April 5: Update on the election leaflets (well, there’s been one so far) that I’ve received – I got a Labour campaign leaflet from Lewisham Deptford’s Vicky Foxcroft that doesn’t mention this government’s astounding attacks on sick and disabled people as far as I can see. There’s no mention of Atos, Maximus and the work capability assessment, the months-long queues for Personal Independence Payment asessments, or the elimination of the Independent Living Fund. I can’t even see a reference to the bedroom tax. It’s almost as though people who need some sort of income support because of sickness or disability don’t exist or something. No mention of JSA sanctions, either. How about that. “The next election is a straight choice between a recovery that puts working people and the NHS first with Labour, or continuing with a government that is not listening to hardworking people,” Vicky tells us. Great. We can assume that people who can’t work aren’t entitled to representation from this party – ie, that nobody will be listening to them.

The really amazing thing about all of this is the extent to which the people who have taken the worst of the coalition government’s violent social security “reforms” are airbrushed from these mainstream political manifestos. People have died as a result of this government’s smashing of welfare benefits and unfathomable, utterly illogical eligibility testing. Iain Duncan Smith should be doing jail time because of that and Labour should be pushing for a prosecution. Instead, we get more of this utterly meaningless “hardworking” guff. Is anyone even buying the “hardworking” line anymore? What Vicky is really saying here is “work hard now. You’ll get fuck all if the day comes when you can’t.”

I love elections.

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Original post:

Wonder which mainstream political parties plan to stand up for sick and disabled people who the DWP routinely harasses in the way described on this page (answers on a very very small postit thanks):

Here is ANOTHER letter from the DWP calling a person who is in the Employment and Allowance Support Group to a jobcentre interview:

This is the fourth letter that this person has received in three months calling him to one assessment or another to keep his ESA. I personally think that this non-stop correspondence from the DWP and its fitness-for-work assessors is harassment – particularly in the case of this man, who simply can’t deal with a barrage of official letters and contact. He is in the ESA Support Group because he has serious mental health problems. He finds pressure from the DWP very difficult to deal with and certainly sees these endless official letters as potential threats to his meagre income. People who are in the ESA Support Group are judged to have the most severe health problems. They are meant to be excused from all work and work-related activities. Unfortunately, they’re not excused from non-stop badgering by the DWP and its various private-company fit-for-work assessors. Plenty of people are getting these letters – Disabled People Against Cuts has even set up response-letter templates so that people who are harassed by the DWP in this way can write and tell the DWP to back off. There are days when I think that the DWP and the likes of Atos and Maximus are working in a pincer movement, closing in on people in the Support Group from all sides.

Take the guy who received the letters you see on this page. He got one letter telling him to attend at Atos assessment in about January (that appointment was ultimately postponed, presumably while the work capability assessment baton was passed to Maximus). Then in February, he got a letter which called him to a work-focused interview at the jobcentre. (even though people in the Support Group are excused from all work-related interviews and activities). In the last week of March, he received the letter posted at the top of this page which told him to attend a 40-minute jobcentre meeting with a work coach to assess the amount of ESA he receives. Then last week, he got a letter from Maximus – a letter which calls him to a rescheduled work capability assessment at the end of April. On and on it goes.

Each letter has caused this guy an awful lot of panic and required phone calls and further contact with the letter-sender – to confirm appointment times, to ask if assessments could be recorded, or changed, or to cancel appointments where they were not actually compulsory. People in the Support Group, as I say, don’t actually have to attend work-focused interviews. They’re just harassed and hounded into thinking they should. This guy’s wife says that she was told off when she rang the DWP to say that he would never attend a work-focused interview at the jobcentre (his mental health problems are so bad that he can hardly leave the house). She said the DWP told her not to say Never, because the jobcentre might get vindictive. Brilliant. Continue reading →

On Monday 9 March, people going into jobcentres were told that IT systems were down and that the problem was nationwide.

Here’s a picture I took of a sign about it posted outside Kilburn jobcentre that day:

The sign said:

“9 March 2015 Customer Notice
IT systems are down
This is a national problem ie contact centre, JCP, Belfast have no access
We do not know when it will be resolved.
All appointments today must be attended.”

I’ve wondered since then if anyone claiming JSA or ESA had had any trouble – particularly with any information taken down by hand that day not being recorded properly (or at all) when the systems were back up. I could see plenty of potential for sanctions threats here – certainly if changed appointments weren’t recorded and so on. I’ve talked to no end of people in the last year who were sanctioned because of confusion about appointment times and dates.

And wouldn’t you know it… I was talking today to a man who felt that his week got very close to ending in a sanctions disaster because the computers weren’t working last Monday. He’s 56, not in good health and in the Work Related Activity group for Employment and Support Allowance. Last Monday – the day that the systems were down – I sat with this man and a woman from the local unemployed workers’ group who helps him with his ESA paperwork. He had a letter calling him to a work-related interview at one of the northwest London jobcentres last week. The session was mandatory. People in the work related activity must attend work-related interviews, or face sanctions.

Anyway – he couldn’t make that interview, because he had an appointment with a specialist on the same day, so the woman we were with called the phone number on the letter and told the adviser who answered that the appointment would need to be changed. I sat there and listened as this conversation took place. The adviser told the woman that the systems were down, but that she’d make a note to cancel the appointment and arrange for a new appointment to be set.

Needless to say, those details never made it into the system. The appointment wasn’t cancelled and predictably, things started to hit the fan. This guy got a message from the jobcentre on the day of the cancelled appointment telling him to call the jobcentre quick. He told me that when he called the jobcentre, he got a right bollocking about missing the appointment – ie where were you, why didn’t you attend, don’t you know that these appointments are compulsory and all the rest of it. He was very worried indeed about getting sanctioned, not least because of the tone of the call. People are certainly sanctioned for missing mandatory ESA meetings.

In the end, things were only sorted out because the unemployed workers’ group rep put in some calls and made it very clear that the appointment had been formally cancelled. There was no sanction and another date for the work-related interview was set. We attended that meeting this week. This story has made me wonder, though. How many other appointments changes made last Monday were written down on a piece of paper that subsequently went missing, was ignored, or fell off a desk, etc? I wonder what recourse people have if they think that happened to them and if the DWP has said anything about it. Doubtless this is the kind of shambles we can expect regularly once Universal Credit is up and – err, “operational”. If that ever happens.