Osteoarthritis, can’t walk up 4 flights to the flat – and no lift. How many disabled people are trapped like this?

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Update Monday 6 August:

Am a little tired of being ignored by councils, so I tweeted the Islington council leader and the member for housing, and asked them to look into Ann’s situation:

The member for housing said he would:

I understand that the council has called Ann today. That’s a start, at least. We push on.

I am still waiting for responses to other questions I asked – for example, I want to know how many disabled people are stuck in flats they can’t easily leave and are waiting for accessible housing.

More updates soon.

Original post (Friday 3 August):

Islington woman Ann Sparling, 47, is trapped in her fourth floor council flat.

Ann has serious osteoarthritis in both of her knees. There is no lift in her building. She must walk down and up four flights of stairs if she wants to leave her flat.

Ann says that she finds climbing the steps impossible. So, she is trapped.

She lives in fear of fire. Ann says the fire alarm in the building went off recently, and “I was terrified about not being able to get out.”

Ann’s been asking the council to move her to an accessible flat for three years. Nothing’s happened. I asked the council for comment on this situation on Monday. Nothing’s happened there either.

The council hasn’t even sent me a general statement.

I want to know how many sick or disabled people are trapped in this potentially lethal way and what is going to be done.

Ann relies on her two adolescent children to bring the shopping and run other chores. I guess it will be up to them to get Ann out if there’s a fire.

Ann’s own doctors insist that she be moved. They say she can’t cope with the stairs and must be rehoused. Her surgeons even delayed knee surgery last year, because Ann didn’t want to return to her fourth floor flat to recuperate.

Here’s an excerpt from a letter written by Ann’s doctor this year:Letter advising of required flat move

Ann reports that the council has told her there are no suitable properties available.

Ann also says communicating with the council is a pain. Emails go unrecorded and calls to housing options go unanswered.

I know that feeling. I asked the council about Ann’s situation and council communications on Monday. I’d heard nothing by Wednesday, so called the press office again. An officer said the council had to check that Ann would permit the council to discuss her details with me. The officer said a general statement might be forthcoming. It hasn’t been. I’ve heard nothing.

I am sick of this.

I say it again.

How many disabled people around the country are stuck and isolated in unpleasant and downright dangerous situations like this?

Have we learned nothing from fire disasters such as Grenfell – you know, making sure that people are safely housed and can get out?

Why do councils refuse to respond?

Somebody at Islington council needs to get in touch with me.

Newham council tries to deny a homeless woman the right to appeal a terrible housing decision. WHY?

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I recently wrote about Sara Abdalla, 30. Sara is a Newham woman who is homeless. She has two young children. The eldest is in school in Newham. Sara has a job in Newham as well.

Newham council recently told Sara that she would have to move to Birmingham for permanent housing. Sara requested a review of that decision. A review officer upheld the council’s decision to send Sara to Birmingham. You can read that letter (and the dreadful tone of it) here.

Today, the council took Sara to court to try and deny her the right to appeal that decision. The council said Sara was out of time to make an appeal.

Sara – like so many homeless people I deal with – missed the appeal deadline because she found the bureaucracy so confusing and overwhelming. We all do. Council and DWP bureaucracies are literally designed to exclude anyone who isn’t an administrative genius. Sara was (and is) also dealing with a multitude of issues to do trying to secure housing while holding down a job and organising a young family. She also thought at one stage that an appeal had been filed by a lawyer who represented her – after a fashion – for a time. It hardly matters. The point is that the complexity regarding who was and is meant to do what and when was impossible. It so often is.

The thing is – I’ve been copied into emails with Rokhsana Fiaz, the new Newham mayor. She’s been promising to sort this mess out. So much for that. Sara has been trying to get hold of a housing officer who has apparently gone on holiday. She’s no closer to a solution to her housing problems than she ever was.

Meanwhile, Sara gets threatening courts summons and papers in which the council tries to deny her an appeal. It’s no wonder people lose it when they have to try and navigate all of this.

I have questions (I can’t put them to Newham Council sadly, because I’m on the council’s blacklist):

  1. Why did the council make such an enormous damn effort to stop a homeless woman appealing a decision to send her to a part of the country where she knows nobody and has no work? She was threatened with intentional homelessness if she did no go to Birmingham. So what if she was out of time to make an appeal. Why wouldn’t the council let it go?
  2. Why has the mayor been saying that Sara’s case will be looked at again by the council – at the exact same time that the council is dragging Sara to court to deny her the right to appeal housing decisions?

What a mess. Thousands of homeless people have to put up with this multilayered crap.

Oh yes – there’s is also this: The council was late with its own notice to the courts regarding Sara’s right to appeal.

Says the council in its letter to the court:

“A (Sara) seeks permission to appeal out of time… R (the council as Respondent) was required to file and serve notice in writing indicating whether that application was opposed by 4pm 25th April 2018.

On 26th April 2018, R wrote both to the Court and to A indicating that A’s application was opposed and apologised for the late provision of notice.”

Oh the irony. Council gets to miss deadlines. Sara doesn’t. That’s how things roll today.

I’ve got more so will come back. Sara won today anyway. I presume she now has the right to make that appeal.

Oh yes – there is something else. The council sought costs from Sara for today’s effort:

Says the letter from the council to the courts:

…”the Court is invited to dismiss A’s (Sara’s) application for permission to appeal out
of time and to grant an order for costs in R’s (the council’s) favour.”

That’s charming, that is – an attempt to pile debt on a low paid woman who has nowhere to live. Lovely. Sara was very upset indeed when she saw that.

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.

——

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 →

Newham council tells homeless mother to move to Birmingham. Council says friends and family are not essential to her welfare

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Update 27 June:

New mayor of Newham Rokhsana Fiaz has emailed Sara to say that she will look into Sara’s housing problems asap. I will post any updates.

There’s a bigger issue here for Labour, though. When are Labour councils going to start telling government that they simply refuse to house people away from jobs and support networks? How are Labour councils going to stand up to LHA caps and prohibitive market rents? What’s the strategy? Where’s the militancy? When will Labour councils get stuck in?

—————

Original post:

I want to show you the sort of letter that councils send to homeless people who are desperate for local housing. I want you to see where things are at.

The excerpts below are taken from a letter sent by Newham Council to Sara Abdalla, 30.

Sara is homeless. She has two children. The eldest is six and the youngest is just 18 months. The family lives in temporary accommodation in a Newham hostel.

The letter is from an officer who reviewed Sara’s decision to decline a council offer of accommodation in Birmingham. The officer upheld the council’s decision to send Sara to Birmingham.

Sara turned down the Birmingham flat, because she was and is desperate to stay in London.

She has good reason for that. Her son is settled in school in Newham. She has a local job. The review letter was written before she got that job – but Sara says the council won’t factor her employment into her case. She has vital support in Newham – the friends and contacts that women with young children rely on.

This whole situation is the usual poisonous mess. I’d ask Newham council to comment on it, but the press office has blacklisted me. Nothing doing there.

This letter gives some insight into council justifications for sending homeless people away – insight, if you like, into council interpretations of homelessness guidance in this era of intolerable pressure on housing. You’ll see where some of the bars are set.

Here’s the first excerpt. This stuff really is cold-blooded.

The excerpt says that Sara’s support networks of family and friends Newham are not key to the family’s wellbeing.

The officer writes:

“I accept that it would be disruptive for any family to have to move away from an area where they have established social links over a number of years and away from their family, and that this may be more disruptive for a family with young children like yours. However, I do not accept that the support of your family, friends or local community is essential to your household’s welfare.” (My emphasis).

There’s more.

The council concedes the move to Birmingham would be a wrench, but says that Sara’s family and friends could visit – for all the world as though occasional sightings of friends make up for the loss of daily contact and support. No mention is made of prohibitive travel costs, or the difficulties that some people would have travelling that distance:

“Google maps has confirmed that the distance from the Housing Needs Service in Newham to the accommodation… is 136 miles, clearly a distance likely to prevent you travelling back to Newham on a frequent basis. However, you can always commute by train to London and your relatives and friends could also in turn come to visit.” (My emphasis).

The state as we have it really is vile. Continue reading →

When you’re older and unemployed, the DWP actively takes the piss. More interviews from the jobcentre

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Have posted below a transcript from another recent interview at Stockport jobcentre. I’ve been leafleting there with Stockport United Against Austerity.

The interview was with Brian (name changed), 54.

Brian was signing on for JSA.

I’m posting Brian’s story to show again the senseless demands that the DWP makes of older unemployed people who really haven’t got a hope in hell of finding work – especially using the jobcentre’s failed methods.

I meet a lot of people in their 50s and 60s who sign on for unemployment benefits.

A lot of these older claimants worked in manual jobs in their day. Brian did. He left school at 15 and went to work building dry stone walls. He joined the army. Then, he worked as a security guard.

Employers cut manual workers loose as they get older. Their health often starts to deteriorate (Brian was disabled after an accident at work. He’d been found fit for work at a recent ESA assessment). People can’t compete for manual jobs with applicants half their age.

That’s one of the many reasons why their chances of finding decent work and pay are zilch.

People know this.

Brian certainly did. “The trouble is that once you get past 50, you’re knackered,” Brian said.

He felt that people from his sort of background – without education and literacy skills – really struggled as they aged:

“..what really knackered us up… [was that] we had poor schooling. Really bad.”

Jobcentres know how the land lies, of course – but still they force people in Brian’s situation to take part in so-called jobsearch activities.

Jobsearch activities never lead to employment – they can’t, by definition – but people must still trudge to their jobcentres to complete them. “Pointless” doesn’t begin to cover these perverse drills. This is the DWP making older, sick or disabled people dance for its entertainment.

Brian was one of many people I’ve spoken to at Stockport recently who had to attend the jobcentre to engage in a famously meaningless activity – to sit at a computer and apply online for tens and hundreds of jobs while jobcentre staff watched.

Nobody I speak to ever gets a job this way. EVER. People don’t even receive an automated acknowledgement a lot of the time. They just sit there clicking Send buttons on job applications until staff say they can stop.

Thousands of people at jobcentres around the country are forced to apply online for jobs this way each week. They must even pay for the privilege. At Stockport, people have to fork out £4 for a bus ticket to and from the jobcentre. People must travel in from miles away.

Said Brian:

“[In the days] when we had the [paper] job applications, I could hand those in. I would hear something back in a couple of days. I either got the job, or I didn’t get the job. [Now] I’m applying for five times as many jobs, [but] never hear a thing…it’s all on the computer. You’re not going to get a job just on internet.

Even job coach…she said, “I can’t understand why you’re not getting replies.”

I said, “when I was back in the 80s, 90s, it was about 15 to one [applying] per job at a rough estimate. Now you’re going for 350 to one. Everybody’s applying for the same fricking jobs, but half of you won’t hear….

It’s crap, honestly, what they have in there [at the jobcentre]. It’s not worth the space it is written on…there’s just not enough jobs out there…you’re applying and you get no replies… the system’s broken.”

It certainly is.

It is definitely broken for people who’ve been written off – older, disabled people who the system has decided belong on the scrapheap forever. Brian told me another story. He said that the jobcentre wouldn’t help him cover costs for his security badge, so that he could work in security again. He’d paid the money himself.

Renewing a badge costs about £220 – money Brian had struggled to find. God knows what goes on with these security badges. I find the whole system bizarre. It seems that sometimes, jobcentres pay for badges and sometimes they don’t. I’ve spoken to people whose badges the DWP has paid for and to people who’ve had to pay for their badges themselves.

Brian said he’d done a “different” course. Perhaps it wasn’t a DWP approved course. Or perhaps the DWP had decided that Brian’s age and health didn’t warrant a financial outlay.

Whatever the case, nothing was easily fixed. Nothing is ever easily fixed at jobcentres.

Brian was stuck where he was. Forever.

Everyone in these situations is stuck – stuck in this mindless plod between home and jobcentre every day, or week, or fortnight, or whatever, to go be seen applying online for hundreds of jobs that very likely don’t even exist.

There’s no exit from this terrible path. I feel very strongly that government conspires to keep people on it. It’s a criminal waste of time and lives.

Brian said that his work coach told him that the jobcentre would put his name forward for a careers’ course – but that he’d have to wait to find out if he’d been selected:

“…[my work coach said] Your name’s got to be picked out of a hat…I’ve got more chance of winning lottery than getting on that…” Continue reading →

Don’t care if you have to pick your child up from school. You must attend the jobcentre so we can watch you apply for jobs you won’t get

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Another story from recent leafleting outside Stockport jobcentre with Stockport United Against Austerity:

JSA and Universal Credit claimants say the jobcentre is presently forcing claimants to attend the jobcentre at least once a week to sit at computers and apply online for job after job. Jobcentre advisers watch while they do this.

People say they weren’t told why they had to attend these sessions in the first instance. They were just instructed to get to the jobcentre at a set time, or else.

Such regimes are not new. Most people who sign on are forced into these compulsory attendance activities. I interviewed people at North Kensington jobcentre who had to attend the jobcentre every single day to sign on. It really is Big Brother stuff – the DWP forcing claimants to a location where they can be seen. Can’t be long until government decides that people who sign on should be tagged.

None of this is about helping people find work, of course. It’s about a government department standing over people who are already trapped.

At these compulsory onsite jobsearch sessions, people just sit at computers and send off one job application after another. They literally never hear back about any of them. Often, they don’t know if the jobs they’ve applied for actually exist. People have to engage in this perfectly meaningless activity on work programmes and at work courses as well. I’ve sat with people as they’ve done it.

“Petty tyranny” is the phrase.

The depth of this pettiness (if there is such a thing as deep pettiness) never ceases to amaze. Jobcentres find any excuse for it at any level.

At Stockport recently, I spoke with one woman who’d just started these compulsory attendances.

She was on edge as it was. Her son had autism. His ESA had been stopped. So had her carer’s allowance and housing benefit. She was signing on for JSA to try for some income.

Now, she had another problem.

Her jobcentre adviser had set her next mandatory jobsearch-at-the-jobcentre session at exactly the time when she had to collect her ten-year-old daughter from school.

She said the jobcentre knew perfectly well that she had a schoolage daughter, but refused to change the time for the compulsory session:

“I’ve got to come here at three o’clock – but how am I supposed to pick my daughter up? They [the jobcentre] don’t care.

This is the only jobcentre [in Stockport]. If I walk, it will take me about 45 minutes. It took me an hour today on the bus, because of the traffic. What I’m going to have to do is take my daughter out of school early to come here. She’s missing out on her education.”

I’ll have to make some excuse up [to tell the school].”

I have a great many conversations like this with benefit claimants: stories about the DWP making already difficult situations even more difficult for people in agonising ways. Still, the DWP gets away with it.

This woman had problems enough. She was appealing the DWP’s decision to stop her son’s ESA. She was trying to sort out problems with his PIP and carer’s allowance.

Now, she had to drag her child out of school, and lie to the school about the reasons why, to get to a jobsearch session that in itself was pure charade. Non-attendance at that session would very likely mean a sanction.

This incident may sound small, but it absolutely wasn’t. It was part of a picture. Once the DWP has people, it never stops putting the boot in. Every part of their lives is fair game.