Recordings from a jobcentre meeting are further down the post. The argument between the adviser and the JSA claimant is the third clip – a classic of an adviser slapping down a claimant who decided to challenge the DWP:

On Wednesday this week, people plan to gather at jobcentres to protest about the arrest of an activist who accompanied a woman to an appointment at Arbroath Jobcentre. The thought of that arrest and upcoming court hearing gets on my nerves very badly, for a couple of reasons. One of the reasons is completely selfish. I accompany people to jobcentre appointments all the time and I don’t want to hear that someone has been hauled off by the police for doing similar. I hope the DWP isn’t getting ideas here. It already has jobcentres in near-lockdown. I’ve had run-ins myself with security guards who police jobcentres and know they can be extremely unpleasant if they feel like it. This sort of crap could inspire them to further triumphs.

And there’s more. Plenty more. I wonder if this arrest means that the DWP will begin to push the idea that JSA claimants should be denied the right to take someone along to their jobcentre meetings. God knows that accompanying people is tricky enough already. I’ve been stopped by security guards who have demanded to know my name (I’ve always refused to give it) or who have simply said You Can’t Come In. Different people at the same jobcentre sometimes tell you different things about access. One guard at a northwest London jobcentre stopped me from accompanying a man with learning difficulties to his appointment until we explained that the disability adviser in the very same jobcentre said that the man could bring someone to help with his forms. The man has literacy difficulties and can’t use a computer. He struggles to apply for jobs online, which means he is at risk of sanctions.

Other people feel exposed without a witness. They’re right to. They are. There’s an awful power discrepancy at jobcentres, you know. I’ve met advisers and guards who are decent and helpful, and I’ve met advisers and guards who are not. Certainly, there are jobcentres where JSA claimants report that some advisers run terror campaigns: “there’s a woman in there who signs people on. She is bullying people…She shouldn’t be working there.” People feel that they must keep their heads down to avoid sanctions: “They are a bit stroppy. You can’t say nothing to them, because if you argue back to them, the security is there and they will sanction you…you have to keep quiet.” People hope for the best, but they may not get it. The equation balances out if the person who is signing on can take a supportive witness to appointments.

So. To show you why people often want to take someone along to their jobentre meetings, I’ve published below some short audio recordings from a recent meeting where people were patronised, reminded non-stop that their benefits could be sanctioned, and then where things turned sour between one claimant and an adviser. (These recordings are not from the Arbroath jobcentre where the recent arrest took place. They’re from a group induction meeting for new JSA claimants at a jobcentre in London. About 12 new claimants attended the meeting, which was run by one adviser). Continue reading →

This fits in nicely with David Cameron’s “let’s smack a few more people on benefits around and not talk about corporate tax-dodging theme:”

Here is a letter received very recently from a DWP “work coach” by Sean* (name changed), a Northamptonshire man who I’ve known and written about for several years. He has Asperger’s and severe depression.

Sean finds day-to-day life very difficult to handle (he struggles to leave his house a lot of the time). He actually finds day-to-day life so challenging that even Atos agreed that he shouldn’t have to work. After a face-to-face assessment for his WCA about two years ago (I attended that assessment with him), Atos placed him in the support group for Employment and Support Allowance. As many of you will know, people in the ESA support group are neither required to work, nor to look for work. That’s the whole point of the support group. It’s an acknowledgement (a grudging one, I suspect) by the system as we have it that some people simply aren’t in a position take a job. From Benefits and Work: “the ESA support group is for claimants who the DWP consider to have such severe health problems that there is no current prospect of their being able to undertake work or work-related activities.” Once you’re in the support group, that should be the end of that, at least until your next assessment.

But here is this letter all the same. Disturbing reports of other people in the ESA support group getting letters like this, or calls to attend work-focused interviews, now abound. Sean received this letter out of nowhere and it scared the hell out of him. I imagine that scaring the hell out of him was at least in part the point of the exercise. The DWP doesn’t like people with mental health conditions to feel too secure.

And they don’t. As you can read for yourself, this DWP letter calls Sean to an interview this week to talk about “returning to work” or “starting a new job,” how to “find the right job” and how Sean’s benefits might be affected if he did go to work (even though the government’s assessor has said that he can’t). Even more incredibly, the invitation calls Sean to a group information session. This suggests to me that whoever sent it never read Sean’s file, or even glanced at it. A group session? Sean finds groups of people so challenging that he can barely bring himself to leave the house a lot of the time. He said he couldn’t handle the idea of travelling across town to sit in a room with complete strangers to discuss very personal details.

That is one of the many reasons why the letter is crass in the extreme. There’s a flimsy attempt in it to acknowledge that Sean is not actually obliged to attend the meeting (“not attending will not affect your [benefit] payment,” etc), but the real message is loud and clear. Continue reading →

He certainly is.

Excellent video here by the Kilburn Unemployed Workers’ Group. Share and enjoy!

Update February 12: It is interesting to me that the DWP hasn’t answered my questions or returned my call on this. You’ll see in the comments that people do indeed have their housing benefit stopped sometimes when they’re sanctioned and that they should ask to have HB restarted if that happens. Unfortunately, the jobcentre I refer to below sends new JSA claimants out believing that a housing benefit sanction is part of a JSA sanction and that’s that. DWP needs to address this. We’ve got a situation here where a jobcentre adviser told a large group of JSA claimants that their housing benefit would be sanctioned for two weeks as part of a JSA sanction and gave a lot of detail. I know too many people who would not challenge that, or know to ask to challenge it. I must say that I’m wondering why the DWP won’t address this, or even discuss it.

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Original post:

Feel free to feed back on this. I can’t work out what is going on:

A few weeks ago, I attended a group induction meeting for new JSA claimants at one of the north west London jobcentres.

About 20 minutes into the session, the jobcentre adviser running the meeting told the 12 new JSA claimants there something that intrigued me. He said that people’s housing benefit and council tax benefit would be stopped for two weeks (he used the word disallowed) if people got a four-week JSA sanction and that they would have to cover their rent and council tax. This confused me. As I understand it, housing benefit and council tax benefit are sometimes stopped with a JSA sanction when councils are advised of the sanction, but that those claims should be restarted and can even be backdated to the time the JSA sanction began (which surely means you’re entitled during the course of a sanction). Any sort of formal disallowance process – with no mention of restart – would surely be another story. Certainly, mention of such a thing worried the hell out of people at that group meeting. Losing your housing benefit would, after all, put you on the fast track to homelessness. I’ve spoken to several welfare rights and housing people about this now and they agree that housing benefit and council tax benefit should not be formally sanctioned as part of a JSA sanction. So it is all very weird.

As luck would have it, I have a recording of the event in question. Here it is:

And here’s a transcript of that recording (have put the relevant sentences in bold type):

“Now, as I was saying, if you are on one of our courses and you either don’t bother to attend that course, or if you are removed from it by your own actions, those things and the other things that I mentioned, if you can remember, could cost you four weeks’ jobseekers’ allowance. When you have your signing on appointments, things are slightly different… if we don’t think that you have applied for as many jobs as you could have, if you don’t provide sufficient detail on the jobs you have applied for, or if you do nothing at all, not only do you run the risk of losing four weeks’ jobseekers’ allowance, there is also a two-week disallowance of other benefits you are receiving. The only exception being child benefit. Now, most people who claim jobseekers’ allowance are also claiming housing benefit and council tax benefit as well. The disallowance means that you would be liable to cover your rent and your council tax costs for two weeks, as well as losing four weeks’ jobseekers’ allowance. Now, these sanctions have been in place for over two years. If it’s never affected you, you may never have known any of this. I’m just giving you the worst case scenarios.”

Okay. The are several possibilities here. One is that the adviser was wrong. Another is that the adviser was right (and let’s face it – he sounded pretty well-versed. People who run these induction courses know what they’re saying and the messages they’re sending, more to the point). Is it possible to misconstrue what the adviser said, or the message being sent here? – if it is, I’m sure someone will put us right. I certainly don’t mind saying that I’m confused.

If anyone can shed any light on things, please do. As I say, people left that meeting very much under the impression that there would be a two-week and non-challengeable loss of housing benefit and council tax benefit if they were sanctioned. If that is not the case, they certainly should be told and some sort of clarifying statement made for everyone, including jobcentre advisors who run induction sessions (I have asked the DWP for such a statement. They generally never get back to me these days, but who knows. Perhaps this post will motivate them). There was certainly no mention of the ways to restart housing benefit if it stopped when you got a JSA sanction, or any indication that asking for backdated housing benefit payments to the start date of a sanction was a possibility – ie, the things people can do when their housing benefit is stopped because of a JSA sanction. It was just the usual “you can kiss all your money goodbye.”

Which is par for the course at jobcentres, I must say. You hear an awful lot about the ways you can lose your benefits. You hear a lot less about the ways that you can get them back. You also hear a lot of confusing, worrying things about the hits you’ll take if you’re sanctioned and the benefits that will be affected. This stuff is done far too casually. It needs a serious sorting out.

Update Monday 9 February: Not much of an update, sadly. Have heard fuck all from Maximus about this issue of recording and filming face-to-face assessments, or anything for that matter. I thought they were supposed to be customer focused and all that. ZZzzzzz.

Anyway:

Here’s a very good list of DPAC protest actions planned for March 2 against Maximus, the Atos duplicate that is due to take over work capability assessments with the help of persons who should know better. I have 2 March blocked out in the diary for protest attendance myself, so hope to see you there. (Update 9 February: more details of protest action and online action now here).

In the meantime, I have a couple of questions for Maximus re: its plans for the work capability assessment. Putting these out there while we continue to campaign to scrap WCAs altogether:

1) Will Maximus allow people to record their face-to-face assessments on their phones or any recording gear they have? Disabled people had to threaten the DWP with court action to get recordings on the table last time around and even then, the so-called system the DWP and Atos came up with was garbage. People either had to wait for Atos to produce a dual recorder and an assessor who agreed to be recorded, or they had to be able to produce equipment that made dual recordings themselves. Almost nobody has that sort of dual CD-recording gear in the cupboard at home, so that was all pretty shit.

2) Will Maximus allow people being assessed/journalists/friends to film their assessments? I had to film people’s assessments on the sly when Atos was in so-called charge and while I’ll certainly do that again, it’d be great to just be able to turn up anywhere with a camera in my hand, as well the little hidden one I sew into my jumper. Just throwing that out there.

I can’t see Maximus objecting to either of these concepts, given their claims that WCAs will forevermore be conducted in the spirit of decency and openness. I fully expect a positive email response from Maximus on both points, in which case we can all start tooling up with recording gear. That way, we can all see for ourselves whether or not Maximus is performing with “more touch, more communication,” whatever the hell that means. We can also decide whether performing with “more touch, more communication,” and the recent Maximus charm offensive matters a damn (spoiler: it doesn’t). I mean – being treated halfway decently in a face-to-face assessment is not the whole story if you’re thrown off your benefit and into poverty. That part of the equation will never add. We know this government’s agenda for disabled people.

Also – I fail to understand why these companies think they should get a pat on the head for deciding to treat people decently – or at least, deciding to go through the motions of treating people decently. People who have to go through WCAs should be treated decently as a matter of course. The fact that they were treated so badly by Atos should actually see IDS in jail.

Anyway – if you can find any references to Maximus assessments and filming and recordings, please send. Always good to get these things straight from the off.

See you on 2 March. I’ll be the middle-aged bird covered in recorders and cameras.

#ScrapWCA

More on the sort of ritual humiliation people must now tolerate at jobcentres as a matter of course:

I attended a first JSA signing-on session last week with Tony, who is aged 60. These inaugural signon sessions at this jobcentre are not held as private, one-to-one meetings. People must attend these sessions as part of a group.

This is a big problem in itself, because people don’t always want to reveal their private information in front of ten or 12 strangers. People must fill in their claimant commitment forms as part of this session. They have to write about their histories and work experience, and not everyone wants to ask the questions they have about these things in front of people they don’t know. People might be ex-offenders, or have long gaps in a work history because they have serious drug and alcohol problems. They may have problems with their reading and writing. On this occasion, one person asked me if I could spell out several words for their form.

Anyway. The toilets. Someone in the group asked if there was a public toilet in the building. The adviser who was running the session said No. There was a public toilet at the jobcentre once, but apparently needles were found in it from time to time and the jobcentre closed it. So – that was the end of that. It was simply a case of Too Bad. No alternative was offered. There’s actually a public toilet at the library just round the corner (I am getting on years and so am kind of familiar with the location of pretty much every public latrine in the parts of London I frequent), but nothing was said about that.

This is the sort of thing really gets on my wick. It seems small, but it isn’t. There’s a real vengefulness here. In any other setting, an effort would be made to solve the problem and offer people an alternative. But the normal courtesies aren’t extended to people who claim JSA. Quite the reverse. People who claim JSA are expected to put up with discomfort. They can wet themselves for all anybody cares. The fact that nobody had any choice but to attend the session and stay at it was neither here nor there. And there is no choice. People have to attend these signon sessions if they’re going to get unemployment money. If they don’t attend and stay, they can’t get JSA. The sessions are long – this one went on for more than an hour and people had to wait a while for it to start, so it probably lasted an hour-and-a-half all up. Add on another half-hour for the walk or bus ride there and you’re getting past a couple of hours.

However. The adviser did say that occasionally, an exception was made to the No Toilet rule. People sometimes might be able to use the toilet if they had a special medical problem. Presumably, they had to convince an adviser and/or security guard that their medical problem measured up.

This is exactly what Tony had to do. He’s 60 and not well. After an hour or so, he had to get up in front of the 12 people in the room, interrupt the adviser and whisper a list of his medical problems to see if he could win himself a visit to the toilet. Seriously. Aged 60. Everyone else in the group (the room was small) sat there watching this and trying to work out what was going on, and waiting to see how the adviser would play it. The adviser thought about it and listened some more and in the end, I guess, decided that Tony had a case. So, he told Tony to walk through the main part of the jobcentre to the security guards and to tell them he was allowed to use the toilet. Tony left the room – and returned in a few minutes to take the adviser aside again. He told me afterwards that the guards had said No to his request and sent him back to the room. A bit desperate now, he asked the adviser if he could tell the guards he was allowed to use the toilet. The adviser seemed stressed by this – “I can’t leave the room,” he said – but decided to solve the problem by opening the door and attracting the attention of the security guards across the main waiting area.

So much for dignity. Continue reading →