Meanwhile in the real world… rent arrears and Universal Credit

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For all those wondering about causes of homelessness and housing problems in Manchester, Oldham, etc…

Below is another example of fallout from government’s brilliant (not) decision to pay rent money directly to tenants rather than landlords when people claim Universal Credit. I’m working through a collection of recordings I’ve made this year with people who have benefit and rent problems. Thought I’d post this one, because it’s an example of the sort of silent fall that people in the real world continue to take while elections rumble on and online factions scream at each other:

A couple of weeks ago, I visited one of the Oldham lunchrooms which is attended people who have benefits, housing, addiction and money problems. A charity gives out a free lunch at this location every week. I go along to talk with people as they have their lunch. I’m being vague about the location and charity on this occasion, because the woman I recorded the conversation with below said that she already had problems with people in the area following her and targeting her:

“I’ve had every Tom, Dick and Harry in my flat… They’ve robbed phones, robbed money and they even took the food out of my cupboard… it’s me own fault with my head being a bit…”

This woman was small, frail-looking and cold – as in not dressed warmly enough. She’d come to see if there was a winter coat among the free clothes that the charity sometimes hands out. I took some pictures of her in a coat she found. I might pixelate and post them another time.

Anyway. This woman – let’s call her Kelly – was 49. Kelly was in trouble with rent arrears. She said that she her debt was £400 and counting. She also said that she had a letter which told her that eviction was on the cards. Her conversation was hard to follow in places. Kelly was confused, under the influence and obviously unwell. She was struggling to cope, she said, after a recent bereavement.

Kelly said that her rent situation started to become a problem when she was moved onto Universal Credit. She’s paid a lump sum of benefit money directly each month and must pay her rent out of that.

Kelly said that she was finding this level of management too hard:

“What they have done is they have changed my benefit. They put me on Universal Credit. [I’m] struggling. I got to pay the rent and I’m in arrears. They pay me every month.”

I asked Kelly why money management was difficult for her. She kept saying, “because of my bereavement… It’s my head… because of my bereavement this year…

“My rent is about £380 a month. I need to talk about a repayment plan… with my bereavement and that, my head’s all… I haven’t got children.”

The conversation was hard to follow, as I say. These conversations often are.

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DWP: “Closing jobcentres will improve the service.” People who use jobcentres: “No it won’t”

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Another interview from people who use jobcentres:

I recently went back to Clay Cross, where the DWP plans to close the local jobcentre.

People who use and work in the jobcentre are furious about the closure plans.

On the day I attended just before Easter, Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centre people were collecting signatures for a petition to keep the jobcentre open. It was one of the easier petition exercises I’ve been involved in over the years. Everyone signed. Even the jobcentre’s G4s security guard was happy to see people out the front collecting signatures.

“Oh, good,” he said when the petition was revealed.

The reason for this unity was obvious. People are angry about service closures in the area. The jobcentre is not the only local target at the moment. The Clay Cross Lloyds bank branch is due to shut. People also said that they worry generally about the local library staying open in the long term and/or about library hours being cut, because local councils are under such pressure. I got the impression that a lot of things feel tenuous.

Not that the architects of such closures give a damn about that, of course. Those people don’t even make sense a lot of the time.

“We’ve been clear that this is about improving the services we deliver, while making best use of taxpayers’ money,” the DWP told me when I asked last month about the impending closure of Clay Cross jobcentre.

Closing a service improves it, eh? I love this sort of line from officials who are trying to justify service closures. I really do. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. I would argue that it’s not actually possible to improve a much-needed service by closing it – certainly, locals never think it is – but government is always keen to argue that such a concept is perfectly logical everywhere. I’ve been interviewing people about service cutbacks for over a decade and I’ve never once heard anyone who uses jobcentres/libraries/banks/hospitals/whatever say “Yay – our local jobcentre/library/bank/hospital is closing. That’s a step forward for the town. That’ll make life easier.” Closures don’t make life easier for people who actually use the services. No doubt that’s the point.

Certainly, locals think that’s the point.

Take Mark, 46, at Clay Cross. I spoke to Mark outside the Clay Cross jobcentre for about half an hour (there’s a transcript from this conversation below).

Mark signs on for JSA at Clay Cross. He said that he would have to travel the half-hour by bus to Chesterfield to sign on if Clay Cross jobcentre closed (the return trip costs £4.20 and Mark did not think he’d be reimbursed for every trip. The DWP says that people won’t be reimbursed for signon trips: “claimants will only have to pay fares when they sign on – on other occasions if they are called into the jobcentre, fares will be reimbursed,” the department told me. I’m not sure how people who must sign on daily and so on will handle this. I suppose people who make a trip to a jobcentre to ask a question or get a form, etc, particularly when they can’t get through to the DWP on the phone, will have to fund their journeys themselves. There can be no doubt that people with support needs will find themselves on the rough end here. It’s definitely my experience that people with support needs who struggle with the DWP’s complex phone and form systems prefer to drop in to local jobcentres to try and get face-to-face help. Continue reading →

You can’t apply as homeless without an address. What.

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This week’s bureaucratic classic:

Yesterday, I was in First Choice Homes in Oldham with Paul, 67, who is homeless. He lives in a caravan at the moment (see pictures below). Joy.

Paul had to make a change to his homelessness and housing register application/record (they’re both on the same form, we were told). He needed to add medical information, because he had a new letter about his health from his doctor. He had to do this online as you must do most things these days. We were ushered over to First Choice’s computer bank as soon as we mentioned the change of circumstances at reception.

So.

Not long into the computer session, we hit a screen which demanded Paul’s address (again). There was, of course, a big and very immediate problem with this. Paul doesn’t have an address BECAUSE HE IS HOMELESS (he wasn’t able to fill in the House Type field either, given that there was no Caravan option in the menu). An address field on a homelessness form would surely be an optional extra in his case – and for the many people I meet who sleep rough, or sofa-surf all over the place, or whatever.  But no. The form would not submit unless the address fields were filled. This is the point where you have to cast about for any old shit that might work in the form fields – maybe a friend or relative’s address, or an older address if you have one. That hardly reflects your situation, though. It doesn’t give you much confidence in the process, either, given that the process doesn’t give accurate insight into your situation.

SIGH. Here’s a shot of the screen not working. It’s fuzzy, but you get the idea. The red fields and exclamation marks are as usual:

I can’t tell you how often my head is done in by public service applications and screens these days. There really does not seem to be a single benefit or housing application process which doesn’t involve a major hurdle or nine. Phone calls to the DWP and councils take ages/go nowhere. Online forms don’t work, or they demand information people can’t easily give. Some processes look and feel as though they were built in technology’s dark ages.

You can set aside a whole morning or afternoon to make calls, or fill in forms these days and get absolutely nowhere (I’ve set aside two afternoons this week for such calls and forms, and emerged no further ahead on both occasions). You inevitably conclude that all aspects of the system are designed to put people off applying. Certainly, very little seems to be designed with the real-life needs of real service users in mind. Can’t wait to see how much further things deteriorate as more and more public money is diverted into endless Brexit departments and projects. Out in the real world, this is how life goes. Continue reading →

“Rich get richer and poor get poorer… The greed is becoming demented greed.” More views from people on benefits

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More views on politics and benefits outside the bubble:

Each Tuesday from 11am, a group called The Ark puts on a few hours of free sandwiches, coffee, cake and bible readings at the Salt Cellar resource building in Oldham. There’s a pool table in the room which is popular as well. People from all walks attend. Some are in and out of street homelessness. Some have alcohol and drug addictions. Some have mental health problems. All worry about money.

A sign at the salt cellar

Image: A sign at the Salt Cellar

Many people at the sessions are affected by welfare reform. They have problems with housing, benefits and paperwork. I attend the Tuesday sessions every few weeks to record interviews on these and other issues. We talk about all kinds of topics: politics, Brexit, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, benefits, service cuts, housing, street homelessness, addiction, jail, family, aspirations – the works.

The transcript in the second part of this post is from a February interview with James, 50 and Paul, 47. I’ve spoken with James and Paul at length before.

For this post, I wanted to ask the guys for their views of people who must live exclusively on benefits – people such as themselves. Everyone else in the world has very strong, and often very negative, views of people who receive benefits. I like to ask people on the rough end what they think.

This can be hard. Not everyone wants to talk politics. Westminster is a world away much of the time.

When I arrived at the Salt Cellar, James and his friend Vance, 43, were out the front of the building, pushing bottles and belongings into their rucksacks.

Vance, James and I have known each other for about six months (you can read more about their stories here). They often ring me very late at night for a chat.

We all laughed as they put their bottles in their backpacks.

“It’s my Lucozade,” James grinned.

We sometimes meet outside the building. People who drink must drink their alcohol outside and behave when they go in. They don’t always. They get chucked out of lunchrooms if they’re pissed and/or aggressive, or when they bring in booze in backpacks. Different lunchrooms have different views on enforcement.

I’m for turning a blind eye to the boozing. I understand that people who run lunchrooms need to keep order – people bring babies and little kids to these places and you can’t have people smacked out on spice or booze or whatever – but there are dimensions that are hard to ignore. Sickness is one. Vance is definitely getting sicker. He’s lost so much weight in the past six months that I don’t like to ask him how he’s going any more. It’s obvious how Vance is going. His health sits in the mind. He’s skeletal. He looks pinched and pained around the eyes.

There was something else going on around Vance’s eyes that Tuesday, too. He had deep, bloody scratches under both of them.

“Jesus,” I said, pointing at Vance’s face. “What happened?”

Vance laughed. “Fuckers threw a cat at me,” he said. “If I find that cat, I’m going to fucking eat it.”

“He coulda lost his eyes,” James said. “That cat is really scared of the owner.”

“Bet it is,” I said.

Vance and James have neighbour problems. They live in a central Oldham flat. Vance was placed there by the local homelessness office in 2016 after years on the streets. James has lived at Vance’s for several months. Before he moved into Vance’s place, James was street homeless. Vance found James trying to sleep on the concrete landing outside of Vance’s flat, so Vance invited James in to stay. Says Vance: “He [James] was sleeping outside on the landing. I can’t see that, because I’ve been homeless meself…It is very cold and wet. You can’t sleep.”

There are dealers, users and all sorts in the neighbourhood. Smooth sailing is rare. A few months ago, a bunch of guys beat James up and threw him out of the flat (you can read about that here). I don’t know how the cat incident came about. I do remember that a couple of weeks after it, James turned up to lunch with a black eye.

“Relationship breakdown,” people usually say when I ask how people end up street homeless.

Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Image: Pool table at the Salt Cellar

Continue reading →

“Towards Work” activities to get a DHP and stayed housed. How big is conditionality going to get?

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Throwing this one out there for your inspection:

Recently, I came across strict, new-ish Derby City Council conditionality rules for people who apply for Discretionary Housing Payments, Council Tax hardship payments and Local Assistance help.

Those rules are here.

For those who don’t know the territory: Discretionary Housing Payments are short-term payments to help people cover housing-cost problems such as rent shortfalls. Local Assistance Schemes buy items like furniture and fridges when people can’t afford them. Council tax hardship payments are, obviously, for people who struggle to meet council tax bills after council tax support.

Since November 2016 in Derby, this help has come with hefty conditions for some applicants. Of course – it is not unusual for councils to ask people to engage in an activity such as debt advice in exchange for a DHP, etc. That’s happened for ages. The Derby list sets out more hoops to jump through. That’s why I’m posting it. I found it while I was searching for help generally for a single mum. Other councils may have similar. No doubt more and more will as time goes on and more funding is cut.

You’ll see from this page that people who apply for DHPs, Council Tax help and Local Welfare Assistance and fall into certain categories: “must be willing to take up and remain engaged with appropriate support recommended by the council.”

This “support” may include:

– money advice
– budgeting support
– access to banking products
– access to digital skills support
– access to job clubs
– training and housing advice

Failure to participate could mean you get and/or keep nothing:

“If you do not engage with your support programme, any award that you receive from the Single Discretionary Award Scheme may be at risk.”

“Towards work” requirements are among the conditions as you can see.

So.

You may think this is all perfectly fair.

I do not.

This is the kind of list which gets on my nerves very badly. It smacks to me of gatekeeping and of the state’s ever-tightening grip on people who are in extreme financial hardship. Conditions for receiving benefits and hardship help become more and more invasive and exacting, as anyone who signs on for JSA or Universal Credit will tell you. Anyone who requests state help these days automatically loses all right to autonomy. Continue reading →

No heating or hot water, because no spare money for problems. This isn’t going to change, is it

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Am posting this because I talk to so many people in the exact situation described below. I feel that the ongoing nature of these occurrences needs noting while mainstream press and political worthies devote attention and resources pretty much exclusively to Brexit and Labour infighting, etc.

I talk again and again to people in this sort of situation. Nothing seems to be changing very fast:

Here you see gas and electric fuel cards belonging to Patrick, a pensioner I spoke to at a foodbank and kitchen lunch in Oldham at the end of February.

Short story, this. Patrick had run out of fuel credit. Upshot: he didn’t have working heaters or hot water in his home. He’d come down to the soup kitchen, because he’d heard foodbanks and kitchens had fuel topup money and vouchers.

Patrick said he thought the boiler in his place might have sucked through more fuel credit than usual. Point was – he didn’t have the money that he needed to get the fuel supplies going again, or to keep supplies going for a reasonable length of time while he sorted the trouble out.

Which is the thing.

I know government doesn’t give a damn about this, but I’m saying it anyway. Again. There are people who don’t have £10 or £20 or £30 or £100 or whatever to throw at everyday financial difficulties. When the problems come, they’re major by definition. As soon as these problems hit, people find themselves trying to live without the basics in the space of a day or two.

A new boiler guzzles a few extra quid on a metre and that’s a big worry. People lose a tenner or £20 walking down the street and they’ve got a problem. They miss a rent payment for whatever reason and end up with rent arrears that they’ll never escape. Long story short: there’s a whole bunch of people who can never buy themselves peace of mind for even an hour.

As I see it, people fall into one of two groups these days.

There’s the group of people who always have a few quid spare to throw at life’s everyday crises: unexpected fuel costs, charges for a doctor’s letter, lost money, a lost phone charger, extra phone costs, a torn winter coat, lost trainers, extra housing costs – whatever.

Then, there’s the group of people who don’t. People can either pay their way out of a problem, or they can’t. And that’s it.

You can forget popular political binaries such as The Deserving and The Undeserving Poor. That sort of thematic populist crap couldn’t be less relevant to reality. All that matters in reality is whether or not you have enough money to buy distance from life’s curveballs. There’s a big gap between people who do and don’t. Still.

DWP: We can’t attend a public meeting on a jobcentre closure because the meeting is public. BOLLOCKS.

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A total classic from the DWP:

Last night, I attended a public meeting in Clay Cross about the DWP’s plans to close the Clay Cross jobcentre.

On arrival, the Derbyshire Unemployed Workers’ Centres people said that the DWP’s Midland Shires district manager had pulled out of an invitation to attend the meeting.

I was intrigued to hear this. Everyone was.

The DWP’s explanation for this non-attendance seemed to be that the meeting had been tweeted as public and public attendance at the meeting had actually been encouraged. Public = Bad. In an email to the DUWC organisers, the DWP said that they couldn’t come, because the district manager’s attendance at a public meeting would “break the consultation conventions.”

You may be wondering what the hell that means. Here’s a bit more detail (I trust I have this straight in my head):

The DWP’s jobcentre closure plans had been open to a public consultation earlier this year. That consultation is apparently now closed. The DWP doesn’t attend public meetings after a consultation is closed, because that is Wrong. Or breaks “consultation conventions.” Or is Against Protocol. Or something. I did try to find out this morning – an investigation that didn’t go too well. After an arsey conversation with the DWP (see below), the DWP emailed me to say that the district manager in question had originally agreed to attend the meeting because the DWP thought the meeting was private. The DWP pulled out when they found out it wasn’t. I can’t say that admission actually helps the DWP’s case if we are talking about transparency, openness and readiness to meet with service users, which we are. They think it does for some reason.

What I can say is that people at the meeting weren’t impressed. It sounded very much like the DWP didn’t want to attend a meeting that might a) include actual pissed-off service users who were angry about their jobcentre being closed and b) end up as a matter of public record.

What? said people when the DWP’s non-attendance was announced.

“Unfortunately,” DWP Midland Shires said in its email on the topic to DUWC, “due to the fact that the meeting on 16 March has been “tweeted” (sic) as a public meeting and attendance encouraged, to that end we have been advised by our policy team that it’s not appropriate for him [the district manager] to attend as this would break the consultation conventions.”

I am not afraid to reveal that this kind of shit really hurts my head. The DWP couldn’t come to a public meeting because that public meeting was public. The fact that the public had been encouraged to attend this public meeting might make the meeting even more public. This last being the case, the DWP needed to keep further away. Consultation conventions (whatever they are – the DWP didn’t quite touch on these in its response to me) aside, the district manager could, surely, have attended as a show of goodwill at the very least. Or as a show of responsibility, even. The closure proposal has the district manager’s name on it. At the very least, someone from that office could stand up and answer to it. In public, etc. But no. The public meeting was too public.

Do go on, I thought.

The email did.

Continue reading →

Homeless and placed in a neighbourhood where people think you’re a nark

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More life and political views from people who must rely on benefits:

Posted below is a transcript of a recorded interview made recently with Michael (named changed on request). Michael is in his mid-50s. We made this recording at a foodbank and kitchen lunch in the Manchester area in February (Michael asked for his details to be kept anonymous).

Most weeks, I spend several hours at foodbanks and kitchen lunches recording interviews with people who rely exclusively on benefits. In the mainstream press and politics, we hear a lot about Just About Managing Families and the Squeezed Middle, and other groups that have some political clout. We hear less from people who are marginalised and considered irrelevant. That’s a pity, because people who are considered irrelevant have a lot of relevant experiences, particularly when it comes to dealing first-hand with fallout from welfare reform. We talk about everything at our meetings: homelessness, housing, money, work, politics, Brexit, drug and alcohol addiction, mental health, family and the DWP.

Michael talked about most of those things.

He was particularly concerned about his living arrangements.

Michael had recently been street homeless. He’d even stayed on the floor of his local church for a time. A few months ago, he was placed in a flat on an estate by his local homelessness office. He liked the flat, but wanted to move. He wanted to get away from another drinker on the estate. He said that his neighbours bullied him, because they thought he was a nark.

Michael said people thought this because he spent a lot of time in the company of a copper. (I wasn’t sure if Michael meant a copper, or a community support officer, or another sort of volunteer. People deal with countless agencies and support workers. Wires get crossed). There may have been other problems, but Michael didn’t volunteer them. He said the policeman worked with a local community partnership. This support worker sometimes took Michael to benefits assessments and GP appointments. He helped Michael fill in benefit application forms.

Michael received Employment and Support Allowance. He’d had a serious heart attack a couple of years ago. Michael said that money was tight. He couldn’t afford to run the heating at his flat for more than half-an-hour a day. He wore many layers of clothing on the day that we met: a shirt, several sweatshirts and his coat. The clothes were dirty. He said he wore the clothes to bed for the warmth.

Michael was informed and eloquent. He read the papers. He said he had a degree and had worked in different parts of the world in well-paid professions. He’d lived in Asia for years and knew a great deal about different countries there. He’d also had a serious drink problem for years. In recent times, the booze had caught up with him, as it does when people reach 40 or 50. The pancreas goes, the liver goes, the heart goes, the balance goes and the mental health goes. The money’s gone. People talk a lot about things they did and things they say they did. Michael was still drinking. He looked unwell. His face was pale and pouchy, and his hands trembled. He held them out to show me. He looked sick with hangover and he probably was. It was good to know that he was at least housed and had some money coming in. Alcohol is such a wrecker. There’s nothing much left at the end.

We talked about the booze, Michael’s heart attack and his homelessness, government, Brexit (“the most unfortunate thing is that David Cameron ended… George Osborne…they were rebuilding the economy, doing a fantastic job,”) and his fears for his safety in the neighbourhood he’d been placed in. Being pegged as a nark weighed heavily on Michael’s mind.

This is the story that Michael told. This is the sort of conversation I have with someone every week or so. Michael began by talking about the way his relationship with the copper had come about:

“When I went to hospital [for a recent appointment, because of Michael’s health problems after his heart attack] – they’ve got a new community support team there. You’ve got the housing company, the health people, [the] council and the police. They all work together in a team in this unit.

A policeman is my designated support worker. He’s plainclothes CID, quite senior, but he’s a really nice bloke and we’re good friends now. He is my personal support worker. [He] give me lifts in his car – makes sure I get to the hospital and dentist’s, and things like that… [he] helps me with all my paperwork. Without him, I’d be absolutely lost.

The trouble with it is because I’ve only been there [living in the flat he was placed in by the local housing office] for six months, I’m seen as a relative newcomer… The people who have lived as residents for many years there really dislike the police, so they see me as some sort of police informant. They don’t get it that when he’s [the policeman] is working at that hub, he’s not being a policeman. He’s not being a copper on duty. He’s actually working as part of the community team.

What they’re trying to do [with that team] is instead of the people going to the authorities, the authorities go to the local villages to support the people with all kinds of issues – health, financial, gas, heating, hate crime. They’re there to support…not to go around arresting people, or hindering people. But the local residents just don’t get that this guy is supporting me…

People have made lots and lots of threats. [I’ve] been hit a couple of times… I live there on my own. I’ve got no backup at all. My mother and father are dead. The only friends I’ve got are in London… plus, I’ve got a degree, so they see me as some sort of pseudo-intellectual… foreign… outside that’s come in working in conjunction with the police and knocking at their world. Which I’m not.

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