Homeless mother of two Alicia Phillips explains how the housing crisis and an expensive commute from Boundary House – an isolated temporary accommodation hostel in Welwyn Garden City – are destroying her work and training options.
Alicia says that Waltham Forest Council told her she’d have to give up her job as a nursery nurse in London if the commute from Boundary House was too expensive and difficult.
This is how single mothers are punished in austerity. They’re actively relegated to a poverty trap. So much for Stephen Crabb’s fantasies about the government’s commitment to getting women out of that trap.
“I felt like I was being totally bullied in the playground by this big bitch… it’s like the more white and English you are, the more fucking shit you are. I’m not being funny, but it’s true.”
So. That’s a quote. That’s the sort of thing people say when I talk with them at jobcentres. These places are not pleasant, you know.
I give you the transcript below as an example of one sort of discussion that I have a lot of – discussions with people who are over 50, out of work and signing on at jobcentres where they must participate in jobsearch activities. In the past couple of years, I’ve met a lot of people who are over 50 and sometimes getting on for 60 at jobcentres. Some are on Jobseekers’ Allowance and some are on Employment And Support Allowance, and some go backwards and forwards between the two as they’re found fit for work and then found not-so-fit-for-work when advisers see where things are really at. I’m not sure exactly what point I’m trying to make by uploading these stories. I think it is probably that signing on when you’re older is grim and that I hope I never have to do it.
This is a transcript from a discussion that I had a few months ago outside Kilburn jobcentre with a guy called Terry, who was 54. He said that he’d been sanctioned by a jobcentre adviser a few days earlier and that he had no money in his bank account. He’d come to the jobcentre to ask for a hardship loan. He was furious about the sanction. No surprises there. People who’ve been sanctioned generally are furious. Being sanctioned does not usually bring out anyone’s best (even though government believes that sanctions teach people very important life lessons and make them better claimants. Or something). People must go through the motions of looking for work. They must fill in jobsearch booklets and talk about answering job ads. Everyone is perfectly aware that these so-called jobsearch activities are pointless. You’re generally no closer to work at the end of them than you were at the beginning, particularly when you’re over 50. To be sanctioned for the poor performance of a task that you know was meaningless in the first place doesn’t teach you much, except that you’re stuck in a farce. And to hate everyone, I guess.
Anyway. I’ve had conversations like the one below as a matter of course at jobcentres over the past couple of years. The main lesson that I take away from these stories is Don’t Age. You may not think your best is behind you when you get past 50, but everyone else sure will. The system will certainly rub your nose in your failures as it perceives them. Nobody reacts well.
What a comforting thought.
Terry, 54:
“I’ve just been sanctioned. I will tell you why. I have to describe this sort of stuff (he showed me the jobsearch notebook in which he had to write details of his jobsearch activities) with my supporting jobcentre like samples. Anyway, that’s what I’ve done. Anyway, she [the jobcentre adviser] signed it. She was just about to send it and she said – “Oh, you’re still hoping to teach guitar from home, still, right,” because I’m saying this that and the other and I’m hoping to start teaching. She said – “you’re just repeating yourself. You’re cutting and pasting.”
I said – “what?”
She said “I’m taking it to my manager,” and so that’s it. She hasn’t signed me on and she’s said “I’ll leave it to my manager to sign anyway” and Monday came and my money wasn’t there, so obviously I’ve come down here. I phoned Belfast as well [the Belfast benefits centre] and they said I’ve been suspended. So I’ve come down here and I’ve got a hardship form for jobseekers, so I filled that in and given them my bank statements, but basically, this is unbelievable. I felt like I was being totally bullied in the playground by this big bitch. Yeah, it’s like the more white and English you are, the more fucking shit you are. I’m not being funny, but it’s true.
I give you below an example of an older, sick and disabled JSA claimant being treated like trash by the DWP via her jobcentre.
This story is for anyone who has bought into Iain Duncan Smith’s very peculiar “I destroyed social security, because I care about sick and disabled people” logic. It should give you insight into two of Iain Duncan Smith’s key legacies for sick or disabled people who must use his ex-department’s services: 1) a breathtaking bureaucratic callousness which even decent DWP staff seem forced to affect and 2) utterly threadbare support and services for sick, disabled or at-risk people who are out of work. One measure of a minister’s “success” is surely his department’s behaviour towards people who need that department’s services the most (and who likely will always need those services in one form or another). You’d expect people in those situations to be treated with the least bureaucratic contempt, not the most:
From time to time, I attend one of the London jobcentres for JSA signon meetings with Linda,* 51. Linda has a learning difficulty and a list of health problems that has lengthened fast in recent times: shortness of breath (she stops a lot to rest when she walks), shakiness and a pallor so stark that one adviser remarked on it at meetings in February and March: “what’s happened to make you so pale?”
When you get down to it, though, nobody really gives a damn about Linda’s terrible paleness, or the reasons for it. There is certainly no system or support in place to make sure that people in Linda’s situation are protected from the cruellest excesses of the DWP’s punitive sanctions and benefits-stoppage regimes. Linda found that one out the hard way. In January, Linda’s jobcentre closed her JSA claim. Linda missed a couple of JSA signon meetings, because she got sick. She wasn’t able to walk to the jobcentre. The jobcentre took a “Two Strikes And You’re Out” approach to the missed meetings. They shut Linda’s claim down altogether. She went without money for several weeks. She had to borrow money from a family member who wasn’t happy about the loan.
“I couldn’t come in [to the jobcentre for the signon meetings]. I was too ill,” Linda kept weeping when we met at the jobcentre late in February to try and restart her JSA claim. She was certainly unwell that day. I was shocked at her pallor myself. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months and was taken aback. I went very quickly from thinking that she needed to get her JSA claim back on to thinking that she should probably see a doctor as a priority. She was pale, shaky and weepy in the way people are when they’re too unwell to be out.
More on the garbage that the DWP and government talk when they say that the aim of ESA cuts and fit-for-work assessments is to encourage sick or disabled people into work:
As readers of this site will know, I regularly attend signon sessions at a north London jobcentre with a guy I call Eddie in these posts. Eddie is 52. He spent most of his working life as a general assistant in kitchens. He was made redundant seven years ago and has been out of work since. He signs on for JSA. Eddie has learning and literacy difficulties (he finds writing especially hard – here’s an example of a Morrison’s job application he filled in by copying notes I made). Eddie is unable to use a computer or email. He can’t open a browser on a laptop, or type in links, or navigate to a wegpage.
But here’s the thing. Eddie’s jobcentre adviser keeps giving him handwritten weblinks and email addresses to take home and use for job applications. His adviser does this at every third or fourth signon meeting. He prints or writes out a link that he knows Eddie can’t use to type into a computer that he knows Eddie doesn’t have. You can see the most recent hard-to-read handwritten instructions and link here:
Eddie was absolutely furious when he was handed that piece of paper. He is furious every time that he is given a link to pursue. “That man knows I haven’t got a computer,” Eddie said angrily. “He’s taking the piss.” I imagine that the jobcentre adviser also knew that Eddie didn’t have a hope of landing one of civil service apprenticeships advertised on the link. Eddie is older, in poor health (he has diabetes and leg pain, which he struggles to manage) and has regular hospital and GP appointments. His literacy levels are not good. He has none of the skills mentioned on the link as far as I can see.
“Taking the piss” doesn’t begin to cover it. I don’t know if the adviser meant to be cruel, but that is neither here nor there. Eddie feels the insult, as well he might. This is a bureaucracy humiliating a person that the job market has discarded. This is a bureaucracy making an older sick and disabled person traipse to the jobcentre every fortnight and go through the motions of jobseeking before being allowed his paltry benefit. Eddie knows and the adviser knows and I know that these signon meetings are the ultimate exercises in uselessness. There’s no point in Eddie being forced to attend the jobcentre at all – except, I suppose, that Iain Duncan Smith gets off on the idea that he can rub a sick and disabled claimant’s nose in that person’s lack of options every fortnight. Other than that, I don’t know why we’re here.
Here’s a little more on the petty tyrannies of the DWP, particularly when it comes to sick or disabled people. I give you this as yet another instance of the institutional disdain that trickles down, if you like, when a government gives strong signals that it’s fine to treat a group of people with utter contempt.
Last week, I attended a JSA signon meeting at Kilburn jobcentre with Linda (named changed). Linda is 51. She has a learning difficulty and a growing list of health problems as she ages: shortness of breath, swollen ankles and a pallor that at least one adviser keeps remarking on (“what’s happened to make you so pale?”), etc.
Because she is finding breathing difficult, Linda struggles to walk up stairs. Unfortunately for Linda, JSA signon meetings take place on the first floor of the jobcentre. Unfortunately too, a jobcentre security guard last week insisted that Linda must climb those stairs if she wanted to sign on and receive her JSA money. The guard also said that there was no lift – an absence which presumably would cause access problems for other disabled people at this jobcentre. I did ask about access for disabled people generally. The guard took a pass on that query.
“All the signing is on the first floor,” the guard said.
“I can’t get up there,” Linda said.
“She’s had a breathing problem,” I said.
“I’m afraid there’s no lift,” the security guard said.
“Last time I come here, I couldn’t bloody breathe,” Linda said.
“No, you have to go,” the security guard said.
So much for making reasonable adjustments for sick or disabled people.
This situation needed resolving, though, so I grovelled for a while. If Linda did not sign on, she would not receive her JSA money. “Tough shit” wasn’t really the right answer to this. In the end, the guard said I could go upstairs and ask Linda’s adviser if she could meet Linda on the ground floor for the signon session.
Had to grovel there, too. The adviser agreed to come down in the end.
I think these stories are important to post. You can just about see a jobcentre channelling government contempt for sick and disabled benefit claimants at these moments. Institutional disdain, you know. Some people have just enough power to make other people beg. Right now, they feel very comfortable making people do just that.
Video from last Friday’s Old Street roundabout roadblock protest against the placing of job coaches in GPs’ surgeries (read more here).
Includes short interviews with DPAC’s Paula Peters, junior doctor Mona Kamal and footage of some tosser who said he didn’t care why people were protesting. Charming.
Transcript after the video:
Transcript:
Paula Peters, Disabled People Against Cuts
Right, welcome to the Surgeries for Treatment, Jobcentres for Jobs protest. We are seeing now jobcentre coaches from Maximus, the US healthcare company based in GPs’ surgeries such as this one behind us which is City Road Surgery. What we’re seeing here is GPs in this surgery prescribing job coaching for hard to reach claimants on Employment and Support Allowance. This is targeted at mental health claimants.
Mona Kamal, Junior Doctor
I’m here today because I am a psychiatrist, I work in mental health, I’ve been working in mental health for several years and I’m here basically because I witness first hand the impact of these austerity cuts on psychiatric patients in particular. I’ve witnessed this over the years and we’ve also seen the evidence now in terms of the research that came out towards the end of last year about these additional suicides that have been linked to the work capability assessments in particular.
Chanting:
The NHS makes us well. The Tories make us sick.
Martin Tolley:
With the DWP it’s not voluntary, it’s mandatory. We all know that and then to allow these job coaches to have access to your medical records and be able to leave notes on your medical records, and I’m not standing for it. My medical records are private. They are not there for every Tom, Dick and Harry to have a look at and add their comments to it.
Member of the public:
Can you get out of the way.
Protestor:
Do you know why we’re doing this?
Member of the public:
No and I don’t really care. Because the rest of us… the rest of us…have had enough.
Paula Peters:
…disabled people would have taken their own lives, due to the stress and the fear of government policy. So I think you can bear with us as we block the road for a bit, don’t you.
Posting here will less frequent for the next few months while I work on a case studies project. There will be more from this article in that project. You can still get in touch here.
I’m here to highlight the absolutely appalling policy that George Osborne wants to implement to cut the Work Related Activity Group of Employment and Support Allowance to Jobseekers’ Allowance Levels which is a devastating move for over half a million disabled people, especially cancer patients, people like MS patients and people like that who need that additional money for their support needs around their disability, money to eat, money to get to hospital appointments.
To cut the WRAG group of ESA is a totally draconian, callous, inhumane move that will have a devastating impact on many lives
————
I’m Eilidh Whiteford, I’m the SNP’s social justice spokesperson and the reason that I’m here today is because obviously the amendments that the Lord’s passed in the last few weeks that could reverse those cuts to disabled people are coming back to the commons so it is really important that we’re in the debate this afternoon.
————-
My name is Neil Gray I’m the SNP MP for Airdrie & Shotts and the SNP’s Westminster spokesperson for fair work and employment and I’m here today to show solidarity with disabled people who are opposing the government’s attempts to remove the ESA WRAG, and also the reporting obligations on child poverty. We believe that those are incredibly damaging and we want to see the Lords amendments stand.
————
Paula Peters
Vote No to ESA WRAG cuts. Say No and do the right thing by disabled people for once in your lives.
Iain Duncan Smith and government plan to push more sick or disabled people into work. Pity that he and the DWP lie about the support that disabled claimants on JSA and in the ESA WRAG group will find when they’re forced to try and find work through jobcentres:
You’ll hear below a covert recording made last week with a person who used to work as a Disability Employment Adviser (DEA) in a northwest London jobcentre (this person now works in another jobcentre role). DEAs were specialist jobcentre advisers who had time and training to support sick and disabled benefit claimants. Government cut the number of DEAs in jobcentres by 60% by the end of last year. For months now, advisers have been telling me and the disabled claimants I accompany to jobcentre meetings that the loss of DEAs means there is now little support or help for sick and disabled benefit claimants at jobcentres. There doesn’t seem to have been much by way of a replacement service. Advisers say that there generally isn’t resource or time.
Last week at the northwest London jobcentre I was visiting, I asked the adviser in the recording if jobcentres in the area offered much in the way of specialist, back-to-work support for sick or disabled benefit claimants. You’ll hear the adviser say that there is little support for these claimants now that jobcentres are “getting rid of” DEAs. I have recorded other advisers saying very similar things in past months. The adviser in the recording below said that in her current job, she dealt with some people who have “bipolar and schizophrenia or psychosis” diagnoses, [but] “they’ve got to want to get a job for me to work with them.” I took this to mean that people who were longer-term unemployed because of the severity of their conditions and situations were parked and offered little beyond basic signon meetings with advisers and the occasional work programme placement (we knew mutually of claimants who had been in that category for a while):
“When I changed to this job, I had to like not think about those clients anymore and it’s really, really difficult, because I know they are having problems and I know they are struggling and there is no support for them.”
Here’s an example of the struggle that people who are on the rough end of austerity have even to be heard. Thought I’d throw this one up there as just another example from the many I’m working through:
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go in for an experiment of a kind. I sat with two women who live with their small children in temporary accommodation in Boundary House, a cramped Welwyn Garden City homelessness hostel, and called the Waltham Forest Council press office so that the women could respond directly to a press statement that the council had sent me about standards at Boundary House.
Waltham Forest Council sends homeless families to live in tiny, one-room hostel flats at Boundary House, sometimes for a couple of years at a time. Some families live four to a single-room studio flat. There are and have been all kinds of difficulties at Boundary House. Residents talk about overcrowding, problems with a lack of hot water, problems with security in the building – so, when I first wrote about the place, I sent questions about these sorts of issues to the Waltham Forest council press office. “We will investigate this further if full details are provided,” the council said in a line about the hot water. I saw that line kind of beaming out at me and I thought – Okay. I’ll read that as an invitation and take the council up on it. The hell with it. I’ll call the press office while I’m sitting with Boundary House residents and hand the phone to residents so that they can provide the press office with those “full details” to pass onto the housing department for resolution.
Some might say that it was unorthodox to ring the press office in that way, but I can’t say that I gave or give much of a stuff about that. Residents were saying then that calling the housing department with problems yielded poor results and I personally long ago reached the point where I’ll try anything to get any officer’s attention on these sorts of issues, so in I went. I thought residents might as well give the press office invitation to investigate “full details” further a whirl.
Alas, this idea tanked: the press office didn’t want to speak directly to Boundary House residents. It seemed the office would take details from me, but not from the residents, even though they were a) better acquainted with their own details than I was and b) sitting right there next to me and available to speak. I argued this toss backwards and forwards on the phone with one bloke for about ten minutes. And then, the kicker: when I handed the phone to Alicia Phillips, a young mother who’d been stuck living in one of these tiny, single-room flats in Boundary House with her two young children for two years and who wanted to pass on “full details” of her problems at Boundary House to the council, the press office bloke hung up the phone. I rang the council and ask for a callback, just in case the hanging-up had been some kind of terrible technical mistake. Alas, that callback never came. The press office emailed me after a while, saying that it was probably better if we stuck to their format for communications. Boo.
Here is a recording of the hanging up:
I thought that the hanging-up was off, to say the least. I thought it was off, even knowing the way that press offices operate. I had the pleasure (ahem) of a job as a council press officer back in the day, so I am familiar with the workings of the role therein: an officer takes questions from a journalist, seeks a response from the relevant council officers and councillors, polishes that response until it is beautifully smooth and about 98% meaningless, and then sends a final, finessed result to the journalist. You’ll hear the council say in the recording that I don’t understand how the system works, but I do. I really do. Been there, etc. I understand perfectly well that press officers don’t resolve problems, as such. They collate council responses to problems.
For what they’re worth. As a rule, these responses are completely useless (certainly, most of the ones I sent over the years in the job meant nothing to anyone. They were paper printouts and faxes then, too. I bet people just used them to line the bottoms of budgie cages). It’ll be news to nobody that press office statements are almost entirely concerned with defending a council’s actions and reputation, as opposed to prioritising and addressing the worries of service users. They’re almost admirable the way that they shine no light whatsoever on the situation that you’re trying to get to the bottom of. You really might as well stick a jpeg of a horse’s butt on the end of your article. Still they come, though, and still we ask for them. I vaguely remember being told at journalism school that you must always ask for a council or government department’s view in the interests of “balance.” I’ve stuck with that instruction for reasons that increasingly escape me. I find that as I age, my patience for some of the garbage I’m sent is wearing thin (you should see some of the drivel that the DWP press office has poured into my inbox over the years).
