Category Archives: Welfare reform

#UniversalCredit rolls out in Stockport this week. Bloody battles loom over this disaster

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Universal Credit rolls out here in Stockport this week. People making new benefit claims will have to claim Universal Credit from this Wednesday.

This will be a disaster. The whole benefits scene already is.

Readers of this site will know that I’ve been interviewing Universal Credit and other benefit claimants at Stockport jobcentre for much of this year. Stockport United Against Austerity holds regular demonstrations outside the jobcentre, which I join. I interview people who sign on at the jobcentre as they come and go.

Stories of sanctions (sometimes one following straight after another and lasting for months) are already all too common among people who use that jobcentre.

People already talk about delays to the start of benefit claims and problems accessing much-needed assistance. I’ve talked with people who’ve been years out of work and can’t get basic help to secure voluntary jobs. Some already claim Universal Credit. Some claim JSA or ESA.

Stockport jobcentre is the only jobcentre in the borough. You’re dreaming if you think that the jobcentre has the staff or resources to manage a tide of complex Universal Credit claims.

Funds for people in poverty are being targeted for cuts even as Universal Credit rolls out

There’ll be a great deal of local attention on Universal Credit in Stockport in the coming months.

Stockport United Against Austerity is campaigning to stop and scrap Universal Credit.

Last week, the Stockport council cabinet agreed to a SUAA demand for full council to vote to call for a halt to the Universal Credit rollout. Council votes on that motion at next week’s full council meeting.

The council needs to do a great deal more than that.

It is not. Quite the reverse.

As we speak, Stockport council is preparing to plunge the borough’s poorest citizens into further hardship.

The council is consulting on plans to close its local welfare assistance fund – the all-important stopgap fund for people who are in extreme financial difficulties and who can’t afford food or basic household items.

This is an extraordinary step to take at exactly the time when Universal Credit is rolled out locally with its built-in debt problems and inevitable setting up of people for serious rent arrears.

Protest this Wednesday

Join Stockport United Against Austerity, Charlotte Hughes and supporters from Disabled People Against Cuts at a protest calling for the scrapping of Universal Credit this week at:

10am-11am
Wednesday 21 November 2018
Stockport jobcentre
Heron House
Wellington Street
SK1 3BE

Regular demonstrations and interviewing will continue outside the jobcentre in the coming months.

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

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Back next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He told me that:

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

This certainly gels with service user reports.

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

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

Enough.

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

I’m posting this interview for a specific reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The list went on. It usually does.

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

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

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

Let’s start at the beginning.

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

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

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

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

So, there was that.

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

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

There was more.

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

Working for nothing, accused of fraud, sent on unchanging CV courses: owned by the DWP when you’re older and unemployed

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Back to Stockport jobcentre – where I recently spoke at length with Ben (named changed). I’ve posted the transcript below.

Ben was 58 and long-term unemployed. Ben did not think that his situation would change soon.

The DWP was after Ben on several fronts.

The DWP is often after people on several fronts.

The department refuses to leave people alone for five minutes. The department drags people to compliance interviews, sends people on useless “employability” courses and makes people attend jobcentres to sit in front of computers and apply online for jobs they never hear about again.

None of this is about helping people find work. It’s about something sinister. It’s about standing over people who are least likely to find work. It’s about reminding people who are out of work that they are not entitled to even a little autonomy. There’s a whole industry devoted to making sure that people who are long-term unemployed are permanently under the thumb.

If you’re out of work and signing on, the DWP owns you.

The DWP certainly owned Ben.

For starters, the DWP was coming for Ben on compliance.

People are called to compliance interviews when the DWP wants to accuse them of earning while claiming, or having secret savings, or whatever. I’ve seen more compliance letters over the years than I care to count. The amounts of money are rarely startling and anyway, the DWP’s accusations are often completely wrong. This doesn’t stop the department frightening the hell out of people by firing out fraud accusations. If you’re out of work, government likes to take any opportunity to rough you up. If there isn’t an opportunity to rough you up on the immediate horizon, government creates one.

Ben had received a compliance letter and a call from the DWP that morning.

The DWP had accused Ben of earning a bit of money and not declaring it.

Ben was furious about this. He was angry about the accusation and, it turned out, about the problems that working a few days had caused him.

Ben had worked as a security guard for three days and had been paid, and declared that. Then he worked another three days as a security guard, but the company he’d worked for that time never paid him.

This happens ALL the time, just so that you know. People land few days’ work with some fly-by-night company and/or sub-sub-subcontracted contractor, but they never get the pay they were promised. They can either go to war with the company in question to get their money, or they can let it go and hope things work out better next time. It’s not much of a choice.

Said Ben:

“I’ve just had an accusation this morning… they sent me a…I have a [compliance] interview… that’s the letter [Ben showed me the compliance letter that the DWP had sent]. It’s a compliance thing. I’ve been accused of working…and I haven’t… this other company, I worked for them in August in the hospital for three days – three 12-hour days. They never paid me. I didn’t get slips or anything. They [the DWP] said, “Oh, you were working.” I said, “I never got anything except a uniform they sent me…” They’re [the security company] probably saying, “he’s got the uniform. We’re not going to pay him…”

So, there was that.

Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

Mark had been on Universal Credit for two years.

Mark was fuming.

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

Said Mark:

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

There was more.

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

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

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

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

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

Mark said:

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

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

Islington council: Dunno how many disabled people we have stuck in inaccessible flats or buildings they can’t get out of. Wouldn’t tell you anyway

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Readers of this site will know that I’ve been posting stories about Ann Sparling, a 47-year-old disabled woman who can’t leave her 4th floor Islington council flat, because she can’t walk up or down the four flights of stairs. There is no lift in her building.

I asked the Islington Council press office what procedures the council had in place for ensuring that people in Ann’s situation wouldn’t be stuck in their flats in an emergency.

I also asked if the council knew how many disabled people were trapped in similar situations.

Got no answers there.

Ann reported, however, that when a council officer finally got in contact with Ann about her situation, the council officer wondered the same sort of thing – “wonder how many people are stuck in the same situation?”

Ever the trier, I sent an FOI to Islington in August with those questions.

The answers were hopeless.

For example:

Q: How many of those households with a disabled member who are requesting transfers are requesting ground floor flats, because they are housed in flats which are up one or more flights of stairs?

Answer: “We are unable to answer this question. Housing information (e.g. the floor level of a property) and Adult Social Care information (e.g. whether a service user has a disability) are stored on different systems and it is not possible to cross reference this information.”

and:

Q: How many households with a disabled member of the household are currently housed in council flats which are inaccessible to disabled people?

Answer: “…For those with existing tenancies in council properties, the council would only be aware if a resident is disabled if they self-identify as such and have notified the council. Additionally, housing information (e.g. the floor level of a property) and Adult Social Care information (e.g. whether a service user is disabled) are stored on different systems and it is not possible to cross reference this information.”

I’m not even sure what that means. I do know that notifying the council re: your disability and needing a transfer because of it means absolutely nothing. Ann notified the council of her situation several years ago and has sent no end of paperwork since, but remained stuck in her flat.

This is garbage. How many disabled people are stuck in flats in buildings that they can’t easily leave? What happens to those people an emergency? What happens if the fire brigade asks if there are disabled people stuck in inaccessible flats? Do they get the same Computer Says No? Does anybody care?

Benefit claimants without a past or history wanted. Really.

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A few thoughts:

I was at a thing last week which had a media session.

One of the speakers made a pertinent, but dispiriting, point.

The speaker said that it was important to make sure that people who received benefits didn’t have a problematic past if they decided to speak to the media – that those people didn’t have a history of fraud, or unsavoury behaviours that the rightwing might dig up.

It’s a line that depresses me. A lot of the people I interview have a past. Everybody has a past. My own past wouldn’t stand scrutiny at all. With the people I interview – there can be drug and alcohol problems, jail records, histories of broken relationships, a list of jobs started and lost – all kinds of things. Life is harsh. It gets a lot of people.

The main thing these people have in common is that they don’t have any money. They don’t have the sort of money you need to paper over cracks. They don’t have rich parents to live with when a job goes, or money for smart lawyers if they get caught dealing, or stealing, or whatever.

Point is – these people are utterly excluded from public conversation, for the very simple reason they don’t measure up in a spotlight. They’re thought to make the social security cause look bad. That angers me.

The political class, meanwhile, bursts with fraudsters – thugs, crooks, charlatans who flip houses and bullies who don’t declare properties and don’t pay tax, and all the rest. They get a free pass on it all.

Nobody tells that lot to avoid the limelight.

This is really starting to irritate me – the rules regarding who should and shouldn’t be heard.

Used and abused: inside a failed UK workfare scheme. Will Universal Credit claimants be pushed into schemes like this to make up labour shortfalls after Brexit?

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The post below – based on Kyla’s story (named changed) – is an excerpt from a collection I’m working on.

The project collects interviews I’ve made since 2014 with people directly affected by benefit cuts and welfare reform.

This collection is being made possible thanks to a Barry Amiel & Norman Melburn Trust grant. I’m posting extracts from this collection here as I work on it.

Amiel_Melburn_logo

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Workfare: how government gets something for nothing out of people in deep poverty

This article is about workfare – that failed (for workfare workers), but electorally-popular concept where benefit claimants must work for unemployment benefits.

Tory, coalition and Labour (and American, Australian and Canadian) governments have been keen advocates of workfare schemes for decades – even in very recent decades, when the widespread failure of workfare as a means of placing people in ongoing paid jobs has been extensively reported.

I’ve written about workfare in the UK and in America many times in the last five years.

To my mind, politicians persist with workfare schemes for one reason when it comes down to it: harsh workfare programmes, with their punitive street-cleaning and charity-shop workfare placements, and tough benefit sanctions for non-compliance, give politicians a chance to crack down on the unemployed for show. Governments are desperate to prove to welfare-skeptic electorates that people who claim unemployment benefits are made to toil for their dole.

“Toughlove,” is the word that workfare’s advocates like to use when they talk about forcing people who are out of work into gruelling workfare jobs on the threat of sanctions.

A Clinton government would “end welfare as we know it,” pledged Bill Clinton on a campaign promise which led to the game-changing (not in a good way for the poorest social security recipients in particular) Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act with its exacting work-for-welfare conditions in 1996.

Clinton said that as though ending welfare as people knew it was a good thing. The reality was that PRWORA, with its strict time limits for social security eligibility and tough workfare and sanction conditions pushed thousands off welfare rolls and into dire poverty. Workfare schemes such as the Wisconsin (W2) programme and the New York (WEP) scheme became notorious for such exclusion, particularly as millennium recession deepened. Lockout from social security was no joke as escape from poverty through any type of paid work became harder.

Workfare’s champions didn’t care. They didn’t care where society’s poorest went as they were excluded from much-needed state support. No matter that society’s poorest went into dangerous and illegal activities such as selling blood and food stamps, skipping meals, shoplifting, scavenging and returning to violent partners to make ends meet. Social security is a numbers game for movers and shakers in the modern age. All that mattered and matters is that the number of people claiming support drops.

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Workfare in the UK

This article is based on in-depth interviews with forced participants in a recent failed UK workfare scheme: George Osborne’s Help to Work programme with its Community Work Placements.

Community Work Placements – CWP – were workfare placements, mostly in charities, aimed at people who were long-term unemployed and thought short of workplace skills, whatever that meant. Actually, the people I interviewed on CWP tended to be older and short of decent work opportunities, rather than skills, but government didn’t talk much about that.

Neither did government talk much about learning from the failure of American workfare schemes, or about the dangers of imposing strict workfare schemes and benefit sanctions on in-need people in a recession.

CWP was rough. It wasn’t tailored to meet people’s circumstances and needs. Some participants I spoke with were older people who were pushed into hard physical work from which they gained nothing, except confirmation of their own suspicions that they were being punished. That “work” included walking around with charity collection buckets in freezing cold weather, or standing all day to sort and clean donated clothes in charity shops.

CWP was memorable for the two reasons that such blunt workfare schemes so often are.

The first was that it was launched at great cost (£300m) with a shifty and strident politician (Osborne) banging on in the foreground about long-term unemployment being a fault of a widespread benefit claimant sense of entitlement (“no something-for-nothing any more“), rather than the economy.

The second was that it failed spectacularly. Launched into jobcentres in 2014, CWP was shut down just two years later after falling short most of the way along of its own modest targets for workfare placement companies to place 15% of CWP “graduates” in jobs. CWP was ditched not long before Osborne was.

Continue reading →

You can’t have this job because you’re too old. We also deduct £200 from wages because these jobs are apprenticeships. What.

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This one is for anyone out there who thinks that people who sign on have it easy. They don’t.

Have posted the recording below to demonstrate again the (often costly) obstacles that are planted in the way of people who look for low-paid work while signing on.

Some of the treatment by employers experienced by the woman in the recording is downright discriminatory and probably illegal. Certainly should be illegal.

I leafleted outside Stockport jobcentre this Wednesday with Stockport United Against Austerity.

I spoke at length with J, a woman I’ve spoken with before.

The recording below is from that interview. J has a son with autism (he’s in his early 20s) and a ten-year-old daughter. Her son’s PIP was stopped recently. J lost her carer’s allowance. She signs on for JSA and is looking for work.

J has been to six job interviews in the last few months.

Only one organisation ever bothered to get back to her about the job she was interviewed for. That was a nursery job.

Here’s the audio – J describing the experience (there’s a transcript at the end of this post):

The woman who called J about the nursery job told her three things:

  • J didn’t get the job
  • J didn’t get the job because she was too old
  • If J had been given the job, the company would have deducted £200 from her (minimum) wage over several months to pay back apprenticeship costs, because the job was an apprenticeship. I thought that any apprenticeship cost or levy was supposed to be paid by employers. I’ll be doing more work on this, but feel free to comment if this is an area you’re familiar with.

J was also told that she would have to pay for a DBS check. Last time I posted about this, people tweeted to say that employers should pay for such checks. I find mixed advice on that one.

The point is that I keep meeting people at jobcentres who can’t get their employer or their jobcentre or pay for DBS checks. The cost – between about £50 and £70 – lands on the newly-employed person. That is no joke for someone who only gets £70 or so a week in JSA or Universal Credit. The jobcentre says No and the employer says No and the person concerned begins to worry that they’ll never be able to start work, because nobody will help pay for the DBS check that the person can’t afford. Continue reading →