Let me tell you a bit about waiting:

One day last week, I took myself right across London to attend a jobcentre meeting with a woman who has some support needs. The woman had been told to come in to meet with a so-called work coach. She wasn’t too sure what this meeting was about. The jobcentre had organised the meeting a couple of weeks back and the woman was concerned about it. You could say that the thought of the meeting had been weighing on her mind for some time.

Not that anyone could care less about that. When this woman arrived at the jobcentre, she was told that the work coach wasn’t at work that day (ha ha – yes, the irony) and the meeting was cancelled. The woman told me that nobody rang her to let her know the meeting was off, to save her the trouble of coming in. Another date for a meeting with the work coach was set for a few weeks’ time. That means she has another month to wait and to wonder what the work coach wants with her. You could say that’s now weighing on her mind.

I can’t tell you how often this sort of thing happens to people who must use these barely-functional, so-called services: appointments changed at the last minute, meetings pushed to new times which claimants aren’t told about, work programme sessions cancelled a few hours before the event, or claimants travelling all the way to the jobcentre to find that the person they expected to meet is nowhere to be found. It is no exaggeration to say that these things happen on an amazingly regular basis. There’s a real departmental contempt to it if you ask me: a right old “unemployed people deserve punishment, not the normal courtesies” from the DWP. I suppose we’re also seeing an annihilated sector now: not enough staff, hopeless communications between jobcentres and outsourced work programme and workfare companies, and morale so low that organisations barely have a pulse.

The problem right now is that the political and media classes care even less about deteriorating public services than they did before the runup to the election. I didn’t actually know that was possible, but it is. There’s nobody around to take any of these problems to – in an official sense, at least. There never was, of course – social security has been destroyed in equal parts by a vicious coalition government and a fantastically weak Labour opposition, and neither was ever inclined to race to the aid of people who attend jobcentres – but at least you could see what you were up against when parliament was formed and abuse someone for it. Occasionally, you’d even find a mainstream media editor who understood that there was a world outside warped political cycles. Now, commentators are cheerfully foretelling an age of instability while we’re exposed to a post-election, months-long and extremely rubbish game of thrones. That concept sets my teeth on edge – not because I want a government particularly, but because it shows that the ruling class is arrogant enough to believe that it can take its sweet time to bash out deals to its own advantage. There’s absolutely no sense of urgency there. It must be great to live in a world where you can destroy other people’s much-needed public services, then let those services deteriorate even further while you haggle for the power to destroy more. Little wonder that people are taking future planning into their own hands.

All of which is a long way of saying that blogging here will probably be light until next week. I aim to fully re-engage when we reach that post-election point (we usually reach it pretty fast) when our political heroes are wiping their butts on their current manifestos and waving at us in their rearview mirrors. That’s the time for political engagement in my view – when you see the real agendas.

Will still be available on twitter, although probably not much. I actually can’t take the bullshit. There is no doubt I will kick the screen in if someone else tries to suggest to me that Labour is the only answer. Labour can’t even bring itself to agree to keep the Independent Living Fund. With or without government, we’re still nowhere on social security. At all.

A few more thoughts about the trashed earth left by a political class currently seeking election to parliament:

I’ve just been listening to a recording I took at a northwest London jobcentre meeting a couple of months ago. I was there with an older man who has learning difficulties and who is claiming JSA.

It wasn’t the greatest jobcentre meeting I’d ever attended. The jobcentre adviser and the man I was with had an angry, if one-sided, confrontation – raised voices, exasperation, sarcasm, accusations, the works.

The man complained that the work choice providers at a course he’d taken had done little to find him work. The adviser said that the fault was his. She said the work choice provider had suggested several jobs for him and that it was not the provider’s fault if the man didn’t get the work. “It’s not up to them,” the jobcentre adviser said testily. “It’s up to you and what you bring to the job.” The jobcentre adviser accused the man of exaggerating his concerns about the work choice provider. At one point, she said to the man: “What is it that you want them to do? Do you want them to take you by the hand and take you to the job and get you the job?” No mention was made of the problems that make things difficult for this man – his deteriorating health, his literacy problems, the fact that he can’t use email, or computers, or that he finds change extremely difficult to handle and to navigate. He is sometimes defensive and can resist when told to make a change. His first response is often No, but there are reasons for that. You’d think that those reasons would be recognised and understood. They weren’t that day. Things were a little one-sided, as I say. Continue reading →

I attended a Maximus work capability assessment with someone this week and was intrigued to note that there was no Maximus branding that I could see outside the building, or in it. Maybe all the branding was lost, or still on the printer (there wasn’t any branding on the callup letter the person I went with to the assessment received either, now that I look at it). Outside the building, there was just a line on the listings boards which said Assessment Centre (I’ll put a photo up shortly when I can get it off my phone). Inside the building, there were a few notices with references to the Centre for Health and Disability Assessments, which I think is the official euphemism for “Place Where Maximus Carries Out Loathed ESA Work Capability Assessments.” Intruiging, as I say. Made me wonder if Maximus is trying to distance itself brandwise from this extremely unpopular aspect of its offering and/or to make its assessment centres hard to spot. Who can really say.

Anyway – have started to attend these Maximus face-to-face work capability assessments now. I’ll be publishing in detail on them after the election, when I know which MPs to pressure with the evidence I have.

Suffice to say for now that I remain amazed by the utter pointlessness of the whole WCA process and of the face-to-face assessments in particular (pointless for the person going through the assessment, that is. There’s plenty of point to it for Maximus – between £590m and £650m over three years and a presence in the UK, as the Guardian reported earlier this year). The people on the receiving end of it don’t do so well. The person I went with this week has very serious mental health problems – so serious that he really has hardly left his house this year. For this week’s face-to-face assessment, he had to drag himself miles across town to the assessment centre (a family member set aside the afternoon to do the driving) to attend an appointment where he was asked to talk about his mental health for a time and then told to briefly lift his arms and legs. Regarding the possibility of a home visit for assessment – I’ll get into the topic of home visits another time, I think. I’d make the general observation now that home visits can present people with a whole new set of concerns. A number of people have raised this point with me over the years. Not everyone wants government or government-funded officials poking around at their place. I sure as hell don’t.

And anyway – the key point here is that this guy’s GP and usual medical consultants could easily have carried out this assessment. Maximus at home or at an assessment centre is entirely unnecessary. The WCA is outsourcing for the hell of it, like privatisation usually is. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again – this outsourcing of disability benefit assessments to private companies like Maximus is for the benefit of private companies like Maximus and for governments that are desperate to show they’re tough on benefit claimants. Millions of pounds are being pissed away to those ends. Whoever gets into government will be made to answer to that. In a big way.

A few thoughts on the extraordinary efforts that our punitive state now makes to isolate people who need state help:

Not long ago, I had ANOTHER altercation with a G4S security guard – this time at one of the East London jobcentres. You can hear some of that argument here (there’s a bit in it about a bicycle that you’ll need to read on to understand):

The dispute was about people’s right to bring a friend or supporter along to their jobcentre appointments. I was there to accompany a young woman to her first jobseekers’ allowance signon meeting. She had all sorts of complicated problems with her benefits, so I went along to take any notes that she needed. She also wanted someone along as a witness.

You’d think that was fair enough, especially at the moment. People need witnessess to their interactions with jobcentre advisers. That is because the whole jobcentre system is a fiasco. People get their benefits sanctioned for reasons that nobody understands, or they’re told to attend meetings that end up being on another day entirely, or they get in trouble for not turning up to appointments that another adviser has cancelled (I’ve seen endless variations on all three over the last year or so). Taking a witness along so that at least one other person understands what jobsearch activities and meetings are agreed is pretty important to survival. The DWP’s own responses to FOI requests about bringing a supporter along to JSA appointments seem to imply that accompaniment is perfectly fine. Other people have argued the toss about representation with the DWP and apparently won. Feel free to leave a comment, or email me, if you have any further insight into the rules. I’d ask the DWP myself, except that asking the DWP anything these days is so utterly pointless that I can’t actually find the motivation to lift my finger and dial the DWP’s number. I ring the DWP and I email the DWP and the DWP simply refuses to respond to my questions.

Which isn’t necessarily a huge loss in the greater scheme. The point is that people should be entitled to take a witness along to their jobcentre signon meetings. The other point is that nobody on the ground seems to know what the rules are anyway. People just say whatever suits them at the time. Some guards (they’re generally in the minority now) have said to me Yes, You Can Go In. The rest say No. That means that the majority of jobcentre security guards I see now are very quick to put a stop to someone’s right to any sort of representation. Their first response shouldn’t be No, but it is. It’s No for the hell of it. It’s No, just because guards can say No. I’ve probably attended around ten jobcentre appointments with people this year and reckon that security guards have said No to my going in at the start of more than half of them. One guy I just totally ignored. I pretended I couldn’t hear him telling me to stop and just kept walking. The rest generally backed down after debates about procedures and/or previous agreements which I largely made up on the spot, but fortunately convinced people existed. This says to me that nobody is very clear on the facts. Things sometimes seem to go better when guards think that I’m a claimant’s mother. I don’t know what it is about mothers. The problem is that I can’t be everyone’s Mum, especially when I turn up at the same jobcentre with different people. It is also a tricky call when claimants and I are around the same age. Continue reading →