toilet. She says that the ILF pays for about 46 of her carer hours a week. Her local council covers an couple of hours or so a day. Without the care hours that are funded by the ILF, she’d be left in an appalling state: to “sit at my home with only two breaks on my bed to enable me to be washed as I will be wet from having no midmorning and afternoon call.”
The ILF was closed to new applicants in 2010. In 2012, the government ran a “consultation” to decide whether to keep the fund for existing users. It decided not to. The plan is to devolve funding to local councils by 2015. It will not be ringfenced. Laver tells me that she has thought of suicide since that news came in.
“In terms of independent living this is the single most regressive action that the Condems could have taken,” DPAC’s Linda Burnip emails to say.
“All disabled people, including those transferring from the ILF, will continue to be protected by a local authority safety net that guarantees disabled people get the support they need,” the DWP purrs on its website. I also have a pained phone conversation with a DWP press officer who insists on the same – that the money and care will continue when devolved.
“The government’s employment strategy lies in tatters after judges declared that almost all work-for-your-benefit schemes were unlawful due to a lack of basic information given to the unemployed.
A three-judge panel at the royal courts of justice ruled that the secretary of state for work and pensions had acted unlawfully by not giving the unemployed enough information about the penalties they faced and their rights to appeal against being made to work unpaid for in some case hundreds of hours.”
Update Friday 21 December – timeframe re: judgement: spoke to Public Interest Lawyers this morning and they said that the judgement has been reserved and is expected in the New Year – they hope by February. That is an estimate for now. Will update with more information as it is made available.
“On 19 December 2012, Cait Reilly and Jamie Wilson will ask the Court of Appeal to reverse the earlier decision of the High Court and quash the Regulations(1) under which the Government has made many of its “back to work” schemes.
The Court will also hear a cross-appeal by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions who is seeking to overturn the High Court’s decision that stripping our client of his benefits for six months was unlawful because the DWP failed, as required by law, to provide information to him about the consequences of not participating in the scheme. Iain Duncan Smith knows that if he is not successful in the cross-appeal, then tens of thousands of other jobseekers who have had their benefits stripped by his department will also be able to seek repayment.
We represent two clients who have been subject to very different schemes:
Cait Reilly – the sector based work activity scheme
In November 2011, Cait was forced to leave her voluntary work at a local museum and work unpaid at a branch of Poundland. She was told that if she didn’t carry out the work placement she would lose her Jobseekers Allowance. For two weeks, she was made to stack shelves and clean floors. Poundland got free labour whilst she gained nothing and received no training. She was not given a job interview at the end of the two weeks and the museum where she volunteered was left short staffed.
Jamie Wilson – the Community Action Progamme
In November 2011, Jamie, a qualified mechanic, was told that he had to work unpaid, cleaning furniture for 30 hours a week for six months under a scheme known as the Community Action Programme. Whilst he desperately wanted to find a job, he objected to doing unpaid work that was completely unrelated to his qualifications and would not help him re-enter the job market. He refused to participate and as a result was stripped of his Jobseekers Allowance for six months.
On behalf of our clients, Public Interest Lawyers will argue that:
The Regulations fail to provide any description of the schemes to which people like our client can be subjected. This is contrary to statute;
The Government has failed to publish any policies setting out the limits of the schemes;
The schemes are contrary to the prohibition on forced labour under Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights; and
The six month sanction imposed on Jamie Wilson was unlawful as Jamie had not, as is required by law, been provided with basic information related to the consequences of failing to participate and/or what he could be asked to do under the scheme.
The hearing will begin at 10:30 am, Wednesday 19 December, in Court Room 63, Royal Courts of Justice, the Strand, London.
Cait Reilly states:
“I hope that the court will uphold our appeal. It is time that these “back to work” schemes were scrapped. They do not help ease unemployment – they cause more by taking away paid jobs. The government is subsidising free labour for high street stores and profit making corporations.”
“Inventing ad hoc policy and failing to make information publicly available is causing chaos and misery for tens of thousands of claimants. We are regularly contacted by people who have been wrongly forced onto workfare schemes or else risk losing their subsistence benefits. The government has seriously failed in its duty to inform claimants of their rights. We hope that human rights will be upheld for the millions of claimants who face the threat of workfare.”
Tessa Gregory, solicitor, Public Interest Lawyers, added:
“Our clients are bringing this appeal not only for themselves but also for the thousands of others who are being bullied into unpaid work. We maintain that the regulations themselves are unlawful and ought to be quashed. It must be time for Iain Duncan Smith to go back to the drawing board, when figures show that less than 3.5% of those referred to such schemes actually get long term work.””
Ever since disabled man Geoff Meeghan was trapped in an Atos assessment centre a week or so ago when a fire alarm went off at the centre there’s been much discussion about the accessibility – or otherwise – of the buildings that Atos is using to hold work capability assessments for the employment and support allowance. ESA is a disability allowance, so it follows that a lot of people who must attend work capability assessments are wheelchair users and/or people who have mobility problems. You’d think that at the very least, buildings would be properly adapted to make entering and leaving those buildings as easy as possible for everyone.
Au contraire.
I took the video below in September when I accompanied DPAC campaigner Patrick Lynch and his carer Stephen to the assessment centre in Archway where Patrick’s WCA was to be held. I’ve uploaded it here to give you an idea of the rubbish which passes for accessibility in some of these centres.
As you’ll see in the video, the front doors at the centre wouldn’t open. A woman who was smoking a cigarette out the front came over to show us how to open the doors – she pulled them open with her bare hands. The “lift” was a single platform squeezed into the right-hand side of the groundfloor entrance. To call the lift, we had to hold the call button down and keep it held down. The door into the cupboard (which it was, literally) which housed this platform opened outwards, into the path of the wheelchair. Once inside, the platform only started moving when the call button was held down. It certainly took more than one person to operate everything.
I don’t know what would have happened if there had been a fire. Using this lift for escape purposes would have been challenging, all right, especially if you tried to fit more than one wheelchair in it. There may have been a brilliant, if not brilliantly obvious, escape route out back, of course, but if there was, nobody told us about it. Would we have had to find it ourselves?
“As reported in the year two review, mental function champions have been introduced at a regional level, rather than in each assessment centre as was originally recommended. Given scarce resources, the review supported this approach… Some representative groups claim that awareness of the champions is low, and that those who are aware of them believe they have little or no impact on the quality of mental function assessments. The review asked Atos to report on the effectiveness of their mental health champions. They said that their healthcare professionals found the champions to be ‘a great resource’ and that they were of ’great use to put any uncertainties into perspective’.”
Well.
A couple of weeks ago, on November 5, Mark Hoban said this about mental health champions:
That line caused some excitement among some of the people I know who have mental health illnesses and are employment and support allowance claimants, and among people I’m in contact with who support people with mental health problems through Atos work capability assessments.
Indeed, a number of these people were so taken with Hoban’s remarks that they sent them to me and asked if I could find out if there was indeed a mental health champion in every single assessment centre in the country.
So, I wrote to the DWP to ask them what Hoban meant when he said that a mental health champion had been introduced into every single assessment centre in the country.
It turned out that he did not mean there was a champion in each assessment centre. He meant that regional champions had been appointed and that they operated a sort of phone advice line.
The DWP told me:
“There is not a champion in each Atos assessment centre. Instead, there are regional champions, with all healthcare professionals having access to a telephone advice line where they can access advice from a champion.”
The department went on to say that:
“A full complement of 60 mental function champions has been in place since the end of July 2011, following a recommendation by Professor Harrington.
“The role of mental function champions is not to interact directly with claimants. Instead, their main functions are to provide advice and support to Atos HCPs (either face to face or via the helpline), spread best practise [sic], and build links with appropriate stakeholders in their area.”
The department also said that:
“All Atos healthcare professionals receive specific and additional training in assessing mental health conditions.
“We are currently working with a number of specialist disability representative groups to improve the initial questionnaire that is sent to claimants.
“We are also working closely with a range of disability organisations to develop an ‘evidence-based review’ of the descriptors used in the WCA in order to make the WCA fairer and more accurate. This is in response to changes proposed by organisations representing both mental health and fluctuating conditions, following Professor Harrington’s second report.”
Needless to say, the mental health support professionals who’d brought Hoban’s “we have introduced a mental health champion in every single assessment centre throughout the country,” statement to my attention were disappointed to hear that what he meant was that there were a few people in each region (the numbers are here) and a phone number for Atos HCPs to ring. (Hoban did mention the phone line in an October statement. but his November remarks got people excited. “We have introduced a mental health champion in every single assessment centre throughout the country,” led people to conclude – not unreasonably – that a mental health champion had been introduced in every assessment centre throughout the country.
I went back to the department for more – to ask if the department could say what training the champions went through, if the champions are already trained health professionals (for example, doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists and so on) and how many there are in each region (as I say, those numbers are already in the public domain, but I’m always keen to see if everyone’s match).
These are the latest excerpts from recorded interviews I’m publishing as I talk to people around the country who are dealing with fallout from public sector cuts, welfare reform and the recession. These transcripts are from interviews with actors, singers and writers at Shoot Your Mouth Off films – a filmmaking project in Hartlepool for people with learning disabilities.
In the transcripts, people talk about their work as actors, singers and writers.
The people who spoke for the interviews were David Miller, Carole Gill, David Lodge, Daniel Judge, Liz Yeats, Graeme Booth and Wendy Elsley.
People here are dealing with many issues: Karen Sheader, the disability rights activist who set SYMO up, says, for example, that two people in the group are worried that they will be affected by the proposed bedroom tax. The two people live by themselves in two-bedroom flats and are concerned that they will either have to move to one-bedroom flats (if they’re available) or lose part of their benefits. There’s a lot of confusion and worry:
“It does make you wonder where they think people are going to to get the money from, especially those people who are already on benefits. There are a couple of people in our group who live in two bedroom flats who were allocated the flats by the local authority who are now being told that they might have to be moved to a one bedroom flat because of the changes to housing benefit.
“Peter (one of the people who is in a two-bedroom flat) came in (one day) with a letter and he didn’t understand it, because he can’t read. It was about his council tax benefit and his housing benefit and he was panicking. When he got this letter, I rang [the council officer] and she offered to see Peter to reassure him. She was saying this is not going to happen in the immediate future – this (the letter) was just saying that it might happen at some point in the future.”
Some people in the group are on benefits, while others work in other jobs, too: Wendy Elsley and Graeme Booth, for example, both work part-time at Asda.
I’ll be posting more on this soon. In the meantime, here are some thoughts from people involved in Shoot Your Mouth Off films. Videos to follow.
Graeme Booth “I’ve got to work two days a week (at Asda), so I’m here on a Monday now. I swapped days over, so I could come back and make films. The best film I’ve done is Dr Why with Wendy. It was just a Dr Who spoof, really. We did it all in front of a green screen. [In the end], I got done in by a big plastic dinosaur.”
David Miller
“I’ve been at Shoot Your Mouth Off films from the start, for five years. When we first came, there were no tables, no chairs – just boxes to sit on. Some of us have got bands in it as well. I’ve got a band called Friends Forever and my friend Daniel Judge over there, he does rapping. He’s going solo now as well. Hope Springs [a soap] is the film I enjoyed the most. The other one I love is called Maniac Mum. It’ll be done for the Christmas show.
Daniel Judge My name is Daniel Judge, but really my name is… Dr Judge. I’m a musician…and with a good friend of mine. Coming into SYMO has changed my life. All my friends are in here. My heroes too. I’ve been coming here quite a long time. By 2007 – that’s the year when I did a new group with a certain guy called Mr Miller over here – Big Daddy Cool. And I produced the album called Rise to Fame and I was on the radio, Radio Hartlepool.
David Lodge My name is David Lodge and I’ve been coming to SYMO for just over a year. Acting’s been part of my life [since I was young]. I went to college for four years and did drama and got qualifications. The best way to describe myself is as an all rounder – acting singing as well. I’ve just played the devil in Nuts To You. A couple of weeks ago, it was on Northeast Tonight, which is our local news for the region. Everybody – from my girlfriend to my Mum and Dad and other people have said I’ve seen you on the TV. Even people are coming up three weeks on have seen it. Acting’s been my passion.
Carole Gill I’ve only been coming here for seven months, since Easter. I like singing and acting and I like to come here, because everybody’s friendly and made me welcome when I came in. I’m in Maniac Mum. I love singing.
I do get nervous…[before our last show] it was terrible. I couldn’t eat nowt. I did it, though. I wouldn’t let them down anyway. When I heard that there was a group called SYMO, I came with one of our staff members. I thought it would be the right thing for me to do and so I wanted to join. Everybody made me welcome and they give us a cup of tea and made me feel that I felt was at home. My best part was when I was singing live music. We had about 150 people in the room. I sang One Moment In Time and Karen was playing it on the synthesiser.
Wendy Elsley I used to come here on a Friday, but I stopped coming in on a Friday, because I’m working in Asda now and they swapped my days. So I had to finish this film off – otherwise they would have been up the creek without a paddle. I’d worked really hard with it and finished it off. [That was] Nuts To You.
I do adult literacy [classes]. In Asda, I’m doing all the clothes work in the clothes department. We start round about nine o’clock and then we have our dinners around about 12 o’clock and then we have two breaks between ten and three, so it’s been a long day but it goes very quick. I’ve been there quite a while now – 20 years now in Asda. I just get on with what I’ve been told to get on with.
With the [adult literacy classes] – Karen helped me [find one]. I met this new tutor and she is dead lovely. She said – what do you want to do? and I said – I want to learn to read. I want to read and write, because if I don’t read and write, that’s it – my brain is totally switched off. I love reading and writing. My Mum says my reading has improved a lot from what is used to be and it’s helped me with my acting as well because I can read scripts as well.
I just love coming here. If I wasn’t coming here now, I’d just be sitting at home 24-7, so I’m looking for something else to do on a Tuesday. I like art, making cards and stuff.
Liz Yeats I come here on a Monday. I prefer Mondays than Fridays, because I seem to get on better on on a Monday. I’ve got lots of friends on a Monday, because I love everybody. That’s why I’m here for. And I’m best at drama and I’m a good comedian. I just like to join in.
While Ed Miliband yabbered on about hard choices and the facts of life and some cuts being unavoidable (we could hear him in the background)…protestors from Disabled People Against Cuts chained their wheelchairs together and shut down Park Lane at the Marble Arch end at today’s TUC march.
I’ll upload more video later today and tomorrow. This one shows the blockade and also the stopped traffic. A protestor argues the case for the action with a copper at the end. After a while, the police worked out that the protestors weren’t going to move and were forced to make all the vehicles on Park Lane – buses included – turn around.
If only Miliband had encouraged the rest of the march to join DPAC and Boycott Workfare in shutting streets and shops across London down. Too hard a choice, perhaps.
This is the latest in the transcripts from recorded interviews I’m publishing as I talk to people around the country who are dealing firsthand with fallout from public sector cuts, welfare reform and the recession. I’m posting these transcripts between longer articles and testimonies that are appearing at False Economy and elsewhere.
In this transcript, Michael H, who is 43, from Newcastle and on benefits, talks about growing up on Gateshead’s Springwell estate, his worries for his children in an era and region of high unemployment, his concerns about being moved out of his council flat if the government’s bedroom tax is enforced (he was moved to his current flat years ago after run-ins with gangs on his previous estate) and his own conviction for benefit fraud. Michael has been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, has depression and suffers from anxiety and panic attacks.
“I know that this is going to come across really, really strong but I think that it’s a social cleansing what they [the government] are doing, with people the likes of us on benefits… because he’s [Cameron] turned around, calling us the likes of scroungers.
I go to doctors, I go to groups – I’m trying to get better, but when you’re diagnosed with things like this and you’re on the waiting list… I’m diabetic. I was diagnosed in 2005 – I almost died [in 2000]. I’ve got summat in my hands where they attack down the nerves. It’s affecting me like joints and things and the medication that they put us on, I don’t think it agreeing with us. I’m thinking like more suicidal thoughts. I don’t know if this drug is right for me.
I was a caretaker years ago and I worked with a broken arm, so it isn’t if I haven’t worked or anything. I have done lots of various jobs. Obviously, growing up, I wasn’t brought up in the best world. It was like…really bad times – a very violent household if you get my drift, so I didn’t have the best of the starts in life. [But] I’m doing everything like I’m supposed to be doing…
Bedroom tax its a different way of cutting the housing benefit bill. That’s all it is. It isn’t anything about encouraging people to move on, because they know that there isn’t any one bedroom properties going. My daughter still comes across [to stay in my flat]. She lives at home with her mam and stepdad and she comes across to mine and she has that room as a little sanctuary thing, because she she’s doing 6th form now. She is going to be a teacher and it’s nice for her to have that sanctuary. In everything, you will get people who will take advantage. It’s doesn’t matter what job you are in – in any walk of life. Look at the Tories with their expenses. Those MPs – in real life, they would have lost their jobs.
I haven’t had an [Atos work capability assessment yet]. I’m on incapacity benefit…I’ve watched the things on the television and seen how [ESA] is decided for people to fail on it. People don’t understand how that plays with your mind, because if your mind is fragile enough now, when you get things like that put on top of you, it just makes you think – what I am good for? The best thing to do would be to end it, because then I wouldn’t be on benefits.
My son and his pals have been on benefits for ages and there is nothing there. He has to go around and hand in CVs to firms in the local areas [as a requirement for jobseekers’ allowance]. They [the job centre] keep asking him to do it and he’s like – if I’ve done every one, how can I go around and do it again? And they are now wanting to sanction people £72 [sic]. That’s their whole benefit, if they don’t meet whatever they [the job centre] wants. Yes, we do know that there is people who do not want to work, because there’s ones that do crime, do drugs, do whatever, but that’s always been there since day dot, but to tar every single person…
The thing is, he [Cameron] claims that it [welfare changes and bedroom tax] won’t have that much impact – but how does he know? He’s a millionaire. He’s not been in our shoes, I would love to have been in his. Because most people round these areas to be honest, they are poor and they accept their lot in life.
At the job centre, they have not got a clue. If they brought in schemes where it wouldn’t affect your benefit – employment training for 12 months, you could go out and train. If disabled people had those rights, if that would then give them the confidence to go back into the workplace and try things out and learn different things. They let the likes of us rot now. We are classed as the worst thing since bubonic plague.