“Why should I pay for other people’s kids?” Because that’s real social security. Stop whining.

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A few thoughts on the modern world’s fear and loathing of single mothers:

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a woman who we’ll call Becky. She was in her early thirties. She and her six children (aged seven and under) were living in a one-bedroom flat in a temporary accommodation hostel in South East London. The whole family (the family included an 18-month-old baby) slept in that one bedroom. You can see the beds and bunks in the photos below. The kitchen was tiny. There was just enough space for two adults to fit into it if neither of them moved around very much. Cockroaches rattled across the floor. Becky had plugged holes in the walls with foam to stop the cockroaches from getting into the flat and into the baby’s cot:

Foam In Wall

Apparently, Becky’s local council had told her the family might have to stay in the one-bedroom hostel flat for months. Big houses for large families were in short supply. Becky had 11 children altogether, but the eldest ones had been removed from her care and adopted into other families (Becky said that the council adopted out her white children. The six children she still had living with her were mixed race). One of her older sons lived with her sister. So, Becky was living in this one-bedroom hostel flat with her six youngest children. Her school-aged kids had to sit on the bunk-beds to do their homework while the littler ones raced around the room. This overcrowding was yielding exactly the results that you’d expect. Becky showed me a health visitor’s letter which said that her kids were falling badly behind in their milestones, at least in part because of their living conditions. That in itself is reason enough to find and finance decent accommodation for this family. Every kid deserves a chance.

Beds and cot

Anyway. I’ve thought a lot about Becky and her kids in the couple of weeks since I saw them. Mainly, I’ve thought about the shit that hits the fan whenever somebody writes about mothers who ask for state support. We all know how this one goes in our punitive age (read a few of the comments under this story if you don’t). Why, people will ask, did Becky have these children if she couldn’t afford to look after them? Where are the fathers? Why should this woman and her children be found a decent home? Why should taxpayers pick up the tab?

And on it goes. For myself, I have to say that I find this sort of dismissal – this slamming of doors, particularly in children’s faces – harder to handle as time goes on. It solves nothing and helps nobody. You find in it one of our era’s most poisonous political ideas: that you can sort a situation out simply by insisting it should never have come to pass. As it happens, there are – as there usually are – many reasons for complex situations: ill health, mental health, domestic violence, manipulation and a host of other forces that are beyond my perception and grasp. I don’t need to know the details and neither do you. Knowing the details doesn’t change the facts. Either everyone is entitled to basics like housing, or nobody is. That is social security. All that matters is the need at the hour of need.

Kitchen

Hope Maximus is totally up for us filming and recording WCAs. I’m all set either way.

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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

Could these meetings be more patronising: inside a first group meeting for people signing on

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This is a report from a new JSA claimants’ induction meeting I recently attended.

When people sign on in this part of London, their first meeting at the jobcentre is held in a group with ten or so other new claimants. They don’t start with a private, one-to-one session with a jobcentre adviser. They’re flung into a group for induction. There’s no privacy. At all. People hate it. The guy I went with to the meeting below didn’t even know his first meeting would be held in a group. People are told it happens because staff don’t have time now to cover everything in the one-to-one meetings that come at a later date.

I also wonder if these group meetings are done to totally discourage people from continuing with their JSA claim at all. This one I went to was a classic of screaming dysfunction:

It is late on recent Thursday morning at one of the north west London jobcentres and I’m sitting in a new JSA claimants’ group meeting, watching the jobcentre adviser in charge of the session totally lose it with one of the new claimants (there are about 12 new claimants and an adviser crammed into a very small and rather dark side room). The jobcentre adviser and the new claimant bloke are having a full-on shrieking-match, which they’ve been working towards since the session started. I’m guessing that the louder parts of it are now reverberating around the jobcentre.

The new claimant guy – let’s call him Mark – obviously can’t take being patronised, or tolerate bullshit in any form, and has decided to come out swinging (metaphorically on this occasion). And fair enough, too. I know for a fact that if I was siging on, there’s absolutely no way in this world I could put up with the high-handed, JSA-claimants-are-on-the-make-and-must-be-kept-in-line presentation that we’re stuck in front of today. If I had just lost my job, this thinly-masked institutional hauteur would be needling me to the brink. It is anyway. The adviser’s address is full of You Lot Better Pull Finger directives such as: “If you have no commitments… we’d expect a lot more effort from you. And to be honest, you should expect a lot more effort from yourself.” The adviser chucks in plenty of poorly-disguised sanctions threats, too (even though nobody’s actually signed on yet): “The less effort we feel that you’re putting in [to find work], the more chance there is of your jobseekers’ allowance being affected,” and “the more vague your information, the more chance that your jobseekers’ allowance may be affected,” etc, etc. This pitch starts to work on your brain like nails down a chalkboard: “Your Jobseekers’ Allowance May Be Affected.” On and on it goes and my word, it grates. Without a doubt, the assumption from the get-go is that people sign on to sponge. Continue reading →

Being treated well when you’re on workfare is a bonus. Don’t expect it.

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I spent several hours today with a group of people who are just about to finish their first six-month stint on 30-hour-a-week workfare Community Work Placements (CWP). CWP began last year as part of George Osborne’s pointless, punitive Help To Work scheme. With CWP, people on JSA are forced to work for 30 hours a week for six months in charities and local organisations. They have no choice. Refuse to work for free – you’ll be sanctioned.

The people I spoke with today have spent the last six months at Haringey charity Embrace UK where they have worked on – among other things – data sorting and entry, administration, sexual health advice for young people (no DBS/CRB checks – I wrote about that here), youth development schemes (ditto), presentations for new arrivals and homeless groups, marketing support, IT development and radio production. This is a huge range of jobs for which people should be properly paid. The fact that so many tasks are now being done by people who are made to do those tasks on workfare schemes ought to be of concern for everyone. I’ve said it before: paid work as a concept is under real threat as people who are forced to work for nothing carry out more and more jobs. As one of the men on CWP at Embrace UK said to me when we spoke late last year – people in so-called white-collar work may not be particularly aware that “their” kind of job is being done now for nothing. “They’ll have doctors and lawyers on workfare soon,” he said. You laugh, but you wonder as well. As I’ve said before as well, I think people who aren’t yet affected by these things have a vague (and snobbish) idea that workfare means a bit of weeding in public parks (a job that also should be properly paid, by the way). I don’t think everyone grasps the reach that workfare increasingly has.

Anyway. The people I spoke with this morning had one big question. They wanted to know what would happen to them when this first six-month placement ended. Nobody I spoke to had a paid job to go to (CWP = another winning government welfare-to-work scheme. Not). Their concern was that their nasty workfare-placement company Urban Futures would shove them into a new placement with another charity. They worried that the next place would be extremely unpleasant – that the work would be filthy and hard (which is no joke, particularly when you’re in your 50s) and the management cruel. There is reason to fear, if you ask me. I’ve spoken with people on CWP workfare at Haringey charities who are sent into the streets to do bucket collections. They must stand outside in all weathers with buckets and collect money. “I did a couple of days charity bucket collection down out the front of the shops,” a guy called Graham told me outside Urban Futures just before Christmas.

Another person I spoke to today had spent time on CWP at the Marie Curie charity shop at Highbury and Islington (Marie Curie, as we know, supposedly pulled out of workfare in 2012, but seems now to take people on CWP by – erm, accident. Marie Curie no longer answers my questions about this. Ahem. They’ll keep. More on them soon). That person (aged in their 50s) had to “steam clothes and stand on the shop floor putting clothes out. You were on your feet all day, with the manager pushing us to work harder and harder.” Continue reading →

Now for our next trick: making elderly JSA claimants grovel to use toilets at jobcentres

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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 →

Not allowed to wait inside the jobcentre for signon appointment even though we were COLD….

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Decided to write this because I can – I went to the Forest Hill jobcentre in Lewisham earlier this week with someone who had a signon appointment. We got the jobcentre early – probably about 15 minutes before the appointment time (the person I was with didn’t want to be late in case they got in trouble, etc).

Anyway, Security wouldn’t let us wait inside the jobcentre – you know, on the seats in the waiting area. They said we couldn’t come in until about the time of the appointment. I have to say that this got on my nerves very badly, because it was so cold outside. I know people who’ve been banned from jobcentres, but they’re still allowed into other ones to sign on, and anyway – nobody has the right to deepfreeze other people. Life is uncomfortable enough for people at the moment without forcing them to wait outside in the middle of a very cold winter. Thought that was a bit shit.

Jobcentre to claimants: if you want benefits help, ask the local group that campaigns against us

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Here’s more evidence of how totally jobcentres have lost the plot/jumped the shark etc:

The Kilburn jobcentre now tells ESA and JSA claimants who need help with their claims to seek advice from the local campaigning group that battles jobcentres. I shit you not. The Kilburn jobcentre is now so utterly unable to solve people’s problems that it tells claimants that a good bet is to get support from the group that regularly protests outside the jobcentre about the jobcentre.

So – we have a scenario where sometimes, the jobcentre staff call the police on the campaigning group when its members leaflet out the front of the jobcentre. Other times, jobcentre staff refer people to the campaigning group for the help that the jobcentre isn’t giving – ie the sort of jobcentre failure that often leads to the protests. What a world. It’s as though some staff at this jobcentre have decided that people will get the best advice in their battles against the DWP and jobcentres if they ask people who actively campaign against the DWP and jobcentres. And you know – although it’s weird, maybe it does make a certain kind of sense. The people at the unemployed workers’ group do have a great deal of expertise and give excellent advice and support to people who have problems with their claims.

They certainly give people more help and support than they get anywhere else. Here’s an example: yesterday, I spent a long time talking with a guy called Tony (there’s a transcript from our discussion below). He hadn’t been able to find assistance at all until the jobcentre sent him to the campaigning group. He definitely needed help, too – he’s 60, unwell (he looked cold and very pale) and he is totally without income. He used to work as a mechanic and restoring cars, but then his health deteriorated and – yeah. This is how it happens. This is how it happens if you age and get sick and forget to get very rich first. Tony was thrown off ESA recently, when Atos found him fit for work. He appealed that decision and has been languishing in the no-man’s land that is mandatory reconsideration ever since (people who challenge a fit-to-work decision can’t go straight to appeal now. They must now wait for the DWP reexamine the original decision at its leisure – that’s mandatory reconsideration). Like most people, Tony has no idea how long he must wait to find out if the fit-to-work decision will be overturned.

In the meantime, Tony has absolutely no money coming in at all. To survive, he’s living with his mother and borrowing money from his brother (his brother, who is retired, turned up at the jobcentre yesterday morning when we were talking to loan Tony some change for phone credit). Tony was trying to find out the best way to hurry up the ESA mandatory reconsideration decision and/or to sign on for JSA. He’d traipsed all over north London (he’s 60, as I say, and has epilepsy and a heart problem) trying and failing to get help at a CAB. He went back to the jobcentre, which was when an adviser told him about the unemployed workers’ group.

“They were sending me from one place to another…then [the jobcentre adviser here at Kilburn] saw me sitting down and said “What’s wrong?” I said “they’ve taken me off ESA.” She said the best thing for me to do was to go to the [unemployed workers’] group. So they [the jobcentre] are saying themselves that they don’t have the people to help.”

He’s probably right about the jobcentre’s lack of staff. I spoke to another guy yesterday morning who was signing on for the first time (he works in removals for an agency and the work he had just ended. His agency could only offer him one day of work this week). His first sign-on session yesterday was due to take place in a group with 12 other people, because “there weren’t enough staff to do one-on-one assessments.”

So that is where we are at. Continue reading →

Back soon. In the meantime…

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Out & about atm on a few things – back soon.

If you have some time and feel like tearing it up on twitter, go ahead and tweet the work programme provider Urban Futures @urbanfuturesuk and the charity Marie Curie @mariecurieuk and ask them exactly how people came to be placed on the community work placement (CWP) workfare programme at Marie Curie when Marie Curie doesn’t take workfare placements anymore.

I got the answer below (ie it was an accident), but have asked for more detail about the exact processes that companies that provide volunteers to charities must (should) go through when placing volunteers with charities to make sure volunteers aren’t on workfare. How exactly do workfare placement “accidents” like the one described on the link below happen?

Sadly, nobody from either UF or MC is responding to my calls and emails atm, so feel free to get in yourselves.

http://www.katebelgrave.com/2015/01/weve-stopped-taking-people-on-workfare-placements-except-when-we-take-them-by-accident/

We’ve stopped taking people on workfare placements except when we take them by accident…?

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Hmm…

I was talking very recently with a group of people who are on a 30-hour-a-week workfare Community Work Placement (CWP) at at Haringey charity. Their workfare provider is the G4S subcontractor Urban Futures, finder of these 30-hour-a-week placements on which people must work or lose their benefits.

Anyway – one member of the group made a startling revelation as we spoke. This person said that until late December 2014, they’d been on a CWP workfare placement in the Marie Curie charity shop in Highbury and Islington.

The thing with that is – Marie Curie supposedly abandoned participation in forced workfare schemes a couple of years ago as a result of successful Boycott Workfare campaigns (shoutout to the Void here who reminded me MC had left).

So I rang Marie Curie and sent through some questions asking how somebody on CWP had ended up on a workfare placement in one of their shops when Marie Curie didn’t participate in workfare schemes, or take people on workfare placements.

The answer I got was intriguing.

Marie Curie’s media guy told me yesterday that Marie Curie does not support work placement schemes where people will lose their benefits if they do not participate – but that sometimes they ended up taking people on such schemes by… accident.

Right.

This bloke said that these accidents come about because disingenuous organisations and work programme providers come to Marie Curie and ask if the charity will take volunteers in its shops without telling Marie Curie that the “volunteers” are actually on forced workfare placements. He talked about the Highbury and Islington case in such a context. “We do try wherever possible to check if we are approached by companies or organisations that are offering us volunteers… but [if] they’re not quite honest with us….and if we do find that this is the case, we do end the relationship with that organisation… We will in many cases offer that volunteer a chance to volunteer with us, but under the deal that they won’t lose any benefits if it is not for them.”

He also said that sometimes, Marie Curie was “not made aware until after the volunteer has left that they were on one of these programmes.”

Intriguing, as I say. I must say that I struggled to imagine a scenario where a lot of people wouldn’t know immediately that someone was on a forced placement, because a) people on such a placement would talk about it and b) they’d be getting someone at the charity to regularly sign their attendance timesheets so that travel costs could be claimed, but it could be that I don’t have much imagination. It does all make you wonder, though. It has, for example, made me wonder how often these sorts of accidents happen and how many people turn up and stay on in workfare placements at organisations that have supposedly pulled out of workfare. At the very least, it makes me wonder how well organisations that have pulled out of workfare police their own anti-workfare policies and exactly how they do it. I think I’ll set aside some time on the weekend to do more wondering about all of this.

I’ve also rung Urban Futures to ask how a CWP provider like themselves – just as an example – would view the sort of placement accident described by Marie Curie. It certainly would be interesting to know Urban Futures’ view of unscrupulous work programme providers who aren always entirely honest about placement motives. I don’t always have much (any) luck when I try to get hold of people at Urban Futures, but you never know. This could be the big moment. I’ll let you know if anything comes through.

In the meantime, stay on alert for any more – err, workfare placement accidents.

Update: Sunday 18 Jan: Urban Futures sadly didn’t return my Friday call, so we’ll have another go this week.

Daily signon and workfare: they don’t think of us as human beings

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As we gear up for 2015 and an election that will be at least in part about abusing people who claim benefits and are out of work…

We went back to the infamous North Kensington jobcentre yesterday where people were complaining again about a jobcentre adviser there who they say abuses power. “Got some sort of vendetta against claimants…” one woman told me. “They [jobcentre advisers] don’t understand how we have to live – not pay our rent some days, or take from our gas money some days, only to be thinking to ourselves “do we have a roof over our heads? They are drawing money, so they don’t understand how we have to go through hardship.”

This woman, who has been unemployed now for some years and is getting older and worried about it, was especially angry about the daily JSA signon regime at North Kensington. She must travel to the jobcentre every day to sign on for her JSA and she must do this for three months.

Like most people I speak with, she says that being forced to travel to the jobcentre daily to sign on is ruining any chance she has of finding a job. Like most people too, she felt that the jobcentre was pretty much going out of its way to prevent her from finding employment. I have to say I agree with this line of thinking a lot of the time now. I certainly agreed with it on this occasion. There’s something very strange about the way these places are operating – if operating is the word. At its simplest – if the point of jobcentres was to find people jobs, there’d be a lot more action along those lines, rather than endless obstacles. There’d be phones that people could use to call employers (so many jobcentres have got rid of onsite phones. People have to call employers themselves, with phone credit they do not have). Signon sessions with jobcentre advisers would last more than five minutes and there’d be dedicated support for people who wanted it. There is not. Jobcentre advisers would ring employers on behalf of claimants and set up job interviews then and there. They don’t. I’ve seen none of that sort of thing at the signons I’ve attended with people. It all makes you wonder. It certainly makes me wonder. One thing I’ve started to wonder in particular is if jobcentres like to keep a group of people unemployed for the long-term so that they can channel those people to work programme providers and into useless work skills courses, and keep the lolly flowing in that direction. Those are big businesses, after all, and they need bums on seats.

This woman must attend the jobcentre every day at a different time. Nobody lifts a finger to help her find work while she’s there. And more than that – in her case, the daily signon regime seems actively to have separated her from a drop-in centre where she used a computer, worked on her jobsearch and seemed to get a bit of help. “I haven’t been able to go to my drop-in centre [since I started daily signon]. My drop-in centre is so helpful. I had use of the computer and advisers there. They are a world of good to me, but coming here [to daily signon] means that I cannot get there, because my drop-in centre is [open] from 9 to 12… [For daily signon], I have to come in every single day and I don’t know from one to another what time it is. Today, I came in at ten o’clock. Tomorrow, I’m in at 11.05am. The day after, I might go back to 9am or 3.30pm. I don’t know.”

My first thought was – why not excuse her from daily signon? Why not call the drop-in centre and set something constructive up? As it happens, I know the answer to these questions. Everyone does. People tell me that the point of daily signon is destroy any chances people have of organising cash-in-hand jobs and earning a few quid on the side. Can’t have someone on the bones of their arse finding an extra tenner here and there, and feeling a little less desperate. People might forget that grovelling is supposed to be their main job when they’re out of work. The truth is that daily signon affixes people to JSA and their jobcentre in a very twisted way. They can’t plan anything else. Any other activity has to be organised around that signon appointment and at the last minute. By definition, daily signon can’t improve people’s chances of getting out, because it locks people in. I think the same of the 30-hour-a-week community work placements that I’ll be posting on shortly (have been spending time recently with people on those workfare placements). The overriding impression I get is that these things are designed to keep people who’ve been out of work for a while exactly where they are. Continue reading →