I wonder if Rachel Reeves knows what long-term unemployment looks like.

I do. Plenty of people do.

Last Monday, I spent a long time outside the Kilburn jobcentre with a guy who said his name was Chug, or Chuck, or something like that. His speech wasn’t always clear. He mumbled a lot and clenched his jaw when he spoke. He said he was 35. He was thin and jumpy, and so pale that he was translucent. Heroin, I thought. Maybe crack. I didn’t know and I didn’t ask. I see a lot of guys with that wasted, nervy look.

Anyway, we talked for a while. And here’s the thing. My heart sank early on in the conversation, as it often does now when I talk to guys in this sort of situation. This wasn’t necessarily because the life story this guy told me was harrowing. It was a bit, but I can usually hear people out when they tell these stories. Pity isn’t really my bag. The heart-sinking bit came entirely from the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing to be done for this guy – certainly as far as drawing major attention to his problems went. As soon as I saw him, I knew there wasn’t a chance in hell of raising sympathy for him outside of the usual support-group channels. I certainly couldn’t think of anyone big to take his problems to. I couldn’t imagine a senior MP backing him, or a major mainstream media outlet campaigning for him, or whatever. He ticked just about all the boxes that Reeves and other welfare hardliners have on their shared hitlist. He was Romanian by birth (he said he’d lived in the UK since he was ten), maybe ill, a long time out of work and hanging around the jobcentre asking for cash (he asked me for money. People often do). He was clearly unwell, underfed and in a mess. He wasn’t coherent a lot of the time. That’s the reality of a lot of these situations. That’s what you get.

That’s the part Rachel Reeves needs to get, too. Probably she does. Probably she has for  while. The thing is that people in the sort of situation I’ve described above already have nothing as far as political representation goes. Those of us on the ground already know that Labour doesn’t care to represent people who are out of work, or to try and explain the complexities of long-term unemployment, or to accept that everyone is entitled to social security and representation, whether people are politically palatable or not. It’s a pity, that. The world needs to know that people in these tough situations exist. They exist, no matter how firmly Reeves clamps her hands over her eyes and pretends otherwise. That’s the point I keep trying to make. People who have serious problems don’t just disappear because nobody claims them. They don’t magically vanish because Reeves or Osborne or whoever decides to draw a line through them in some ledger in Whitehall. They exist. So do basic human needs. Continue reading →

Update 17 March 2015:

Although Andy Burnham committed to a meeting with disabled people about protecting Independent Living Fund recipients when the ILF closes (he made that commitment on Saturday – you can listen to him talk about it in the video below), he’s now said he can’t meet. I realise he’s busy and that Labour has an election to fight/screw up in the coming weeks, but honest to god. Can’t a single senior Labour figure commit to keeping that fund open so that the disabled people who receive it can live. The ILF is due to close in June. If Labour is going to commit to anything to protect those people, now is the time to do it. Can we take Labour’s refusal to make that commitment as evidence that disabled people aren’t people that Labour plans to represent?

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Original post:

To the Labour Spring conference in Birmingham yesterday! – where a group of Independent Living Fund recipients, Disabled People Against Cuts and me did our best to get answers from Labour worthies about the party’s plans for disabled people’s benefits and funds. The aim was to hear from various horses’ mouths what will happen if Labour forms part of whatever monster administration we end up with in a couple of months, etc.

So.

It wasn’t a bad day out if you fancied a mid-morning cake. There were croissants, piles of those great little pastries with jam and icing, and awesomely big chocolate squares laid out on oddly morgue-y concrete slabs. Answers to the funding questions were a little harder to come by. The people I tried to speak to either ran away, stamped off when compared with Tories, or said they had families to get home to. Not to worry. Plenty of time left before the election (54 days they kept saying yesterday). I think I might get along to a few more of these junkets and hustings. Even the most committed MPs and parliamentary hopefuls can’t spend 54 days legging it from the rabble.

But let’s not carp about that. Let’s go to some of yesterday’s responses. The electorate requires a few decent responses on these issues. Disabled people have taken the brunt of austerity cuts. I personally feel that Labour needs now to be offering something a bit more substantial than “That’s Sad,” or “How Awful” (heard both yesterday) on the topic of this government’s disability funding slaughter. A rigorous commitment to social security from a party that ought to see the point of it would be nice.

We had two questions for MPs:

1) Would Labour scrap the hated and dangerous Work Capability Assessment for Employment and Support Allowance?

2) Would Labour change its mind and keep the Independent Living Fund (ILF) open – the ILF being an all-important fund that profoundly disabled people use to pay for the extra care hours that they need to live independent lives? The current government plans to close the fund by the end of June this year.

You’d expect a reasonably straightforward set of responses, given that the answer to both questions ought to be a resounding Yes. Unfortunately, things weren’t quite as simple as that, as you’ll see.

Out of the blocks (literally) in the video below was Yvette Cooper. I asked her for her views on the WCA and whether Labour would scrap it. She said to talk to Rachel Reeves, because she, Yvette, was in hurry for her next meeting. To be fair, this may have been true, although I noted that she went from walking to her next meeting to sprinting for it very fast when I tried to talk to her. I was asking “Will Labour get rid of it [the WCA]?” as she went. Not a lot of joy there as you’ll see:

Transcript for video (pdf)

No luck finding Rachel Reeves back at base, either. But not to worry, as I say. Am already on the search for a next time.

Onto Andy Burnham next. The great man was in the NHS corner in the top assembly room. In the video below, he speaks with DPAC’s Linda Burnip about the fast-approaching closure of the Independent Living Fund.

Burnham agreed that the profoundly disabled people who rely on the ILF needed protection when/if the funds closes. Which they do, to say the very least. Without the ILF to pay for the extra care hours they require, those disabled people will either be pushed into care facilities, or left at home to try and get by with dangerously low levels of care. It is no exaggeration to say that many won’t get by. The big problem now, of course, is that the ILF is due to close in a matter of months. It’s very late in the day for politicians to be wafting on in a non-specific way about protections for people whose lives will depend on those protections. As DPAC says in the video, Burnham’s integrated health and social care plan is still a long way off. There are also those of us who feel that in a general sense, Labour council attempts to protect social care budgets and facilities in the past five years have been beyond woeful, so putting further hope in widespread protection for disabled people could be a bit – hopeless. Burnham did commit to a meeting with DPAC and Inclusion London about the ILF/these “protections”, so I very much look forward to that:

Transcript for video (pdf)

Next up – I spoke with Liam Byrne about the Work Capability Assessment. God only knows why I decided to do this to myself. I’m starting to think that I may need to re-nose this aspect of my approach. Quite a lot of my life has already been wasted on conversations with fading worthies. You can actually hear my will to live leaving me via my voice in this one. Needless to say, Byrne thought that outsourcing assessments for disability benefits was still a good idea, despite the Atos experiment ending up as a pile of turds. One thing I will say for modern politicians – once they’ve chosen a disastrous ideology, they stick with it. They don’t flail through life looking for new ways to fail like the rest of us. I raised the ILF with Byrne, but didn’t get anything there, because he had to go and talk to some (possibly more important) blokes and also remembered he had to get home to the family:

Transcript for video (pdf)

What next. Oh yes. There was a “conversation” with Angela Eagle near the start where one of our number made a comment about Labour’s approach to WCA not being far removed from the Tories’. She apparently got all upset about that and left because she was a) genuinely angry or b) quietly delighted because she felt that the Tory comparison gave her an excuse (it didn’t) to leave, and on her high horse. Her Spad person told us to “send an email” as Angela marched off. I think I’ve got an audio from that one, but might go for a drink before subjecting us all to it. Definitely let me know if you’ve got hustings coming up in your area, though. Am right up for more of these face-to-face chats.

Working on a few longer things at the moment, so here’s a short report to be going on with – a bit of on-the-ground reality re: support for disabled people who are out of work:

I was at a jobcentre this week with a man who has learning difficulties. First, he signed on (that took a grand total of about four minutes, including a brief interlude of about ten seconds when Security called out to stop me accompanying this man. I decided to ignore Security on this occasion and kept walking). Then, we went to find the disability adviser to talk about people or organisations or someone somewhere who might be able to help this man into work, or to understand his support needs, at least. I had talked with the adviser about this briefly earlier in the week. The aim was to have a discussion about options and then take things from there.

We found the adviser. The adviser was not in a good mood. At all. There was no chance to talk. Before we even sat down, the adviser had signed this guy up to a work course – one which he had no idea how to get to. We were only told where it was when I asked. He’d been signed up on the computer by then. That was the end of the story as far as details or any negotiations went. The rest he’ll have to try and figure out. Travel was definitely a worry. If this man gets the tube, he’ll need to make a change at Green Park, possibly at rush hour. Bus options might work, but seemed complex. The point is that absolutely none of this was raised or canvassed before the course was chosen. This guy I was with is physically unwell, struggles to read and write and to follow complicated directions, and may need someone to help him negotiate the journey, especially the first time that he goes. He clearly felt stressed at the thought of it. I told the adviser that I might be able to accompany him to his first session now that he was signed up. “That’d be good,” the adviser said. I assumed that was the extent of the “help” that disabled people got if they struggled to travel, at least on this day.

The adviser made it very clear that if this man doesn’t get to this course, he’d be sanctioned. “They’re strict,” the adviser said of the provider. For Christ’s sake, I thought. It would’ve been nice to talk about the travel requirements and any potential problems before the place was selected. Perhaps another provider closer to home could have been found. There followed next a very heated exchange about this man’s most recent experience on so-called work choice (which I’ve just noticed seems to be voluntary) and whether or not he’d taken full advantage of the “help” he was supposedly offered by a previous provider. The adviser said he hadn’t. The man said that the “help” hadn’t been helpful at all. The adviser lost patience. This man shouted as well. He was obviously struggling to get his point over. I just sat there and wondered again why we were doing this, and whether the best way to handle someone with learning difficulties was to lose your temper and shriek.

I know that advisers are under pressure – I see stress and exhaustion on a lot of faces at jobcentres. There can be no doubt about that. The adviser in this case has been reasonable on other days. But the upshot here is that a man with learning difficulties has been signed up to a course that he knows nothing about, has no idea how to get to, but was told to attend or else – by someone who was obviously fraught and angry to the point of losing it. That’s the system we have now. That’s disability support and advice at the jobcentre on a tense afternoon.

I do wonder where the PCS really is on all of this. Getting very late in the day and all that.

Details of next week’s day of action against sanctions events are here:

Remember, though – sanctions are only one problem on this scene at the moment. They’re a very big problem and should be highlighted and fought, but there are other big problems as well. One of those problems is that people with support needs are being dumped in these jobcentres and to my eye anyway, jobcentres can’t cope. You get these days where everyone seems to lose it.

Working on a few things atm, so back soon.

In the meantime – enjoy the excellent David Cameron Is A Wanker video by the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group. And share share share! Widely 🙂

To Central London today, where Disabled People Against Cuts blocked roads outside Maximus HQ in Queen Anne’s gate and then the DWP at Caxton House and Victoria Street in protest at the Maximus contract to run the work capability assessment for disability benefits.

The turnout was good and the intention clear. Disabled people and campaigners will not stop until the Maximus contract is in tatters. Protestors managed to kick Atos out with its tail between its legs, so there is every reason to target Maximus with confidence.

Which people did today. Confidence is the word, too. The campaign against Atos was ultimately very successful, which means that people know they can do this. Doesn’t matter what sort of effort Maximus puts into the so-called “Customer Experience” that sick and disabled people who must go through the work capability assessment have when they apply for Employment and Support Allowance. Everyone knows the real point of the government’s WCA exercise is to throw people off disability benefits – and very likely to eliminate disability benefits altogether. People in real need died after Atos found them fit for work and their benefits were stopped. It’s very hard to imagine that’ll change simply because Maximus has decided that it’ll be pleasant to people as it recommends that their meagre benefits are cut.

These protests are significant for everyone. When Atos was running this shambles, DPAC and campaigners proved that it was possible to end a corporate contract by destroying a corporate reputation. That was a very useful result in an era where so many vital public services and functions are outsourced to companies like Maximus. You could argue that the New Era campaigners got a similar result. Removing a major corporate from the picture is something that people can do. And want to do, by the looks of it.

Disabled campaigners block Victoria Street:

Blocking the roads at St James station

Maximarse

Blocking Victoria Street and reading captions written by campaigners:

Now isn’t this charming.

On Thursday, I went again to one of the northwest London jobcentres to meet up with Eddie (named changed), the 51-year-old man with learning and literacy difficulties who I’ve accompanied to JSA signon sessions for coming up to six months. Eddie’s signon time changed last week and I met him at the jobcentre just as he came down the stairs from his appointment.

He was furious. He felt that he’d been threatened. He said the jobcentre had told him that his next sign on appointment would take place at 2pm on a Thursday afternoon, rather than in the morning as usual. Eddie told the jobcentre that he preferred morning appointments. It suits him. He finds that routine easier to manage. But that is too bad, it seems. Eddie said he was told off for arguing the toss about the new afternoon signon plan. He said the jobcentre made it clear that if he kicked up a fuss about afternoon signon times, he’d be forced to attend every week to sign on instead of every fortnight. No matter that absolutely nothing ever happens at his signon meetings. He’d just be forced to attend more of them and get no help more often. Great.

I hear this sort of thing too often now: people with learning difficulties, or mental health problems being threatened with some sort of backlash if they object to jobcentre regimes. Maggie (named changed), a woman in Northamptonshire who has a long-term schizophrenia diagnoses, told me that she was recently warned by the DWP not to say “Never” when she told the department that her partner Sean (named also changed), who has severe depression and Asperger’s syndrome, would never attend the work-focused interviews that the local jobcentre very much wants to make him attend (here’s that story and the letter that Sean’s local jobcentre sent calling him to such an interview). Sean is in the Support Group for Employment and Support Allowance. People in the Support Group for ESA are supposed to be exempt from all work and work-focused interviews, because of the severity of their health conditions. The idea that some people simply can’t work is clearly being eased out of the DWP, and society, altogether, though – people in Sean and Maggie’s situation are getting letters and phone calls “inviting” them to job-focused interviews. They know they’ll be asked again and that the ante will be upped in a serious way if they refuse. Maggie and Sean are already worried about that “Never say Never To Us” they got from the DWP. They wonder if there will be repercussions.

They have reason to worry. The DWP’s contempt for benefit claimants is often very poorly disguised. And let’s face it – there are times when it isn’t disguised at all. If you want to hear that contempt in full roar, just listen to this recording recently taken at a jobcentre group induction meeting for new JSA claimants:

As you can hear, throughout that meeting, one claimant kept interrupting and challenging the adviser who was in charge of the session. The problem is that the jobcentre didn’t seem to have a plan in place to deal with a disruptive claimant. In lieu of such a plan, the adviser just spat the dummy and yelled at the claimant. Which wasn’t much of a plan, really. Shrieking your head off generally isn’t. Continue reading →

Readers of this site will remember that a couple of weeks ago, I posted questions about people’s right to record and film face-to-face assessments as they go through the work capability assessments that are to be run by Maximus.

I wanted to know if Maximus will allow people to record their face-to-face assessments on their phones or any recording gear that they have – from the point when Maximus takes over the grisly WCA process. I also had other questions, which I put to Maximus last week. I’ve listed these questions below, along with the answers I got back (perhaps I should say “answers”). I had to lean on Maximus’ US office for a response in the first instance, but got one of sorts in the end.

Needless to say, the entire exercise was a complete waste of time. You’ll see below that the responses give us five-eighths of fuck all as far as concrete information, timelines and/or actual process detail is concerned. No surprise there, of course – but I thought I’d post the responses anyway, because I think there is merit in highlighting the PR guff and detail-free twattery that Maximus has decided to specialise in when it comes to this contract. There’s also a dismissive aspect to a lot of the language, which you might find illuminating – a sort of “we’ll do things at our pace and you lot can wait” – air which nettled me badly. It should get on your nerves, too.

This sort of thing, for example:

“Change cannot occur overnight”

“[We] will take forward this and other ideas to the Department for their consideration”

“I am unable to comment on such speculation,” when I raised a perfectly valid point about Maximus’ view of the future of the ESA Support Group.

Sue Marsh actually got in touch with me after the press office did to say that I could speak with her, because my questions “come under her job,” but that attempt at overture got right up my nose, as well. For one thing – if Sue Marsh is the person who is best placed to answer questions in the sort of details required, then the Maximus press office should go to her for those answers before responding to whoever asked them. It’s not my job to sweep together Maximus’ various outputs on its own assessment processes as and when those outputs drop out of different holes, or to wait around for the responses that Maximus feels it has best finessed. For another thing – I can’t see myself responding well to any aspect of the many-pronged charm offensive that Maximus has launched in its sorry and very costly attempt to sculpt and polish the WCA turd. Let’s face it – any company that comes out with a phrase like “more touch, more communication,” apparently in all seriousness, should not be encouraged to contribute further to any dialogue on any topic, or to remain involved in any process where people require something better than bullshit. It’s my view that in a general sense, any company that speaks lines like “more touch, more communication,” needs a smack in the soft parts right there.

Anyway. Continue reading →