“I stay away from my flat to avoid the bailiffs” – the joys of being hunted down for council tax

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Happy New Year, all.

Am kicking things off with a story about council tax, people who can’t afford to pay it, bailiffs who keep bashing on doors to demand money that people continue not to have and the almost-unusable council systems that people must use to try and sort things out.

Happy days.

Just before Christmas, I rang Redbridge council on behalf of a young woman who lived in Redbridge a couple of years ago. She was moved there from another borough to escape domestic violence. She lives in another borough now.

To get down to it: the councils in all three of the boroughs that this young woman has lived in over recent years have chased her – through the courts and with bailiffs – for council tax that she can’t pay.

This situation regularly spiralled out of control last year. The demands for money kept coming. Bailiff and court costs increased (and continue to do so). The bailiffs turned up. Towards the end of last year, visits from bailiffs became a regular feature in this young woman’s life. “I hide in the bedroom when they come…or I try not to be at home,” she told me. Imagine that. She spent the Christmas break staying away from her flat to avoid bailiffs. God only knows how many people live this way.

Point is – the thing is futile. It so often is. This young woman has repayment plans, but has run into trouble with these for the simple reason that she has no money. This is the key point to keep in mind. If people have no money, they have no money. Harassment by councils and bailiffs doesn’t change this basic fact. Neither does it magically improve people’s incomes. Councils can demand council tax and bailiffs can hammer on people’s doors, but we all keep finding ourselves back at the beginning. People who don’t have money can’t pay money out. They certainly can’t pay debts which increase out of sight with court and bailiff costs (there’s something called a compliance stage fee of £75 whacked onto this young woman’s paperwork. God knows what that is). They fall behind in payment plans, especially when things go wrong. This young woman signed up for Universal Credit, but waited weeks for money, as people do. She missed her council debt repayments. A friend gave the bailiffs some money before Christmas to put them off, but they’re back. You wonder how it’s all going to end.

Sometimes, I like to ask councils how they think it’s all going to end. Just before Christmas, I rang Redbridge’s council tax department to talk about this sort of situation in a general sense. Mainly, I wanted to see if there was room for a civilised or imaginative (don’t laugh) discussion about options for people who don’’t pay because they can’t pay, etc – options other than repayment plans they can’t meet, threats, bailiffs and jail for non-payment of council tax, that was.

The (very) short answer to this was No. I called Redbridge. The officer who answered that day wasn’t great (although we will give the council a few points for answering the phone at all. I didn’t spend ages in a queue, which was refreshing). Certainly, there wasn’t a lot of thinking outside the box going on.

I wanted to know if the council would be open to a constructive discussion about people who couldn’t meet council tax payments, or repayment plans that had been set up – people who were at the end of the line and harassed by bailiffs. I was trying to find out if there was any flexibility around at all. You can demand money from people all you like, but there comes a time where it’s obvious that payment is not a starter. What’s the big plan after that? Do you send bailiffs round every day? Do you chuck parents with young children in jail?

The officer said something along the lines of No, we couldn’t talk about options in a general way. The young woman would have to call the bailiffs to put them off. The problem was not with the council. The problem was with the bailiffs. I explained that this woman was terrified of the bailiffs and didn’t want to call them any more. The officer said “she’ll have to.” I said something like “hang on.”

Continue reading →

People who need help actively avoid seeking it now. Applying for benefits, housing, etc, is too torturous

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In the last few weeks, I’ve spent time with people in Oldham who’ve been in and out of street homelessness. There are some transcripts from some of these sessions at the end of this post.

You’ll see people talked about many things: reasons for homelessness, (“relationship breakdown”), Donald Trump (“you know on his head there… it won’t come off, that”), government, the state of the world (“atrocious”), Man City being full of wankers and so on.

I spent a lot of time with James, 49 and Vance, 43.

A few thoughts:

One point really stood out: the fact that James said he didn’t have any income to speak of. He didn’t receive any state assistance – no benefits, or council help with homelessness, or hostel accommodation. He hadn’t joined housing or hostel waiting lists.

He said that he tried, discovered that there was some problem with his National Insurance contributions (“your stamp when you work all your life,”) and ultimately decided to abandon the whole thing. He was reluctant to engage further. He was homeless and sofa-surfing at Vance’s place. Vance found James sleeping on the freezing concrete landing outside the flat that Vance had recently been placed in. Vance invited James in to stay.

James:

“Where Vance lives, it is a high rise flat. He find me on the top of it on the concrete floor sprawled out, sleeping. He come out of his flat. I’m on the floor on the concrete. Vance said to me: “go in my place.” He had a friend with him. He said go in there and knock on the door. He let me in. He picked me up.”

Vance:

“He was sleeping outside on the landing. I can’t see that, because I’ve been homeless meself…I did if for years meself. Absolutely years. I slept on the streets, but I got sick of sleeping on the streets, so I bought a tent. I lived in a tent for five year. It is very cold and wet… and with snow. You can’t sleep. You put your tent anywhere you can.”

So.

I mention James’ lack of income, because I have met a number of people in the same boat now – people who have no income and are in need for whatever reason, but who have abandoned attempts to get help from the jobcentre or the council and/or who give jobcentres and the council a wide berth. This needs pointing out as often as possible. People who should be getting help are not getting it. I’d go further and say people who are most in need of help are not getting it. If government’s aim was to put people off state help by making so-called support systems too torturous and painful to negotiate – job done and all that. I know that plenty of people are aware of this, but it’s worth another mention when you meet people who imply that sleeping on a freezing concrete landing is easier than applying for housing. Asking for assistance is not worth the wrangle. People hit hurdles early and leave.

“It’s called a rigmarole,” James said when we had a Sally Army lunch a couple of weeks ago and I asked him if he’d tried for hostel accommodation anywhere.

As I said, James reported that he’d been turned down for benefits and for housing – that problem with his stamp from his working days, he reckoned. Maybe there were other problems and other reasons. None of that matters. The point is that he and others I speak to don’t feel the system or those running it are inclined to sympathise, cut anyone a break, or sort problems out. Too many organisations are too controlling and too aggressive in their demands for paperwork, personal details and compliance with one ridiculous rule or another.

People expect to be pulled up for something they’ve *done* to make themselves homeless. Relationship breakdown (the starting-point a lot of people often give for their troubles), a prison record, mental health problems, job and house loss, the hardcore substance use that often goes with such losses – society doesn’t cut much slack for people with so-described self-inflicted wounds these days. Pity the same stringent standards aren’t applied to tax avoiders, or, say, MPs who blow public money on private tennis court repairs (hi, Oliver Letwin), or heating their horses’ stables (big shoutout to Nadhim Zahawi and his horses). David Cameron left his job recently due to a project fail and shitty colleagues, but I doubt he’s been round the jobcentre trying to get an adviser to understand why he walked away from work.

For everyone else, judgement permeates. Some charities are strident about not giving homeless people cash because they’ll *just* spend it on drugs and booze – for all the world as though withholding cash cured addiction and for all the world as though people are for charities to fix. Not all charities behave that way, of course. I’ve been to some drop in places where attendees have gone outside and come back smelling strongly of booze. Nobody has said a word. Rightly so. Punishment does not cure addiction. I think we’d know by now if it did.

“Foodbanks and stuff like that. And begging,” James said when I asked how he got by. Vance had some income from Universal Credit. “I’ve worked since I was 16,” James said. “I’ve not worked in the last couple of years, but I’ve worked since I was 16, since I was a child and paid the NI. They’ve going to scrap the benefit system. Nobody is going to get any benefits. Nobody. I’m not signing on. Not getting any benefits. No. I’ve not been claiming for a few years and it goes back on you. I just do it day by day.”

Continue reading →

About half the people who come to our foodbank are there because of benefit sanctions…

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Yesterday, I was over in Oldham talking to Mike Kendrick from the South Chadderton foodbank. The South Chadderton foodbank is open on Mondays from 11am to 2pm.

He reckoned that about 50% of the people who came through the foodbank’s doors were there because they had been sanctioned by the jobcentre. A high proportion, I thought.

Needless to say, I have a big problem with government/DWP denials of any relationship between benefit sanctions and social security cuts, and foodbank use. One of the main reasons I find these denials hard to accept is that I keep meeting people outside jobcentres who say that jobcentre advisers tell them to go to foodbanks if a sanction/loan deduction/cut to money means they’re out of money.

So. There may not be a link between sanctions and so-called “welfare reforms” in the government’s mind, but there certainly is a link between all of these things in the minds of jobcentre advisers and people who sign on. There also seems to be a link in the minds of people who provide foodbank services.

More soon. Spending a lot of time talking with people in Oldham at the moment, so more updating next week.

Homelessness in a northern winter can’t be good

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I’ve met a number of people recently who don’t seem to have any housing or income to speak of. More needs to be said about this, so here we go.

I’ve been spending time in Oldham recently, at drop-in lunches and afternoons talking with people who are in and out of street homelessness. Am transcribing longer interviews which should be posted in the next couple of weeks.

Here’s an excerpt from one conversation.

James, 49, is staying with Vance, 43. James says he has no income. He’s not signing on for benefits, because he thinks there’s a problem with his national insurance contributions not being up-to-date from his working days (“you know. Your stamp when you work all your life,” James says). His relationship ended and he had nowhere to live (“relationship breakdown” James and Vance say when I ask about the reasons why people become and stay homeless).

Vance, who was homeless for a long time himself, was recently placed in a flat in Oldham. James, as I say, is staying at Vance’s place. He sleeps on the couch. This sharing arrangement came about a few months ago after Vance found James lying on the concrete landing along from Vance’s flat. James was sleeping on the freezing ground.

Vance told James to go into his flat.

Vance: “[James] was sleeping outside on the landing. I can’t see that, because I’ve been homeless meself…I did if for years. Absolutely years. I slept on the streets, but I got sick of sleeping on the streets, so I bought a tent. I lived in a tent for five year. It is very cold and wet… and with snow. You can’t sleep. You put your tent anywhere you can.”

James: “Where Vance lives, it is a high rise flat. He find me on the top of it on the concrete floor sprawled out, sleeping. He come out of his flat. I’m on the floor on the concrete. Vance said to me: “go in my place.” He had a friend with him. He said go in there and knock on the door.”

I asked James how he managed for money and food, because he had no money coming in. “Foodbanks and begging,” he said.

So.

I don’t want to make this situation, or these guys, sound pathetic. They are not. They are onto it and hilarious, she says, patronising. They have their issues. Who doesn’t. We’ve hung out a few times and we’ll hang out some more.

I just want to make the point again that there are a lot of people around who do not always have the basics for living.

Too-complex and horribly invasive benefit application systems are often part of it (“it’s a rigmarole” James says when I ask about benefits and housing assessments). Struggles to get into housing and even basic shelter is also part of it (I go into that in my longer post). A political class which insists on punishing people at this point is also part of it.

I personally don’t care how people spend their lives, or who is considered deserving or not deserving. All that counts is that you live in a time and a place where people sleep out in the cold, for whatever reasons. Wonder how that plays in a northern winter.

Video: Don’t care what your health is like. You wait outside the jobcentre in the cold

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I’ve posted below another video of another jobcentre security guard being an arse because he can be an arse. I have quite a collection of these videos and audios now – a gallery of petty incidents courtesy of the DWP.

I took this video earlier this year at Ashton Under Lyne jobcentre at one of Charlotte’s Thursday demonstrations.

The video shows the usual sour stuff.

In the video, the security guard said that an older disabled woman who was sitting in her wheelchair in a cold wind outside the jobcentre had to stay outside until the time of her jobcentre appointment. She was not allowed to wait for her meeting inside the jobcentre.

The guard said that people were only allowed to enter the jobcentre ten minutes before their appointment times. Before that, they had to wait outside. You’ll see that the guard left absolutely no room for argument. No exceptions would be made.

No exceptions would be made even when they could and should be made. The woman sitting outside in her wheelchair was elderly and she said that she felt cold. The weather wasn’t terrible that day, but there was a chill wind on the corner and the cold cut through if you weren’t moving about.

Not that the facts of the weather mattered. It turned out that the weather wasn’t actually relevant to the rule. The guard said that people had to wait outside even if the weather was terrible. You can hear me ask the security guard about this in the video. I asked if people could come inside when the weather was bad. He said No, people could only enter the jobcentre ten minutes before their appointments. That apparently included people who were older, unwell and/or not able to move around or to head elsewhere to keep warm. Probably, some people turn up to the jobcentre early, because they don’t want to be sanctioned for being late. Probably, some people want to wait inside the jobcentre, because outside is very cold some days. Not everyone can afford to wait in cafes and pay for coffees and so on.

But rules are rules, it seems. Blah blah blah. The guard would not be moved. The justification for the rule was that you’d get a bottleneck if you let everyone in. Continue reading →

Video: jobcentre tells a sick & disabled woman to climb stairs though she can’t. Fix this contempt, Mr Green

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This is a video of one of several incidents I’ve seen in recent times – a jobcentre adviser/security guard/person giving a sick or disabled person a very hard time for the hell of it.

This video is from Kilburn jobcentre. I made it earlier this year.

In the video, you’ll see G4S security guards telling Linda*, the sick and disabled woman I was with, that she must walk up the stairs to the first floor to attend a JSA meeting.

More than that – the guards insist that all JSA signon appointments MUST take place on the first floor and that Linda will have to climb the stairs to get to her meeting. No matter that Linda has serious breathing problems and had by that stage been ill for several months. No matter that the jobcentre knew this and had even called an ambulance for Linda a couple of weeks earlier because she was obviously sick (I have a video from that day where a jobcentre adviser says “Yes, I can see that,” when I point out Linda’s awful pallor).

The guards in the video are absolutely uncompromising. Linda must walk up the stairs to her jobcentre meeting. That’s where the meetings are. If you don’t walk up there and sign on, you don’t get your benefit. That’s that.

Charming.

I’m posting this because I want to show you a bit more about the way things really roll in these places – in the real world, away from the DWP’s endless, empty prattle about “helping” sick or disabled people into work. I want to make a point about the contempt that a lot of people meet with as a matter of course in jobcentres. They’re not treated decently, let alone “supported” in any obvious way. Forget being “helped” to find work. These people spend most of their time just battling for reasonable treatment. The world needs to know how deeply the DWP’s institutional contempt for benefit claimants runs. You find that even in apparently small incidents. These small incidents speak volumes if you ask me. That’s what I’m showing you here.

I have, needless to say, been thinking about this incident, and the many similar ones I’ve experienced, ever since our newish DWP uber leader Damian Green released his work, health and disability plans/ode to employment this week and filled our airwaves with the standard We Are There For Sick Or Disabled People blather.

“We must be bold in our ambition to help disabled people and those with health conditions,” Green has yabbered via mainstream outlets, as you’ll be all too aware.

I find myself wondering if Damian and I are experiencing the same bureaucracy, or even the same universe, when he and the DWP guff out these banalities about tailored government support and “help” for sick or disabled benefit claimants. “Help?” Really? My experience is that institutional contempt for sick or disabled benefit claimants is now so entrenched in the relevant bureaucracies that jobcentre security guards feel that they are absolutely entering the spirit of things when they refuse to help someone with obvious health problems deal with a flight of stairs. Continue reading →

You’re on benefits. How dare you enjoy a hamburger, a cigarette, a drink or a life?

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This is the sort of story that really gets my back up – it’s a story about the state looking to catch benefit claimants out and making sure to utilise every one of the petty ways open to it to do this. Why aren’t bailed-out bankers hauled out for the sort of probing described below?

A few days ago, I spoke again to this young woman. She is 22 years old and has a four-year-old daughter. She’s been trying to sort out her Universal Credit claim for ages.

She told me about an argument she’d had at a London jobcentre she’d recently signed on with. It’s the sort of story I hear a lot – it’s about a jobcentre adviser and a benefits claimant arguing the toss over a small expenditure that appeared on a bank statement. This story may not sound like a big deal to some, but it is. I think that this nit-picky reading of bank statements by officials is one reason why people don’t apply for state help to which they may well be entitled.

So.

At one of this young woman’s jobcentre meetings, a jobcentre adviser who was reading through the young woman’s bank statements happened upon a small payment to a fast food establishment. This immediately turned into a drama – doubtless heard by many the jobcentre, given the total lack of privacy in these places. The adviser demanded to know how and why the young woman was spending money on burgers and blah blah blah.

The young woman told me that a friend gave her some of the money afterwards to pay for the food, but that they had used her card at the time, because the friend didn’t have the cash with her to pay then and there. It was the sort of on-the-spot arrangement that takes place between friends around the world about a million times an hour, etc. Or should I say – it was the sort of on-the-spot arrangement that some people are permitted to make and others are not. Those who earn their “own” money are allowed to make those sorts of agreements with friends. People who receive benefits are not. They must make sure that they are in a position to justify every penny and know that they will be dealt to if they can’t, or if some official somewhere doesn’t like their explanation, etc. A bank statement does not, of course, offer any sort of back story. It simply lists financial transactions. The jobcentre adviser in this case assumed, of course, that the young woman was lying when she said somebody else paid towards the food. The subtext was and always is, of course, that the young woman was a) wildly irresponsible financially, b) a pisstaking benefits claimant and c) flush with cash.

Continue reading →

Authorities bully benefit claimants because they can

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I have posted below a letter received by a Kentish Town* man who is in his early 60s and disabled.

The man receives housing benefit for his one-room housing association flat.

The letter is from Camden Council.

As you can see, the letter is very unpleasant. I am sure that I would not want to get one of these. The letter begins with an accusation. It says that the council has received correspondence from the DWP which *suggests* the Kentish Town man has another person living with him. The letter gives no details about that correspondence. Neither does it explain how the DWP’s correspondence led the council to believe that another person was living in the Kentish Town man’s home. No proof or evidence to support this accusation is offered. The letter simply makes a statement. It also makes a threat. The letter says that the Kentish Town man’s housing benefit claim could be in jeopardy if he does not answer the points raised.

You can imagine how people feel when this sort of thing drops through the door:

camden_letter

This is the kind of filthy correspondence that people receive from councils and government departments out of the blue. DWP Customer Compliance letters strike the same sinister tone. So, as I understand it, do the letters received by people who have their child tax credit after being accused of living with people they’ve never heard of.

I see a lot of these letters. They cause an extraordinary amount of stress for people. They absolutely assume guilt from the off and tell people to prove their innocence. Certainly, that’s how the recipients of these letters perceive things:

“Councils, government departments and their associates regularly state that they will come down hard on people who abuse their staff, yet they ought to be aware how their standard procedures and threatening standard text approaches are in themselves abusive,” the man in this story wrote to me. “Just because we have no real bargaining power does not give them licence to bully us about.”

Indeed. Continue reading →

How long do you have to wait to get a PIP appeal hearing after requesting one…?

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Dealing with a couple of people who are waiting to find out if they’ll get a PIP appeal tribunal hearing and a date for that hearing if they do get one.

Does anyone know how long people typically have to wait to hear back after they’ve requested an appeal, or is this another part of things that is all over the place.

If you’d rather email than leave a comment on this, contact details are here.