Another week and another pile of crap from Esther McVey on JSA claimant conditions. This week – hopeless guff about newly-unemployed people having to prepare CVs (most of the many newly-unemployed people I’ve talked to at jobcentres have one, because they’re stuck in the low-pay, insecure work cycle and are always looking for jobs), set up an email address and register on the notoriously useless Universal Jobmatch website – the one that people at jobcentres describe to me as “a waste of time. Most of the jobs in there – they don’t bother to check the computer to see if the jobs in there are already filled. Every two weeks I go there, the same old jobs are in there. It’s just rubbish.”

Doesn’t stop McVey, though. Rubbish is her thing. “This is about treating people like adults and setting out clearly what is expected of them so they can hit the ground running,” she blathers. Bollocks. It’s about nothing of the kind. It’s about introducing a few more steps for already-under-resourced, dysfunctional jobcentres to fail to administer properly, which will make it more difficult for people to get their first, much-needed benefit payment and could lead to sanctions as McVey’s own press release happily notes. All these things will do is keep people off the benefit books. People won’t show up in benefit stats. That’s what this garbage is about. People already have to leap through hoops to get their crappy £71 a week and they are already perfectly aware that there are expectations, thanks. They already have to participate in absurd form-filling exercises which take god knows how long and never lead to work. I’ve spoken with people who have to show that they’ve searched for 25 jobs a week – with at least some of these jobs being roles that are advertised on Universal Jobmatch, which of course leads nowhere. I’ve spoken to people who’ve gone on work programme-type courses which have involved ripping sheets of paper up and putting them back together again to learn about teamwork.

Here are some of the people I’ve spoken with in the last two months – about their struggles with JSA and the experiences they’ve had trying to deal with a system that is designed to push people off benefits and nothing else. This system is certainly not about getting people into jobs, let me tell you. It’s about putting the fear of god into everyone about unemployment. In my experience, people have to sort the getting jobs part out themselves. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has found work through their jobcentre. Absolutely everyone I’ve spoken to so far who has found work has done so off their own bat, through their own contacts. I’ve got more of these interviews to upload as well. You’ll get the point from these ones, though – this is a system that already sets people up to fail. McVey simply adds further conditions and further options for failure and sanction.

Continue reading →

Back to the Kilburn jobcentre with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group. Have been doing this for a month or two now (links to earlier posts at the end of this one). We’ve been to Kilburn, Neasden and Marylebone. The sessions involve me talking with people on JSA about sanctions, jobcentres, the work programme and the whole dysfunctional Jobcentre Plus system, and the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group talking with people about all those things and handing out leaflets about the group’s weekly support meeting.

That weekly support meeting is growing in size. This is definitely worth a mention. The group is made up of people who are either affected by the government’s so-called “welfare reforms”, or have been affected by those reforms and/or who know a great deal about benefit forms, jobsearch and benefits. They also know a lot about the way that bureaucrats on power trips can operate. The group’s catchphrase, if you like, is “Never Attend Anywhere Official Alone” – wise advice that is catching on if recent meeting numbers are anything to go by. More and more of the people who the group talks to at the jobcentre leafleting sessions turn up to the weekly meeting for advice, and to find someone to accompany them to meetings with jobcentre staff and a wide range of advisers and officials. As far as I can see, self-organised groups like this one are taking on the work that jobcentres should be doing, rather than creating – they’re solving people’s problems, explaining appeals processes, helping people make some sort of sense of the nonsensical paperwork and instructions they’re given and so on. Accompanying people to their benefits interviews and meetings is an important part of making sure that officialdom stays in line.

God only knows I wouldn’t go to a jobcentre meeting alone. The more time I spend talking to people about their jobcentre experiences, the more I see how completely screwed the whole thing is. And okay, we all knew that – but seeing it in action, if action is the word, is still something else. I stand outside of these places and watch person after person reel out – they’re baffled by sanctions, confused by letters which call them to meetings with no explanation, bewildered by extreme jobsearch requirements, frustrated by a (hopefully doomed) Jobmatch “technology” which serves up the same jobs week after week, not at all sure of their benefit entitlements generally, and wondering why being unemployed deserves such punishment. I suppose we all know that is the point of the exercise – to reduce jobcentres to the point of non-function and/or to a stage where a political “justification” can be made for outsourcing. Part of that plan is also to make the thought of unemployment and signing on utterly terrifying to everyone else. The interesting thing is that the majority of people I’ve spoken to are actually employed a lot of the time. They’re just employed in low-paid, insecure jobs which end as suddenly as they start and pay so badly that people can’t save for lean times. Or for anything, for that matter.

Anyway. Here are some of the people I’ve spoken with at the last two sessions.

Ravi, aged 22. Trying to sort out a sanction.

Ravi said he last worked in January. He works in sectors like retail and banking. He wants something permanent, but is struggling to find permanent work. As of Monday, he was still trying to sort out a sanction – he was waiting to go into the jobcentre for a meeting where he hoped things would be worked out. Continue reading →

Earlier this week, I spent a morning outside the Kilburn jobcentre with the Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group. The group regularly leaflets at the jobcentre, to let people know that there is help and support available for people who are struggling.

We talked to person after person who was on JSA and signing on. And being sanctioned. The first person we saw was a young man who came out of the jobcentre yelling that he’d just been sanctioned for 13 weeks. He was furious, as well he might be. Thirteen weeks is a hell of a long time to go without money.

He was too angry to talk about that with us in any detail, but we did speak to a lot of other people who had similar experiences. I recorded those discussions and have posted transcripts of those recordings below. I’ll be doing a lot more of this. People need to hear the sorts of things that people on JSA are saying. And I don’t think it will do jobcentres any harm to know that there are journalists out the front of their places asking people what things are like inside.

Because things don’t seem too good at all inside. Just about everyone we spoke with talked about sanctions and appointment mixups and confusing instructions and paperwork, and having to “walk on eggshells” in case anything happened that might lead to a sanction. This part really gets on my nerves. If you’re on JSA, you’re at the mercy of everyone. You’re on the receiving end of everything. People can treat you however they like. And all because you’re unemployed. It’s as though being unemployed has become a hanging offence.

Continue reading →

The Court of Appeal has upheld a ruling which found that the process used to decide whether hundreds of thousands of people are eligible for Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) discriminates against people with mental health conditions, learning disabilities and autism.

The original judgment, at an Upper Tribunal hearing in May this year, was the result of a Judicial Review brought by two anonymous claimants with mental health problems. You can read the origins of the challenge and the story here.

This was an action brought by the Mental Health Resistance Network and is a tribute to that member-led group and the hard work that people who use services have put in – with little help from established charities or politicians. That should be said and must be said and I am not going to stop saying it. There is a press release on the issue and today’s announcement on the Rethink site, but I make the point again that the MHRN and the Public Law Project deserve all the credit here. I’ll say it again good and loud and why not – it is the member-led groups like Boycott Workfare on workfare and the work programme, Disabled People Against Cuts on issues like the closure of the Independent Living Fund and the Mental Health Resistance Network on the fight against the work capability assessment that are achieving the results in the fight against this government.

And that is the key point to make about resistance and results in our era. People are fighting a vicious government here and they’re doing it on their own pretty much. Just imagine how much further ahead we’d all be if those who had the resources and the political clout contributed those things to the fight.

Don’t start me.

Here are DPAC and MHRN campaigners outside the Royal Courts of Justice in October when the DWP took its case for overturning the initial ruling to the court of appeal:

Here are Boycott Workfare protestors outside Senate House today, defying police clampdowns on campus protests and making plenty of noise about the political class’ disgusting embrace of workfare and benefit sanctions…

….and inside the building, the ultimate rogues’ gallery of thieves and state-funded robber barons who are making a filthy pile out of workfare, taxpayers and the misery of people who find themselves unemployed or unable to work. ERSA, the trade body for the so-called welfare-to-work industry, was holding an annual workfare conference in the building today. The roll-call of attendees included: Esther McVey and Stephen Timms, the DWP’s director of social justice (ironic job title of the millenium there), the CE and director of Tomorrow’s People – the organisation that brought you the scandal where unemployed people were forced to work without pay and had to get changed under a bridge during the Queen’s Jubilee. There was also, apparently, a smorgasbord of plundering work programme providers – the likes of Avanta, Seetec, G4S, A4e and Pinnacle People. Joy.

Anyway. History will judge these people harshly. It’s just a pity that the political classes, and organised labour and Labour refuse to judge them harshly now. To date, it has been the member-led groups that have beaten the government and pro-workfare companies and charities back – on the streets, online and in the courts. Same thing with the fight to save the Independent Living Fund – member-led groups like Disabled People Against Cuts were behind that success and pretty much on their own fighting for it. Established charities and the political class ignored them. So. There are people who are going to find themselves on the wrong side of history here and I only regret that I won’t be around to see it. Workfare is absolutely a labour issue, but Labour was not to be seen today – unless you counted Timms, who was somewhere inside the conference, hoovering lunch up with the crooks. I counted a couple of Unite community flags at the protest, but really, there should have been a couple of thousand. And more. But there weren’t. Which was and is extraordinary, albeit totally expected… except the fact is that we’re seeing something very significant here. We’ve been seeing it for a while. We’re at a point (again, we’ve been at it for while) where the very notion of a wage for work is under threat and if things continue as they are, very few jobs will pay. Everyone will be under the boot of a sadistic corporate. As for decent terms and conditions to go along with some sort of wage – forget it. As one speaker rightly said today – the workfare juggernaut will end up driving everyone’s wages into the dirt. It’s bad enough that people on benefits are expected to work for free. It’s only a matter of time before everyone else will be. That has certainly been the case in America, which is something I’ve said before, but I might as well say it again. An example: several years into New York city’s workfare programme, District Council 37, a union which represented municipal employees, took Rudy Giuliani to court, saying that his workfare programme “had illegally replaced nearly 2000 unionised clerical workers with unpaid welfare recipients in three agencies.” That sort of thing. It’ll be that sort of thing all round.

And if you rely on a wage to get by – as opposed to a trust fund, etc – it’ll be that sort of thing coming your way soon, if it hasn’t hit you already. Meanwhile, the member-led fightback groups get on with the battle. They know that there is no negotiating with the political class and/or the major corporates that the political class represents. And they are right. Austerity governments of all stripes exist only to hand public money to the private sector. They will do that and do that until there is nothing left.

Ho hum.

To Liverpool, then, where I spend an hour or two with a guy called Peter S_ (may add  his surname later) about his experiences of jobseekers’ allowance. He’s on JSA at the moment. There’s a transcript of the interview with Peter below.

Peter used to work as a carer. Like many carers, he had a job which paid so badly that he couldn’t meet his bills. He started his day early and finished it late, but – again like many carers – was not paid for the time that he had to spend travelling between caring jobs, which meant that he couldn’t make enough money to get by. (Said the Resolution Foundation in an August report on this serious and growing problem: “Careworkers often lose at least £1 an hour because they are not paid separately for the time spent travelling between appointments and because providing decent care often takes longer than the time allocated by the employer for each visit.”)

Then – this is hardly surprising – Peter became very depressed. He suffers from depression and the working situation made it worse. He applied for ESA, but was found fit for work. He was still very depressed and couldn’t find the energy to appeal. So, he signed on for jobseekers’ allowance and was promptly sanctioned for “leaving” his job (depression, it seems, is no longer considered a “proper” reason for breakdown). He was sent on the work programme with the British Heart Foundation and is now applying for zero hours caring jobs which will also pay next to nothing.

So.

The best part of all this? – that Peter is supposed to feel grateful for his crappy wages and his life on JSA. He is supposed to accept every sanction and attack without complaint. He is expected to rise to all hurdles. Everybody is supposed to. Everybody is supposed to feel grateful for the chance to grind away on dwindling wages and get nowhere while the well-connected and well-appointed loot the nation’s pay packets and the public purse. I’m sure I tell you nothing new when I point out that when Cameron says “work hard and get ahead” he means “work hard for stuff all and help my corporate mates get even further ahead.” Why should anyone feel inspired to work to advance corporate interests? I’ve never seen that as a golden ticket, myself.

You’ll read more about this in the transcript below.

You’ll also read a few short comparative paragraphs about very wealthy and well-connected persons who – unlike people in Peter’s position – genuinely feel entitled to public money. They are taking that sense of entitlement to a new plane.

You’ll note, for instance, that I post Peter’s story as we’re lobbed an “apology” by Nadhim Zahawi who claimed parliamentary expenses to heat his stables. I mean – heated stables. Who the hell has stables? People I speak to can’t afford to heat their homes. MPs can, of course. You would have read plenty about MPs heating their second homes on expenses. I head out for an hour to walk the dog and by the time I’m back, we have career twat Nadine Dorries finally forced to register her I’m a Celebrity fee. These people are taking the piss.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – it’s the gross lack of balance I can’t stand. It’s the extraordinary double standard. This is unreal. It can’t last. Peter in Liverpool has been paid utter crap, had his tiny benefit cut and sent to work for free on the work programme. He spends his time applying for zero-hours caring jobs which won’t pay him enough to survive. If he doesn’t like this and doesn’t accept it and his mental health suffers, he and people in the same situation will be pillioried by members of a political class who care only to trample us all as they race for the lolly. I wonder, on the other hand, how things will pan out for Nadhim Zahawi. Comparatively, you understand. Will he be sanctioned, written off as a scrounger, forced to take a zero hours contract for tiny wages that won’t cover his costs and told to be grateful or to get out? Will he be forced to queue for one of two computers at a jobcentre to find non-existent work (as Peter was – you’ll see this below), sent on meaningless work programmes and made to turn up to a jobcentre each day for pointless jobsearches and workfare? Will he be held up before the electorate as an example of someone who is responsible for the recession – someone whose sense of entitlement and flagrant abuse of the public purse stands between the nation and economic greatness? Continue reading →

Joe Halewood has posted a very interesting article: it’s about a letter from the Knowsley Housing Trust which says that the recipient may be considered to have intentionally made themselves homeless if they’re evicted because of rent arrears. The letter also says that social services will be advised if there are children in the home:

People have read this as “pay your rent, or we’ll come for your kids,” as well they might.

As Joe says:

“Knowsley Housing Trust (KHT) are sending out a standard letter which tenants are reading as “pay your rent or social services will come and take your children off you”..and you thought social landlords couldn’t get any more incompetent!

“The prior paragraph sees KHT assume that any tenant evicted for arrears will be declared intentionally homeless by the council – that not paying your rent means you WILL be found intentionally homeless and that is a huge assumption and an overt scare tactic in itself by KHT and this predicates the threat of your children being taken into care. Councils have to look at the individual circumstances of each case under homeless legislation and eviction for arrears does NOT equate with being found intentionally homeless as KHT strongly allude it does.”

So.

I’m posting this, because I know that this fear of losing your kids if you can’t pay the bedroom tax looms large in many minds. I know this because people have told me about it. They certainly told me about it when I was travelling around in the northwest for this recent article about the bedroom tax. I wrote then:

“The other concern people have is that social services will remove children from parents who are found to be struggling due to the extra cost. People say this a lot. “Nobody wants social services butting their noses into people’s business, because it’s a danger game when a mother hasn’t got enough money to feed her kids properly,” Jill says [at the West Everton Community Centre]. “She’s going to starve herself to make sure her kids are fed. You’re hearing about kids being taken away when they shouldn’t be.””

A similar point was raised on at least two more occasions by people I met at the bedroom tax campaign meetings I attended during that trip. One man I was speaking with said that the campaign groups wanted to get more young people involved. “They’re probably worried about social services coming round,” a woman at our table said. I had a similar conversation with two women after a meeting in central Liverpool.

This all put me in mind of a conversation I had a couple of years ago with a Wisconsin woman called Pat Gowens. I’d rung Pat in the first instance to talk about Wisconsin’s appalling workfare programme, which she had some experience of. She and other women had set up Welfare Warriors – a member-led campaign made up of people who were directly affected by that punitive W2 workfare scheme. We talked about that for some time and then our conversation moved onto other work the group was involved in. That work, it transpired, included representing women whose children had been removed by social services. “They come into your homes,” Pat said, “usually on an anonymous call, or [a call from] your husband. They decide you’re a bit crazy, or your house isn’t clean enough – a mother didn’t vacuum her carpets, or just swept them [or something like that]. Then, they take your kids away. You used to get them back in six months. Now it can be six years. If you want them back you have to do parenting classes, therapy, anger management, domestic violence therapy.”

The group is still active – you can see their facebook page here – and they’re still running articles with titles like Give Us Back Our Children.

The fear of losing your children is an appalling one. Most people ought to know that. And it is very bad to know that people fear losing their children because they can’t pay a tax that they should never have had to pay in the first place.

Joe Halewood is absolutely right when he says:

“Social landlords are in a position of authority when it comes to housing matters. Tenants assume that landlords know housing law and good practice therein and tenants in large part have to trust social landlords.”

He’s also right when he says that anybody who is abusing that power needs to be named and shamed. There is something very unpleasant going on here. Talk about a nasty way to keep people who don’t have money in line. Pure evil.

Update: info here on this situation from the Shelter site (h-t Mr Bogbrush on facebook):

“Can social services take children away because the family is found to be intentionally homeless?

No. Social services can only forcibly take a child away from her/his parents if there is clear evidence of a risk of abuse and a court order has been obtained. If social services offer to house the children but not the rest of the family, the parents are not normally obliged to accept this option.

If social services offer to house the child alone, you should get specialist advice from a local Shelter advice centre or other housing advice agency immediately.”

I wrote this update Sunday 3 November –  “it seems that KHT is “reviewing” its customer communications after that original letter went viral on it. Bit more than that needs reviewing if you ask me” – but it seems that review of customer communications has to do with another incident to do with eviction and not this one. What a mess – how many shambles can a trust have? Will post more on that when I get info through.

Update 4 November: The “review of customer communications” has to do with this incident – “A Merseyside community formed a ring of steel around a bedroom tax victim’s house after fears her possessions would be removed without her consent.” And see this, too – that ring of steel action apparently led to KHT announcing that anti bedroom tax campaigners were a danger to staff. Unreal. Were HAs not expecting direct action as a response to this tax?

Update 5 November: You’ll see in the comments that the review of customer communications is to do with the social services letter. See comment below from Huyton Freeman and watch the links below for updates:

“I posted the letter on my blog http://www.huytonfreeman.co.uk/ and on http://www.facbook.com/huytondi any further responses from KHT will also be published there and @huytonfreeman on twitter.”

Let’s see what KHT comes back with.

Video from outside the Supreme Court today where five justices found that government “back to work” schemes were legally flawed.

Have put a full transcript of Tessa Gregory’s speech below as it appears in the video – in it, she details plans to pursue repayments for sanctions.

“We’re delighted that the Supreme Court has unanimously dismissed the government’s appeal and confirmed that the regulations under which most of the back to work schemes were initially created were unlawful. The court upheld the findings that Iain Duncan Smith acted beyond the powers given to him by parliament by failing to provide any detail about various schemes in the regulations and in any event, the required notice provisions have not been complied with.

Shortly after lodging his appeal, Iain Duncan Smith rushed emergency legislation through parliament which retrospectively amended the law. This effectively overturned the court of appeal’s judgement and shamefully rendered much of its own appeal proceedings academic.

Indeed the Supreme Court was moved to note that the government has rather unattractively taken up court time and public money seeking to establish something that it had already sought a rememdy for in parliament.

We have already issued judicial review proceedings challenging the validity of that retrospective legislation which following today, we will seek to extradite.

It is also though important to note that the judgement has real practical implications.

In addressing one of our arguments, the court found for the first time that the government has a duty as a matter of fairness to provide from the outset enough information for jobseekers about a given scheme to enable them to make informed and meaningful representations.

A failure to provide that informtion is likely to make it unlawful for the DWP to require people to participate on a given scheme, or to dock their benefits if they fail to do so. The court found that on the facts of this case, the secretary of state did not provide our clients with adequate information. For Jamie Wilson, who was stripped of his benefits for six months, that means that notwithstanding the restrospective legislation, we will now seek repayment of his benefits on that basis. We know that like Jamie and Cait, hundreds and thousands of other jobseekers have not been and continue not to be provided with information about the dizzying array of schemes. Following today’s judgement, any such jobseekers can object to sanctions that have been imposed and seek repayment of their benefits. It is staggering that Iain Duncan Smith has found himself in this position even after fast-tracking emergency restrospective legislation through parliament specifically designed to prevent repayment of benefits.

We intend to work with advice organsations to ensure that following this ruling, affected individuals have the right information and assistance. This case has expsoed an utterly shambolic system, where individuals are routinely being stripped of their subsistence level benefits after receiving inadequte and inaccurate information. Iain Duncan Smith has sought to brand our clients as job snobs. In reality, all they have been seeking is a system
that is fair and transparent.”