DWP to disabled woman with bone fractures: Don’t miss hospital appointments. To meet Universal Credit conditions, you must show you’re trying to get better

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Wtf indeed.

On Wednesday, I spoke at length with Karen Sheader, a Hartlepool women who is a director at the Shoot Your Mouth Off film production company for people with learning difficulties.

Karen has the bone condition osteopetrosis. She’s liable to serious bone fractures. Both her legs are broken at the moment.

She had to take leave from work, because of those fractures, and so applied for Universal Credit earlier this year. This was a shambles in itself – her claim took months to start and she got to the point where she was worried about losing her flat if she went into rent arrears while waiting for Universal Credit. More on that soon.

For now – the extraordinary comment her Universal Credit work coach made at one of Karen’s work-focused interviews.

The work coach said that Karen must make sure that she attended all her hospital appointments to meet Universal Credit claimant commitments – that conditions for benefits included proving that she was doing everything she could to “get better.”

What are these work coaches even talking about?

Are they saying that attendance at medical appointments is an actual condition for claiming benefits – or is it simply that they’re now all so programmed to bang on about getting back to work or into work that they come out with any rot that might serve as a threat? Maybe the DWP really thinks that the only reason anyone ever misses a hospital appointment is because they’ve chosen to avoid healing and avoid work as a lifestyle option. Thinking that about everyone must be hard. These clowns are obsessed.

Karen says she had literally never considered not attending her hospital appointments, because she would very much like to get better and to return to the job and organisation that she has put so much time into. Would have hoped the DWP knew that.

There are days when I wonder where the DWP’s mania for work at all costs will end – if it ends at all, that is. Don’t suppose we can count on that.

We’re obviously well on course for a point where people have their benefit money sanctioned for not only missing a medical appointment, but for missing an hour with the physio, or even a swim class, or maybe even for not shopping at health-food outlets. It’ll be compulsory to participate in any activity that some policy wonk imagines will hasten a return to health and to work.

“If you don’t pay your rent, we’re going to look at every penny you spend and see whether you’re intentionally homeless…” How contempt for homeless people really plays

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This is the third article in a series with a housing officer who talks about the realities of providing housing services at councils in austerity across London and Greater London councils.* There’s a transcript from the interview at the end of this post.

In this article, the officer talks about two issues that should enrage everyone:

1) the grossly unfair intentional homelessness decisions that some councils make

2) the contempt for benefit claimants and homeless people that drives some intentional homelessness decisions and some frontline officers generally. I and others have certainly seen that in the past few years.

The officer in this article says that some housing officers have completely bought into the government line that benefit claimants are scroungers and deadbeats. This won’t be news to some people, but it needs pointing out for those who don’t realise. Some officers are very fair and helpful (I’ve certainly seen that), but some are not. In austerity, government disdain for benefit claimants can trickle down to officers who are supposed to be providing support services for benefit claimants. Trickle down may not work too well when it comes to sharing wealth with everyone, but it works very well indeed when it comes to sharing disdain.

Says the officer:

“Individual [council] managers will be pushing this [finding people intentionally homeless]. [They’ll be] saying, “let’s look at this… they’re [tenants] expected to pay this [rent] shortfall now. This is why we have benefit caps and LHA rates.”

“They have this idea that these people are sort of scrounging cunts – they should be paying their shortfall and if they don’t, we need to find them intentionally homeless…”

and:

“Since 2010, you’ve got all the benefit porn on TV – this whole idea of unemployment and benefit claimants being scroungers and getting the blame for having to bail the bankers out… and that is coming into housing as well.”

Some of the “bullshit” intentional homelessness decisions that this officer has overturned at the review stage include an intentional homelessness finding against a woman who left a flat and the local area to get away from a man who’d raped her, and an intentional homelessness decision made in the case of a woman who was evicted for rent arrears after her abusive husband left and stopped paying rent.

Intentional homelessness decisions can have nasty repercussions. When a council decides that people have made themselves homeless intentionally, the council doesn’t help those people sort their homelessness problems out long term. It holds those people responsible for their homelessness.

I realise that’s a simple take, but simple is fine in this context. That is how people on the rough end experience intentional homelessness. I realise that the Homelessness Reduction Act should improve support to an extent, but I’m not talking about acts, or the rules that staff should follow in this post. I’m talking about the ways people can behave at a point in history when whole societies are encouraged to write benefit claimants off. I’m talking about officer mindsets in austerity. I’m talking about the contempt behind some decisions – the institutional contempt which can permeate minds and organisations at a time when political derision of claimants is rife.

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#UniversalCredit is based on a poisonous government loathing for people in poverty – and a genuine belief that people in poverty are lab rats

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This is a rant, but let’s have it:

Here’s a short list of long points re: some of Universal Credit’s fatal problems as I see them (literally – these are based in problems that people I’ve interviewed actually have).

1) Universal Credit is based on a truly terrifying government and political class contempt for people in poverty.

I have a lot to say on this, so let’s go:

The main point I want to make is that Universal Credit  is based entirely on the (false) premise that people in poverty are solely responsible for that poverty and any problems they have finding work. All Universal Credit problems flow from this political contempt.

The (highly misleading) idea behind Universal Credit (and its strict in-and-out-of-work jobfinding conditionaility) is that people only need a kick up the backside to get out of poverty. With Universal Credit, those kicks take the form of sanctions threats, constant reminders to find more hours in jobs that already pay almost nothing, and days on meaningless, fruitless, privately-provided “employability” courses.

In other words – if you’re poor, stop being poor, or else. That’s it.

This should make everyone furious.

It should make everybody furious, because it is entirely about government shifting blame for societal problems onto the shoulders of people who are least able to respond, or to take the financial burden. There is no acknowledgement whatsoever from government that the problems that land people in poverty might be external – that too many people these days can’t find enough decently-paid work to live on. I see this all the time, as does anyone who frequents foodbanks and jobcentres. It’s real.

Why does government think it has a free pass on this? There is no concession AT ALL to the fact that finding secure work which pays a wage that people can survive and thrive on is difficult, especially in some parts of the country, where it is incredibly difficult (I know this, because I travel around). There is no acknowledgement that government needs to address those problems before pointing the finger at the very people it has abandoned. There is also no concession that money which should be spent on wages and social security keeps disappearing into offshore tax havens. How long will this be tolerated?

Readers of this site will know I regularly interview people who experience these employment difficulties. I’ve interviewed cleaners, carers, housekeepers and people who work in warehouses and in other low-paid jobs. They all have the same problem – insecure employment, variable hours and low wages. They never get ahead. They never will. They never have the money to get ahead. They’re thousands of pounds behind, because they’re in debt. Welfare reforms such as council tax benefit cuts (and court fines for non-payment of council tax) and LHA and benefit caps pushed people into debt even before they were moved to Universal Credit.

As I see it (and I do see it, as I say) government’s answer to its own glaring job creation and wages failures is to set up a system such as Universal Credit and to tell people who receive it that they are responsible for the lack of local jobs and money, and that they need to pull finger to sort problems out. They must fix financial problems by meeting Universal Credit’s strict conditionallity rules and working endless hours for very little money in an unreliable, low-wage economy.

If anybody dares to supplement their non-income by thieving or dealing, they’re chucked in jail (I’ve lost count of the number of people on the breadline I’ve spoken to who’ve done time for such offences. Nobody seems to want to talk about that). It’s just a pity that the same strict rules for behaviour aren’t applied to all these tax dodgers we keep hearing about. Those people walk away from the havoc they create (or fly off in their private jets, or sail away in their yachts, or whatever).

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There is and will be another kind of austerity death – the slow death through neglect

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There’s much talk and fury (there should be more) about deaths related to benefit cuts: people dying after being found fit for work and people committing suicide following cuts to their benefits. There’s no doubt that current and one-time government ministers need to do jail time for this. And they will. There will most certainly be a reckoning.

There’s another sort of government destruction of people taking place that I want to raise again here.

It’s hard to quantify, but very obvious when you keep seeing it. A lot of people talk about it.

It’s the all-round annihilation of people’s health via the universal destruction of all the services they rely on – housing, care and income help in particular. The life expectancies of people in these situations MUST be adversely affected (to say the very least) by this all-round destruction. I really don’t care if anyone thinks such a statement is hysterical. It isn’t.

I know what I see. I keep interviewing people who are assaulted by government cuts on all fronts. Assault is not too strong a word.

People live in cheap rented housing which is disgusting and full of mould (I’ve posted pictures of some places I’ve been in below). This is the only housing that people can afford on LHA rates. I’ve interviewed people who live in tiny, grotty, falling-apart static caravans because they can’t afford anything else.

People’s care services have disappeared, because they can just about achieve the daily basics such as shopping and dressing on their own. They’re left to it as a result. No matter that they struggle with other aspects of running a home, such as keeping the tiny places they must rent clean and clear of mould (you can see that in the pictures below).

They are getting older, but must drag themselves to weekly jobcentre meetings to talk about work they’ll never get. They’re banned from jobcentres because they lose their tempers (perfectly understandably) when the DWP insists they apply for jobs that everyone knows they’re not eligible for. They’re thrown out of jobcentres when they try to drop in the sick notes their doctors must keep writing to cover people’s very obviously deteriorating health. The hours I’ve spent posting or delivering sick notes to the DWP and jobcentres for people who everyone at the jobcentres knows is neither fit nor eligible for work – I tell you what.

The “lucky” people are supported by collectives such as the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ group who really do make herculean efforts to keep things afloat for people. Other people just rot.

There’s no doubt in my mind that each of these problems hacks away at people’s health. Together and over time, these problems are dynamite. Because I see people again and again, I see the deterioration as it gathers pace over time – the weight loss, the worsening diabetes and respiratory health, and the decline in mobility. It’s neither hysterical nor naive to say that. I spend most of my time out talking with people who are in these situations.

People like me and plenty of others know what we see. We’re not the ones who are hysterical or in denial. Seriously. This is not exaggeration, or hysteria, or even the dreaded fake news. Fake news is the sort of thing you find in the average DWP press release – press releases which say, for example, that the DWP provides “tailored” services for sick and disabled people, even while jobcentre advisers are telling you that the DWP does nothing of the kind. I think that every mainstream outlet which publishes a DWP justification-for-policy statement at the moment is publishing fake news.

—————

Here are some pictures of places I’ve taken in the last few years.

You can’t tell me that the health of the people who lived in these places hasn’t been affected by these cramped, mouldly, filthy conditions. Anyone who says otherwise really is naive.

The man who lived in the first two places (he has learning difficulties and diabetes) has recently been found sheltered housing thanks to the efforts of the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group.

Mould in one-room studio flats in London (kitchen, bed, living space all in one room):

Man in his 60s living in an old static caravan (Oldham):

Some addicts can’t be “fixed” or “cured.” Provide hostels and wet houses for them. Lay off the sanctimony

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Time to share a few observations on that sanctimonious school of thought which says a) people shouldn’t give money to street homelessness people because they’ll buy booze and b) that the money should instead go to charities which “help” street drinkers.

I LOATHE that line. It implies that street homeless people aren’t entitled to the autonomy everyone else enjoys when it comes to spending/wasting money. It also implies that people who won’t/can’t stop using should be sidelined.

Which they must not be.

Let’s have a story:

Here is a picture I took recently of James, 50.

James is from Oldham. I met James in September last year. Since then, we’ve had lunch and played pool on the free table at the Ark in Oldham every month or so. I spoke to James last night. We’ll meet up again on Friday.

James has been in and out of street homelessness for years. I’m guessing that the drinking has everything to do with that. We’ve talked about it. In the time I’ve known him, James has been been banned from malls and various soup kitchens for aggro when pissed. When I saw James at the end of September, he was street homeless again. He’d just been turfed out of the temporary accommodation he’d lived in for several months:

“Don’t know what happened. The landlord come round last week and told us all to get out.”

Recently, James took a thrashing, as you can see. I met him at a Sally army lunch the day after it happened. He still had blood on his clothes. He had two black eyes, bruises down both sides of his face, a deep slash across his nose and a burn on his scalp where his head had been set alight for some reason. He wouldn’t show me the burn. He kept pulling his hat down.

“They told me it [the burn] is the shape of Ireland,” James said.

He also said, “I’m sick of people talking about it.”

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Is anyone getting information out of the DWP at the moment?

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I got a note from the DWP FOI yesterday to tell me a response to an FOI request that I sent last month about deductions from Universal Credit for tax credit debt would be delayed.

Of course – that’s happened before and not just to me. The point I making today is that I can’t get anything from the department on any front. The press office wouldn’t give me even a one line response to use about a fortnight ago for a question about private companies which do or don’t run Universal Credit contact centres (the department sent me a list I had and then I had to send another FOI. I couldn’t understand why the DWP wouldn’t just tell me who ran the contact centres).

And then there’s the fact that people’s requests for their own benefits paperwork go unanswered by the department.

Don’t like it.

“We’re cutting your benefit, but won’t say why. Get your arse to the jobcentre” – DWP to woman with serious mental health condition

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Readers of this site will know I’ve written regularly about Maggie (name changed), a 41-year-old Northampton woman with a schizophrenia diagnosis.

Maggie has been sectioned in the past and has spent time in hospital.

Maggie receives the Employment and Support Allowance benefit. Up until recently, Maggie was in the ESA Support Group, which is the group for people with the highest support needs.

The DWP suddenly changed that about a month ago. Maggie was sent to a Maximus face-to-face assessment. She got a letter at the end of September which told her that her ESA claim had been downgraded. She was now in the ESA work related activity group (which means that she must attend jobcentre meetings about finding work) and her benefit money had been cut.

The DWP did not tell Maggie why it had suddenly decided she was able to look for work and live on less money. Her condition has not changed. It’s actually worsened since local mental health support services were cut. No reasons for this decision were included in the DWP’s letter.

Maggie rang the DWP to ask the department to send her a list of reasons for this decision to push her into the ESA WRAG group. The DWP said it would send her those reasons by post. That was three weeks ago. The list of reasons has not arrived. Maggie can’t properly challenge the decision to change her benefits without understanding exactly what it was about her condition that the DWP thought had changed.

However – the DWP HAS managed to send other post to Maggie in the last few weeks. The department sent her a letter which told her in no uncertain terms that she must turn up to her jobcentre for a work-related interview, or risk benefit sanctions. The DWP has no problem getting that sort of letter – ie a threatening letter – in the post. That part of the system works absolutely fine.

That letter about the work interview at the jobcentre arrived almost immediately after the letter which told Maggie that her benefit had been cut (I was actually speaking to Maggie on the phone about the first letter when the second one dropped through the door). Maggie had to attend that first work-focused interview at her jobcentre last week.

I am getting very, very sick of this. You think the sex scandals in parliament are bad. This sort of story is as bad and worse. This is cutting off support to people in great need and dropping them in it.

With one pen-stroke, David Gauke and the rest of the DWP’s geniuses cut money and support to someone who has previously been hospitalised because her mental health condition is so serious. Nobody gives a stuff about that, of course, or about the effects that such letters have on people whose are already struggling to keep things going. After cutting her money, all the DWP offered Maggie by way of “support” (ha) was a threat about attending a jobcentre meeting.

How do Gauke and his bureaucrats still get paychecks for running this intentionally disastrous system – the system that people in the greatest need in our society must use? The situation I’ve described above is exactly the sort of scenario that sets desperate and unsupported people up for suicide attempts – horrible threats, pressure and reduced money, and nobody to help (welfare support and advice in Northampton is hard to come by). It isn’t even subtle.

So much for government taking mental health seriously. Do me a favour.

I won’t be letting this one go.

Of course we don’t inspect all flats we put homeless families in. No resources. Mould, broken boilers: we know temp housing is foul

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“[We] move [a homeless family] into [temporary accommodation] and of course it is full of cold and damp, and things don’t work, and there’s rats running around…”

“….I do remember somebody who did actually have a hole in the ceiling and rain was coming through.”

“Mostly, it’s mould is the biggest problem….you get some terrible places.”

“[When placing people in other boroughs]…They [the originating council] don’t have the resources to go and look at the accommodation before they move people into it.”

This is the second article in a series I’m writing with a housing officer who has worked (and still works) in council housing offices across London and Greater London*. There’s a transcript from this interview at the end of this post.

For this article, I asked the officer whether London councils inspect accommodation before they place homeless households in it. I was especially interested in checks on temporary accommodation when London councils send homeless households to other boroughs.

I asked, because I’ve interviewed quite a few people who’ve been disgusted at the standard of the accommodation that they and their families have been placed in both in and out of borough.

Councils ALWAYS insist to these tenants that temporary accommodation in other boroughs has been and is inspected, either by council officers, or by companies which manage that accommodation.

“That’s bullshit,” the officer told me (a view that tenants usually share).

“The biggest problem with accommodation is – obviously, a lot of councils are having to get accommodation out of their borough. [It’s] not always a long way out of the borough, but maybe the next borough, or the borough after that one.

They [the originating council] don’t have the resources to go and look at the accommodation before they move people into it.

They’ll ring up and say, “well, as long as they’ve got a gas safety certificate and an electrical safety certificate…” other than that, they ask the landlord, “is the accommodation nice and clean and all that?”

They’ll [the landlord] be like, “yeah, of course it is [laughs]…[then you] move somebody in there and of course it is full of cold and damp, and things don’t work, and there’s rats running around…”

“….I do remember somebody who did actually have a hole in the ceiling and rain was coming through. That was obviously somebody who got moved straight away… but obviously, they [the council] didn’t know that when they placed that person there. The landlord didn’t mention the hole in the roof, strangely enough.”

“Mostly, it’s mould is the biggest problem. That is a problem, because it’s health. It affects some people’s health and clothes, and everything else…you get some terrible places. It doesn’t even have to be that bad. You know if there is mould there, you ain’t going to get rid of it very easily.”

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Total of 40 minutes and more on hold to the DWP’s Universal Credit Debt Management line

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Keeping a record of these things:

Yesterday morning, I made two calls to the DWP’s Debt Management “helpline” – the 0345 850 0293 number that people who receive benefits, including Universal Credit, must use to sort out problems with debt money that the DWP deducts from people’s Universal Credit payments.

I had to call twice yesterday (I didn’t have all the information that DWP Debt Management required the first time around. Unfortunately, I had to make the first call to find that out). I was on hold for more than 20 minutes both times to that 0345 850 0293 DWP Debt Management helpline, as you can see in the image below. I also called the line on Friday and was on hold for more than ten minutes, before I had to hang up to deal with something else.

As far as I can tell, this number has a charge. (I have a phone contract which covers those charges – that’s why I make calls for people who don’t). I hope this is one of the numbers that David Gauke has decided will be free soon. All helplines lines should have been free in the first place (I’d ask the DWP’s press office where things are at on all of these lines, but their answer to all my questions these days is to submit an FOI. So I have).

People who ring the DWP Debt Management helpline only ring that number because they have a debt problem and are in serious financial hardship. They can least afford extra charges for phone calls:

I was calling on behalf of young woman who claims Universal Credit and whose story I’ve been covering. She is concerned about deductions for child tax credit debt that the DWP is taking from her Universal Credit payments. She disputes the tax credit debt. The DWP has taken over tax credit debt recovery for Universal Credit claimants from the HMRC.

Trying to get to the bottom of disputes and problems with deductions from benefits like this literally takes forever. It really does. It drives people out of their minds. The whole “process,” is unbelievably stressful. I can’t emphasis strongly enough the difficulties we’re having just finding the right people to talk to – or getting through to anyone at all.

I called Universal Credit on Friday to try and understand who to contact. We wanted to do two things – challenge the tax credit debt and stop the reductions from benefit. Universal Credit said we’d have to speak to the HMRC about challenging the tax credit debt decision, and then to DWP Debt Management about stopping or reducing the deductions the DWP was taking from the Universal Credit payments each month.

Universal Credit gave me two different numbers to call. There was no suggestion that Universal Credit could just me put through to DWP Debt Management. I had to make new calls all over again. I’ve literally spent the time I’ve had available since then on hold to DWP Debt Management.

I post this, because I want to keep talking about the problems that people who are on the lowest incomes and most in need have with these systems. Waiting on hold to a debt management department for more than 20 minutes when you’ve got a serious debt and income problem is dreadful. It really is. People have complicated situations, too. I had to call Debt Management twice yesterday, as I say, because I didn’t have all the information needed when I made the first call. That sort of thing happens all the time. It meant I had to find the information, dial DWP Debt Management again and wait another 20+ minutes for the phone to be answered.

This really is the sort of thing that has people climbing the walls.