Why are we talking about student debt but not benefit debt?

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Article about benefit debt by me on Open Democracy today

We need an amnesty on benefit debt NOW.

The state and its ‘providers’ are crushing people with debt. Rather than helping people, organisations like councils and the DWP own people. The problem is as urgent as student debt – and an amnesty is long overdue.

A string of so-called welfare reforms mean that people are paying extra costs they could never afford in the first place – the bedroom tax, rent shortfalls because of LHA caps and benefit caps, council tax because of council tax benefit cuts and exorbitant court costs when they’re taken to court for non-payment. People lose their ESA, face Universal Credit delays and are often paying off DWP loans. They must try to sort these problems out by dealing with horrendously dysfunctional, bare bones public sector bureaucracies that can’t deliver.

People are in debt – probably permanently – to councils, the DWP and housing providers. These are the very organisations that are supposed to support (ha) people most in need.

I meet people who owe hundreds and even several thousand pounds to councils, courts, housing associations, the DWP, bailiffs and all the rest.

In work or not, people will never have the money to get out. They will never have the income. Incomes are too small and debts are too large.

Read the whole article here.

It’s disgusting that people most in need are excluded from help by useless benefits application systems

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And I’m back…with another example of the flawed and downright nonsensical systems people must use to apply for benefits.

This post is about an application for Personal Independence Payment. What a drawn-out mess this one has been:

Regular readers will know that I’ve written several articles this year about Paul, an Oldham man in his 60s. Paul has a heart condition and a defibrillator implant. He has problems with pain and walking, and depression.

Paul is also homeless – or as near to homeless as people can be without actually sleeping on the street. When we first met this year, Paul was living in a tiny, grotty, falling-apart static caravan on an Oldham campsite. First Choice Homes, the local homelessness office, considered Paul adequately housed in that caravan. More recently, Paul’s been living in temporary hotel accommodation. He was moved, because a man living on the caravan site threatened him. I mention Paul’s housing situation, because unstable, insecure housing has a real bearing on people’s attempts to claim benefits. We’ll get to that.

Let’s look at the dreadful PIP application “system” as Paul has experienced it. A person of Paul’s age and with his health and housing problems should NOT have to struggle as he has to get support. Nonetheless, this often-hopeless PIP application system is considered adequate for sick and disabled people who are most in need. This has to change. Now.

Until the end of last year, Paul received Disability Living Allowance. In December 2016, the DWP sent Paul a letter to say his DLA would end (DLA is being phased out and pretty much everyone will have their DLA claim closed and have to apply for PIP). Paul had to apply for the new Personal Independence Payment if he still wanted disability support.

Applying for PIP meant Paul had to take these steps:

– Request an application form

– Gather medical certificates and doctors’ letters to support his application

– Attend a face-to-face assessment to explain to an assessor why he should receive PIP.

You may think these steps were/are straightforward. They are not.

Paul experienced four major problems with his application:

– The DWP didn’t know which papers it had received from him. This confused and concerned Paul greatly, because he’d posted sensitive medical information

– Paul wasn’t sent a date and time for a face-to-face assessment. He says he was never told that an assessment date had been set. The DWP closed his claim for missing the face-to-face appointment he didn’t know about. Paul was denied PIP and had to start his application again. He had no recourse. (I’ve been in touch with another person who had a similar experience. John Pring at Disability News Service has reported on this problem in detail).

– A second face-to-face appointment for the second claim was cancelled at the last minute. This set Paul’s application back another fortnight.

– Texts that Paul received from the DWP made absolutely no sense. Two texts said the DWP hadn’t received Paul’s application forms – forms he’d sent. Shortly after those texts arrived (half-an-hour after in one case), Paul received texts which said the DWP actually HAD received the forms. I’ve seen these texts. This “no, we haven’t received your sensitive information – oh, hang on, yes, we have,” stuff really upsets people who must trust these bureaucracies with sensitive medical details. Continue reading →

Student debt dominates debate – but where’s the political sympathy for people crushed by council tax debt, DWP loans, rent arrears and sanctions debt?

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I have an article on the debts people owe in austerity at politics.co.uk today:

Student debt dominates headlines – but why don’t we hear arguments for writing off debt for people who austerity has crushed with council tax charges, DWP loan repayments, sanctioned benefits, rent arrears, court fines and all the rest? Where’s the political sympathy for writing off debt for these people? Where are the headlines for that?

“Staying housed, battling bailiffs, fighting councils for housing, sorting out benefit sanctions and paying rent arrears, fines and DWP loans really is a full time job. Benefits are constantly threatened and sanctioned by the DWP. Housing benefit and paying rent becomes a mess when people shift their claims to Universal Credit. People end up with rent arrears because their local housing allowance doesn’t cover their private sector rent. They are charged court costs for eviction and struggle to get council help for a new place… People are paying council tax arrears. They’re paying back loans to the DWP which go on and on. The letters and demands pour through the door. They’re in hock to the state and its providers forever. That’s the point. The system isn’t helping these people. It owns them. They can’t get out, because they’re not allowed out. It’s time that the political class stopped insisting they try.”

Read the rest here.

Why does it take the DWP so long to process sick notes? Why must people put up with such useless systems?

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Feel free to email your views and experiences on this if you don’t want to leave a comment. I know many of you have canvassed this topic in recent times:

In the past fortnight, I’ve called the DWP’s 0345 600 0723 Universal Credit line twice to ask about the best place to send the sick notes (DWP calls them fit notes I think) which excuse benefit claimants from jobsearch activities. Sick notes are crucial when a Universal Credit claimant is sick or injured. They explain why people can’t work or carry out jobsearch activities. Benefits can be sanctioned if people miss job activities without a medical note.

Problem is this. People raise concerns with me about sick notes and other communications to the DWP not being properly recorded, or taking ages to process, or being processed out of order, or apparently not even arriving when posted to the DWP. God knows what’s going on with all of this. You should see the masses of paperwork that goes to and from the DWP and benefit claimants. Keeping track is a nightmare.

Last week, I called the DWP after speaking to a volunteer at South Chadderton foodbank. Her 40-year-old son had his Universal Credit sanctioned in June. He’d been about to start a warehouse job in May when he broke his wrist. His sick note from his doctor should have excused him from the placement and jobsearch activities. Something went wrong. He was sanctioned. His mother wondered if there’d been a problem with the processing of his sick note. Nobody was sure at the time of interview. The DWP still hadn’t sent a letter explaining the reasons for the sanction. People were still trying to guess what had happened.

Because I’d spoke to this woman and because others have raised this issue, I decided to call the Universal Credit line to ask general questions about the best place to send sick notes. I especially wanted to know if people everywhere could drop their sick notes in at their jobcentres, or if they should send them in to the DWP’s Freepost address.

Four points emerged from those phone calls (one made on 14 July and the other on 17 July). All four were cause for concern, so I’m putting them here. Feel free to weigh in.

1) The DWP seems to have a sick-note processing backlog of some description, so claimants must allow time for sick notes to be processed. The officer I spoke to last Monday said that UC claimants should allow up to seven days for sick notes to be processed: “because obviously they’re [staff are] so busy.” People online report delays of ten days for DWP mail processing.

That “obviously they’re so busy,” is a line I’m sick of hearing. Why are delays in this area considered so acceptable? Why must benefit claimants always wait and wait before their information is dealt with? The people who use these so-called systems are on extremely limited incomes. Those incomes depend on the right paperwork getting to the right people IMMEDIATELY. Everything can go wrong if it doesn’t. Claimants could be sanctioned if they missed a jobsearch activity while an explanatory sick note was stuck in a pile. If there are processing delays because staff are “so busy,” someone needs to hire more staff.

Continue reading →

You won’t get PIP because you failed to attend a face-to-face assessment you didn’t know about. What.

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Be interested to hear if this has happened to others:

I’m working at the moment with a man whose Disability Living Allowance was stopped in April this year.

He applied for Personal Independence Payment, but says he never received a letter or a text to tell him when his face-to-face assessment for PIP would be.

What he did receive a couple of months later was a letter to tell him that he wouldn’t get PIP because he didn’t attend the face-to-face meeting. As he says – he didn’t attend the face-to-face assessment because he didn’t realise that it was on. He didn’t get a letter or a text telling him where and when it would be.

So he applied again. A time and date for a face-to-face assessment was set up for last Friday. I was going to attend the assessment with him. Unfortunately, that assessment was cancelled at the last minute, because the assessor called in sick.

Two people have told me that they’ve recently had this experience. They received a letter advising them that they wouldn’t get PIP because they didn’t attend a face-to-face assessment – a face-to-face assessment that they say they were never told about. In these cases, the part of the comms which tells people they’re not eligible for PIP seemed to work better than the part which tells people when and where to show up for eligibility tests.

It seems unlikely that either person simply chose not to attend. Applying for PIP is a form-filling nightmare. I doubt very much that anyone would go through all that and then not attend the face-to-face assessment when given a date and then apply for PIP again for the lulz.

Has anyone else out there had a similar experience? If you have and don’t want to leave details in the comments, feel free to contact me here.

Am also interested to hear from people who had their face-to-face assessments cancelled at the last minute.

Making people wait for PIP assessments and payments really is rubbish

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Was meant to go to a PIP assessment with someone this morning.

The assessment was cancelled at the last minute because the assessor called in sick. Guy I was going with has to wait another fortnight now for another assessment appointment. He hasn’t had any DLA or PIP money since April due to one stuff-up after another.

On it goes. Or doesn’t go, I should say. While Brexit and party-political shenanigans suck up headlines, attention and resources, real life for real people who must use public services, benefits and support systems continues to be something of a challenge.

People sent by councils out of London like this will be parked on benefits for life. Is that the actual aim.

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Here are a few thoughts on the council trend to force homeless people out of London AND on the supremely unhelpful council homelessness system that people must battle through to get any housing help at all:

Regular readers will know I’ve been writing about Chantelle Dean, a 32-year-old woman who is about to be evicted from her private-sector rented flat in Newham.

Chantelle’s landlord wants the flat back, so Chantelle must leave. She’s just received her final eviction notice. The bailiffs will be round to throw her out on 27 July. Newham council won’t help Chantelle with emergency housing until that day:


 

 

 

Two points to put to you today:

1) Sending Chantelle to live out of London makes absolutely no sense – unless the aim is simply to get poor people out of rich people’s faces 

Chantelle has good reasons for wanting to find another flat in London. She has a three-year-old son who starts school in September. She receives Income Support at the moment. She wants to give herself the best chance to find work and training when her son starts school. Chantelle’s mother lives in Newham and can look after Chantelle’s son for free. Still, the council has told Chantelle to look for flats out of London (you can read email exchanges on that subject here). That’s because Chantelle will struggle to pay the inevitable shortfall between her housing benefit entitlement and expensive Newham rents.

So.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: moving mothers with young children to places where they’re a long way from work and free childcare is a very sinister move.

The concept is a cruel nonsense by definition. If you send people who have no money away to live in areas where there is less work and no family nearby for free childcare, you cut people off from opportunities as a matter of course and they disappear. No doubt that’s the idea – Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind and all of that. Continue reading →

Why do people return and return to foodbanks? Because their benefit problems don’t get fixed for ages. If at all.

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I was at the South Chadderton foodbank this morning and talked with some of the Monday volunteers.

I asked the volunteers why people were restricted to a certain number of foodbank visits in a set period of time. The limit is generally about three visits every six months or so – limits vary from place to place. The South Chadderton volunteers said today that the limit was now four visits.

I also asked if foodbanks showed discretion about these things – whether they could give out food parcels even if someone had reached their quota. Last week, I spoke to Pat McCullough, a 67-year-old Oldham man whose pension credit had been stopped for reasons he didn’t understand, and who’d reached his limit for foodbank visits while a caseworker helped him sort the pension credit problem out. He’d had four foodbank vouchers recently.

Jean Jones, who is one of the South Chadderton volunteers, said one reason that some people returned for three or four food parcels was because their problems with benefit sanctions and/or benefit delays, etc, now took so long to fix. This is worth noting. I find this myself again and again.

“The theory is, if you’ve got it [a foodbank voucher] for your benefits sanctions [to cover food while a benefit is sanctioned]… or whatever reason, the theory is that by the time you’ve had four [foodbank] vouchers, [the problem] should have been solved. The problem is [that] it isn’t [solved].”

I’ve certainly spent time with people who’ve had such experiences. I’ve attended jobcentre meetings with people who’ve literally waited months for a full Universal Credit claim to be properly started. I went to Kilburn jobcentre many times last year with a disabled woman whose benefit claim was closed when she was too ill to attend the jobcentre and who for weeks couldn’t find anyone to help her start her claim again (she was really ill – she had a bloodclot on her leg). Her housing benefit claim was stopped at the same time. She ended up with rent arrears and all kinds of problems. That one took months to fix.

I’ve spoken to no end of people in the last year who’ve had their benefits cut for weeks because they missed meetings that weren’t even compulsory, or who’ve been forced to pay rent arrears that their housing associations knew perfectly well they couldn’t afford, or who must pay exorbitant and very unfair court fines. Point is, these problems take ages to solve – if people can find anyone to help solve them at all. I meet a fair few people who just give up. It can take ages to get through to someone on the DWP phone lines. Jobcentres will rarely help people solve problems on the spot. Instead, advisers make formal appointments for people who have problems with their benefits. These appointments are often set a week or two or even further down the line. There’s not a lot of resource in jobcentres these days and government is about to close a bunch of them down.

Jean said her own son was on a Universal Credit sanction at the moment and that he still wasn’t sure why his money had been stopped, or how long the sanction would last. His UC wasn’t paid last month. He’d sent in a sick note to Universal Credit which excused him from his jobsearch requirements for six weeks, but that note seemed to have been lost in the mail, or disappeared forever into the black hole that is the DWP bureaucracy, or god knows what. He was waiting for a letter from the DWP, which apparently is due to arrive this week and will tell him why his benefit stopped, and how long it will be stopped for. The hope was that all would be revealed when the letter turned up.

So. Worth noting, as I say. Say what you like about benefit claimants – and plenty of people do say what they like – but the fact is that a lot of people are at the mercy of a system which falls over all of the time. People are left with nothing to live on while they try to address problems such as stopped benefit claims, reduced benefit claims, lost sick notes, court fines and all the rest of it. Those problems seem to go on forever these days. Maybe someone wants to fix that.

Q: Should there be limits on the number of times people can use foodbanks, or get help? Answer: No.

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I was speaking to a man called Pat McCullough, 67, at the Ark lunch kitchen at the Salt Cellar in Oldham yesterday.

Pat raised an issue that comes up a lot – the limit on the number of times in six months, or in a set time, that people can visit a foodbank for food parcels and/or get fuel voucher topups.

Pat’s fuel cards with no credit on them earlier this year

Pat, who is ex-army and having problems with money because his pension credit stopped for reasons that various people are trying to get to the bottom of, said that he’d reached his limit of three foodbank visits in six months.

Everyone I talk to who attends foodbanks here quotes the “three visits in a set time limit,” rule, often without prompting. People certainly see the “three visits” line as a policy, not as a useful flag.

Some places enforce these limits more strictly than others. You get good people and you get strict people, and you get confusion. There are also a number of different places that hand food out. Some require vouchers. Some don’t.

Pat said he’d had four foodbank referrals of late. He’d also had a couple of fuel topup vouchers, but didn’t think he’d be eligible for more for a time. He said he was using emergency credit for his electricity and gas cards at the moment.

Pat is a regular at the Tuesday lunches. I’ve written about his problems with paying for fuel before. Which brings me to the central point of this post in a roundabout way: There are a lot of people out there who I see again and again, and whose circumstances never really change. That being the case, why have limits and rules at all?

The real problem people have is that they are permanently stuck. They are permanently stuck without money. That’s the issue. They’ll never have the money that they need to get completely free and clear. A few quid here and there won’t change things.

That’s why “popular” concepts such as compulsory Debt Advice or Money Management lessons for people who apply for council or charity support always have me sighing very loudly. I wonder if we really get anywhere with any of that – a debt management person telling an impoverished person that they might be able to repay a few pounds each week on a massive court fine or whatever if they spend two quid less, say, on chips. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul.

So what if people spend a few quid on booze, or fags, or a hamburger, or whatever. So what if some debt management worthy tells people off for spending that money. It doesn’t matter a damn when you look at the real equations. A handful of change doesn’t make an impact on the big sums and debts at all. Continue reading →