Jobcentre meltdown and bans. What a mess.

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It’s hardly surprising to hear that the tension is bad at jobcentres. Lengthy and ridiculous benefit sanctions, pointless courses and workfare placements that go nowhere – it’s no wonder that people are getting really, really angry.

Birmingham Against Cuts had a story recently about a man who smashed windows at the Sparkhill jobcentre after being sanctioned.

The Manchester Evening News has a story today about a man who set fire to phones in a jobcentre in the hope that he’d be arrested and given something to eat when in police custody.

And last week, I visited a few people in Bracknell who told me they and people they knew had been banned from their jobcentre for complaining about the centre and their workfare provider.

The jobcentre ban notices (which are not signed by a named officer) said they were banned for verbal and written abuse and behaviour “which was totally unacceptable” (no further details on that appear in the correspondence). The people in question denied the charges in the letters. More to the point – and this is the key point, whether we’re talking Bracknell, or wherever – they felt that they had little recourse. They said that they had nowhere to go to appeal those bans. They’d been issued with ban notices by London lawyers (I have copies of these) and then the jobcentre (I have those as well) and told to appear at another job centre for their fortnightly JSA interviews. That was the end of that.

Except that it’s not. Iain Duncan Smith has clearly decided to leave claimants and jobcentre staff to their hell together, to fight it out themselves. This can surely only get worse. As Birmingham Against The Cuts observes, people are dealing with increasingly lengthy sanctions and ridiculous reasons for them – absurd sanctions handed out by stressed staff who are under pressure to meet cruel targets. No wonder things kick off. What do people expect?

As for bans – heavy. And one-sided. I’ve got papers here which threaten Asbos and injunctions and costs if bans are broken. Wonder what happens if you disagree. Which you might. Of course jobcentre workers shouldn’t be abused – but there are always two sides to a story. These are tense times, as I’ve said. Isn’t it possible for frustration, anger and persistence to be interpreted as abuse? Can’t perspectives on a heated incident differ? Couldn’t jobcentres ban people who simply persist with a complaint and refuse to give up the fight for their money? Couldn’t bans be used to shut people up? (The DWP said, simply, that it banned people “who posed a threat” and that “we do not issue bans lightly.” I’d be interested to know if people think that’s the case. Certainly, the various people I’ve spoken to about this have issues with it).

And if someone disagrees with a ban, shouldn’t they at least be able to appeal that decision? Because if they can’t, or don’t know that they can, then the equation is not equal. So I asked the DWP about this as well. I tried to ask Bracknell jobcentre first, but kept getting bounced back to the DWP. Their advice seemed to be that anyone who disagreed with a ban would need to fork out for a lawyer – “they can seek legal advice – and additionally they could follow our complaints process if they disagree with the methods we adopt – but as a legal request the ban would stand, unless contested legally.” So – you’re sanctioned, you’re banned and you must find money for a lawyer. You’re hardly in a position to do that.

What a bloody mess. I can only imagine that IDS enjoys it – this power to throw people into a tinderbox and chuck in a match. Only a truly evil prick would foster that.

No discretionary housing payment for you this time around #bedroomtax

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Latest article with Jo here. She’s from Speke and I’ve been in contact with her about the bedroom tax for most of this year (visited her house in June to write this article):

“Been sent this letter by Jo.

Jo lives in Speke in a two-bedroom housing association flat. She’s lived in that flat for about 13 years. She was moved to her current flat so she could care for her elderly mother who lives nearby. Jo is disabled herself and on employment and support allowance. She has one small “spare” room for which she must pay the bedroom tax.

When the bedroom tax began, she knew that she’d struggle to pay for that “spare” bedroom out of her small benefit. So she applied to Liverpool City Council for a discretionary housing payment. That was in April. She was awarded a DHP of about £11 a week which was paid directly to her housing association (the South Liverpool Housing Group) to cover the bedroom tax.

The problem is that Jo’s DHP award was only for six months (DHPs are time-limited) and it has just run out. She applied for another DHP a couple of weeks ago, but was turned down. So now she’ll have to pay the bedroom tax herself. “A discretionary housing payment is not a long term solution for assistance with your rent shortfall,” the council says.”

Read the rest here.

Letters Jo received from Liverpool City Council saying her application for DHP had been turned down are here:

First page
Second page

Chris Huhne, rehabilitated. Too bad for everyone else.

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A few thoughts on the return of Chris Huhne – and a few of the people I’ve met who’d love to be welcomed into genteel society as warmly as Chris, but never will be:

The appearance of Chris Huhne’s weekly column is now a serious irritation. He is a crook, a liar and a cheat. His greatest talent is blaming others for all of that. I thought him surplus to most requirements, if I thought about him at all.

But suddenly, here he is every week – back in and cosy with the political and media classes, and rubbing everyone else’s nose in his fast-turnaround rehabilitation. I’ve tried to ignore it, but at the same time can’t stand it. I first assumed that his column was a one-off pressed ham to us all. Now, it seems that the Guardian means to go on with it.

Every week for three weeks, Huhne has been back. He’s been back again today – looking as smug as he is shameless, and sitting before us as evidence (like we needed more) that the political class believes there is one set of rules for us and one set of rules for the self-appointed elite. And that it’s fine to flaunt that, etc.

This disparity is winding me up, I have to say. It’s everywhere and it is vile. It is beneath everyone, except the people who are pushing it. It’s a poison that taints us all. But ho hum and on it goes. If you’re without money, or connections, you’re benefit scrounging scum. If you’re Chris Huhne, you’re Our Guy. If you’re on a benefit and earn a few extra bob on the side as a cleaner to make ends meet (as people I’ve interviewed have), the director of public prosecutions will say that you should be locked up for ten years. If, on the other hand, you’re the CE of a profit-making company who can’t handle the thought of paying tax, PwC will relieve your pain by telling you to pretend that you’re domiciled elsewhere (see Panorama for more on this and/or the latest edition of Private Eye). And if you’re Chris Huhne, you can skulk out of prison and present yourself as an inspiration to anyone from the monied classes who has fallen (spectacularly) from grace, but was born and raised to expect to rejoin the fold.

And if you’re not Chris Huhne, you can get stuffed. That’s the part that gets me.

So.

Continue reading →

Councils using zero hours, casual staff and the work programme

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This post is now also over here

Post updated 7 October with more responses

Post updated 22 September with more responses

This post lists the results of an FOI I recently sent to councils to get a rough idea of how many people councils employed on zero hours contracts or zero hours-type working arrangements and how many councils were using the work programme. When I was writing several years ago about workfare in the US, I found that Rudy Guiliani had replaced paid and unionised public sector workers with people on New York’s workfare programme to cut wage budgets. It’s worth keeping an eye on trends here as large numbers of paid staff are cut from the public sector. I’m also interested in the number of casual staff that councils use.

The numbers in this post are basic and I post them as a rough guide. Other people may want to use them as a starting-point for asking for more questions about employment arrangements at their local authorities and in different services provided by their authorities. It’s definitely interesting to note the sorts of jobs that people must work on zero hour terms and/or as casual workers. This is a complex area: councils outsource a lot of services and workers, and employ a variety of people, including full-time employees, part-time permanent staff, short and long term contractors, agency staff (some of whom stay for significant periods) and a lot of casual staff (people who work when required). Some arrangements for casual staff aren’t really too different from zero hours working, but you’ll see councils below arguing that the difference is substantial because people working on casual arrangements aren’t on call as such and are free to pursue other work. In fact, there’s plenty of room for unscrupulous employer behaviour in both and there’s plenty of that around. Continue reading →

Capita, Serco, G4S, government and the rise and rise of electronic tagging

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Updates at the end of this post.

I rarely use the words “fascinating” and “press release” in the same sentence, but:

This fascinating press release appeared on the Capita website recently: “Capita [is the] preferred bidder for electronic monitoring contract.”

So.

It seems that Capita has positioned itself (with three other companies) to take over the dire electronic tagging system run by Serco and G4S for the Ministry of Justice. By “dire,” I mean “very likely fraudulent”: Serco and G4S were recently slammed by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for charging the taxpayer tens of millions of pounds for people they claimed to have tagged, but who turned out to be dead or incarcerated. Serco will participate in an independent “forensic audit” as a result. G4S won’t: according to the MOJ, they told Grayling No and were referred to the SFO. G4S, amazingly, told Robert Peston that it opted to call in the SFO itself. I am not sure what the real situation is there. All I know is that we get to keep paying for it.

And paying for it. We now have Capita as preferred bidder for a large electronic monitoring contract. Unfortunately, it is a contract that sets many alarms off itself. Chief among these Capita’s plan to make £400m in its first six years of the contract and its reluctance to explain in detail (to me anyway) exactly how it proposes to do that. I hope that they have decided against targeting the dead. Of even greater concern, though, is the extent to which they apparently plan to target and tag the living. Their press release says that the £400m in those first six years will be generated on the basis of an “anticipated increase in the use of tags beyond the current numbers of monitored individuals.” Early days, I know, but £400m is a lot of money, so we’re surely talking a lot of monitored individuals.

I’m going back and forwards with the MOJ at the moment for more on who exactly the ministry proposes to tag and how long for when we’re talking offenders and/or ex-offenders: the press release they sent speaks, vaguely, of “tracking the movement of offenders in the community,” “delivering swifter justice,” “tracking offenders wherever they go 24 hours a day,” (in another call, the MOJ says that’s an advantage of the new technology it expects to be provided) and stopping “paedophiles hanging around” at school gates. Napo offers more details in its take: Napo said last year that as government dramatically increased the number of people it tagged, “it was envisaged that tagging would be a condition of all community orders. Currently around 35,000 offenders are tagged for up to 12 hours and for a maximum of six months, either as a condition of a community order, or early release from prison on Home Detention Curfew. This has risen hugely over a 15-year period from a few hundred individuals tagged per year to the current level of tens of thousands. Under the government scheme, the number tagged could rise 180,000 or even more, an increase therefore of six-fold.”

So there’s that.

I also wonder if several hundred million quid’s worth of tagging will go beyond the offenders and ex-offenders that Chris Grayling seems so obsessed with tagging and tracking long after they are released from jail (I don’t personally believe the tagging of people in those categories should be accepted as written, either – but more on that later. The MOJ says that the length of time on a tag will be decided by judges).

I think that it will. Capita certainly sees a market beyond so-called justice and the MOJ. Like Serco and G4S, Capita thinks big. Certainly, Capita thinks a lot bigger than Grayling. You could go as far to say that Capita sees the MOJ contract as a launching-pad for the real projectile – an enormous net to sling across the public sector and people who use it, and then, it would seem, the entire world. You wouldn’t have to be a wild conspiracy type to reach that conclusion, either. Just go back to that Capita press release. It’s fascinating, as I say. “Further significant growth is expected through the expansion of services to other government departments and agencies.” (my emphasis). “Capita will work with the MOJ to promote the intellectual property which underpins the service internationally, generating further growth.” “The service has been designed to enable other government bodies – for example, the probation services, the NHS and social care agencies, to procure related services.” (my emphasis).

I wonder about all of this, you know. Who are the people that the government and/or Capita (I’m not entirely sure which is which or who is who any more) really plan to tag as this golden future unfolds? Are they thousands of ex-offenders who have served their time, but who Grayling decides need a further kicking, for political gain at least? Are they the people who were once served by the probation service that Grayling is in the process of privatising and destroying? Where is this all meant to end?

And what does Capita mean when it talks about “enabling” social care agencies and the NHS and other government bodies with this sort of technology? Are they thinking, say, of replacing paid care staff with a tag? Will this tagged population include people who are in and out of hospital with serious mental health conditions, but whose services have been cut and who have nowhere to go and nobody to help if there are times when they become disoriented? And what about people who the government is already after? Will we see pre-emptive tagging of people who are known (and entitled, by the way) to attend anti-government protests, or who plan to disrupt, say, a royal wedding? What about people on the work programme, even? Does the government fancy a future where it can tag people who claim benefits – and sanction anyone who steps away from Jobmatch for ten minutes? I wonder about these things.

So I asked Capita for details. That went about as well as I expected it to. Capita said talk to the MOJ. The MOJ, needless to say, said talk to Capita. Then, the MOJ rang me thinking I was Capita. Trying to recover from this error, the MOJ told me to ring the Department of Health about people who might be tagged through the health system. I told the MOJ to ring Capita and tell Capita to tell me which groups of people it was basing its projections on. Am now waiting for Capita to ring and tell me to go back to the MOJ, the Department of Health, the DWP and every council out there that still has social services, to ask what Capita has in mind for their client groups. This will probably go on until I’m dead.

In the meantime, it’s worth having a think. I think, for example, of the woman I spoke to for this article who had a long-term schizophrenia diagnoses and alcoholism, and who’d been in and out of hospital, and who’d been able to live an independent life in a supported living hostel. The hostel was staffed around the clock. People who lived there came and went freely, but were able to contact staff if they got disoriented, or lost, or if abusers were following them, or trying to get into the building. That hostel was closed down though, as was another in the same borough. The woman I spoke to was terrified of being placed in low-support accommodation, or a B&B because she’d been abused in such places before. And she’d wandered before and often got lost and confused when she was drinking. She liked the hostel and had good relationships with staff. She certainly liked the arrangement better than the alternative – which was being cast adrift completely. Is she the sort of person who would be tagged in future – someone no longer thought worthy of decent services or decent accommodation, but to be kept track of in a basic way?

And what about other people who are losing services? I think about a story I did in Ealing earlier this year. I spent a lot of time talking to Ealing people with learning difficulties and their families about council plans to cut their training-to-work centre and the support staff who worked there. The people who used the centre would get nothing as a replacement: Ealing council no longer allocates funding to people with “moderate” needs. The thing was – safety was an issue. One mother of a 28-year-old man who attended that centre kept telling me that she appreciated the centre because she knew her son was safe there. Out on the streets on his own, he got picked on, robbed and, often, just lost. The thing was – he would be on his own if the centre was closed, because he’d be given little or nothing to replace it, or to pay for personal assistants or support. His mother could pay for a mentor to accompany him sometimes, but could only afford one day a week. So in future – will she and families of people with even more substantial needs whose care will undoubtedly be cut, be told their best and only option is a tag? Is the future of social care a world where, instead of proper funding for independent living, money is given to the likes of Capita to tag people and update their families with their basic positioning?

That issue that has long been debated, of course. There’s been much discussion, for example, about the ethics of tagging of people with dementia, who do sometimes become disoriented or lost: “of the 700,000 people in Britain with some form of dementia, up to 60% occasionally felt compelled to walk away from home without knowing how or where to return,” the Alzheimer’s Society told the Guardian some time ago in a debate on the topic. Some people welcomed the technology, saying it gave them greater freedom in the earlier stages of their conditions. But, as you can see from that story, there was and is concern that the technology infringed on human rights and that it would be used in place of high-quality care and personal assistants – a concern that must be even more pressing now as social care budgets disappear.

In my experience, too, people want human contact as well as technology. I’ll be written off as a wet hippie for saying that, but it really is true. People make that sort of point all the time when you talk with them. Another story: several years ago, Barnet council announced that it would remove onsite wardens from sheltered housing flats in the borough. One of the justifications for this plan (which was very unpopular with sheltered housing residents) was that the elderly people in those flats had alarms and electronic means of summonsing help if they needed it. But the elderly people who turned out at Hendon Town Hall to protest the cut did not have faith in those alarms. They said no button or alarm would compensate for having a real person onsite to check in with, or to alert when someone was feeling unwell.

No technology is entirely dependable. Tagging technology certainly isn’t. Napo, which is battling the privatisation of probation services as we speak, has long argued that tagging systems are unreliable and alone don’t impact on crime. Concerns listed in Napo’s 2012 paper on tagging include: faulty equipment, tags not working when people take baths or showers, people being recalled to custody unnecessarily, high-risk offenders not being monitored properly and instances where devices were never fitted. So – tagging companies are not always be brilliant at tracking and finding people who have been tagged. They are, however, brilliant at tracking and finding councillors and MPs who are willing to pay and pay for their technology. Even the Policy Exchange has raised concerns about this. As the Howard League’s Andrew Neilson reported here last year, the Policy Exchange said “that the use of electronic monitoring has been too expensive and dominated by the duopoly of Serco and G4S, leading to a lack of innovation and a use of technology that has changed little since it was first deployed in 1989.” Cost upset the Exchange: “the report estimates that electronic monitoring an individual costs £13.14 per day in England and Wales, while the equivalent in the United States was £1.22.”

So. Intriguing, as I say. Intriguing to imagine where all of this is going and who will end up tagging whom. Capita obviously thinks the sky is the limit. CE Paul Pindar freely admits in his press release that “when fully live, this is expected to be the largest, single and most advanced ‘tagging’ system in the world.”

He also says that the thing will be run “to the highest possible standards of governance and transparency.” That’s an intriguing claim as well. I’m guessing that Paul doesn’t realising that he’s the CE of the company that recently put the translation service in meltdown, or brought us the black hole that is Service Birmingham (where transparency is such a problem that a sub-committee was recently set up for councillors who publicly admitted they did not know how much money the council was paying Capita via Service Birmingham), and the Sefton council debacle (Sefton is cutting short a £65m contract with Capita, because it has failed to deliver savings). There are times when I think that the only people round here who really need tagging are the ones from these companies who keep visiting council and government buildings and leaving with blank cheques.

Update September 17:

In other news, the Lib Dems announced today a policy to provide free school lunches. Only last week, Capita announced that it was now in school lunches. I simply observe that I will watch with interest to see who provides lunches.

Also, Capita had said that it would be all right for me to attend this workfare conference, but yesterday wrote to say that there would be no press pass allowance at the event after all.

 

The reasons for low pay? Greed and uselessness at the top

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Right. Low pay.

This crap got my attention today: the DWP’s ridiculous notion that the UK’s lowest-paid employees should be classed as “not working enough,” and “be pushed to earn more – or have their benefits cut,” and that people whose earnings are really low “could be mandated to attend jobcentre meetings where their working habits will be examined (my emphasis) as part of the universal credit programme.”

I note, though, that the DWP has omitted to mention plans to examine the working habits and dubious achievements of the people who are responsible for inflicting low pay on others – the wage-crushing habits of employers, if you like. But fear not – I am here to plug that hole. Because it’s Saturday and because these stories can’t be told often enough, I’m going to tell you a story or two about some of the the reasons why people end up on appallingly low pay.

—————-

Case study: the story of low-paid careworkers who work in the North London carehomes for elderly people that are run by the Fremantle Trust.

From about 2007 for several years, I spent many Wednesday nights in the Barnet Unison office with a group of low-paid Fremantle Trust careworkers who were organising against the vicious cuts that the voracious private company they’d been outsourced to planned to make to their pay and terms and conditions.

The careworkers met every Wednesday to talk and to organise the next strike action and ballot (they took strike action regularly over the course of about two years). Most of the careworkers were women and most were from black and ethnic minority groups (time and time again, the wage cuts I see are, charmingly, both sexist and racist). Many had worked for Barnet council and then the Fremantle Trust for more than ten years.

Unfortunately, though, that commitment and service didn’t count for a stuff. Nobody at the management end gave a shit about staff commitment, or for the notion that elderly people might just be best served by a reasonably-paid and treated workforce.

Just a few days before Christmas of 2006, horrified careworkers were presented with a reorganisation document and a harsh new employment contract which proposed to reduce their pay and working conditions to rubble. As is always the case with these sorts of attacks on careworkers, the proposed cuts were purportedly “needed” to bring the salaries of people on council wages and conditions “into line” with those of people whose rates were set by the market – ie set in already-privatised workplaces where people were less likely to be unionised and companies more inclined to pay workers as little as possible and return as much of the lolly as they could to themselves.

There was also all the usual guff about a competitive industry and times being tough and tightening belts and getting/keeping the business on track, etc. It’s the good old: “the only way to stay competitive in this line of business is to slaughter the salaries of the people who actually do the work.” This is, inevitably, shorthand for “Fuck you lot working down there on the floor.” Or – “we can’t make money unless the people who work for us get none.” I’m not entirely sure what this business model is called. What I am sure of is that it’s been around from the beginning of time and that I’m sick of seeing it.

Those Fremantle documents were comprised entirely of devastating proposals for careworkers – including a cut to the rate for new starters and (this was crucial) the abolishing of the weekend enhancement payments that many existing careworkers relied on for a wage that they could pay rent and mortgages with. For years, workers had been receiving enhanced payments on Saturdays and Sundays – very important extra money for people who were on a base rate of about £8 an hour. Barnet Unison estimated at the time that the abolition of that enhancement rate would see some careworkers losing 30% of their pay. The weekend enhancement money was particularly important to workers who had children (and plenty of workers did) – by working Saturday and/or Sunday and earning over and above their low standard rate, they could earn reasonable money on days when their partners were at home to look after the kids.

But tough shit for them on that: the weekend enhancement money was to be cut. So was the careworkers’ annual leave allowance (by 11 days) and their sick leave. The Trust introduced a statutory sick leave scheme to cut sick pay and days – a rotten scheme at best and a dangerous one in carehomes for elderly people where flu and colds were likely to spread like the plague if sick workers decided to come into work after all and brought flu and colds in with them (the pursuing of cuts to sick leave and pay for low paid workers is, incidentally, one of the many managerial working habits that I’d like to see the DWP examine).

Needless to say, the employer’s response to complaints about this splendid new world was Kiss It. Anyone who didn’t like the new arrangements was told to piss off. I mean that literally, too – careworkers and unions were informed that anyone who refused to sign the new contract would be sacked. And indeed, one union steward was sacked, on some trumped-up misconduct charge, if memory serves. TUPE was useless, as it often is  – particularly, in this case, because some years had passed since staff were transferred to the private sector.

By far the best part of all of this, though – and this is the sort of thing that the DWP should poke through if it ever decides to examine shit board and management working habits, as opposed to the work habits of people who must live with the fallout from management’s shit ones – was Barnet council’s later admission that that the cuts to the careworkers’ salaries and conditions had very likely been for nothing. Which is another way of saying that the cuts hadn’t delivered quite the money that the care companies involved in this shambles wanted and that they refused to leave things there. In a 6 December 2007 cabinet resources committee report, the council admitted that the “high profile” change (the Fremantle careworkers’ industrial dispute over the new contract) had not helped the Fremantle Trust’s sister company Catalyst Housing blunt its own supposed financial losses and that those losses presented “an ongoing and increasing budget risk to the council.” Which was another way of saying “Catalyst wants even more money from us.” Which it did. Catalyst lodged a claim for further funds from the council – and was ultimately awarded £8m in arbitration. Trebles all round, as they say.

Except, of course, for the careworkers.

‘I said [to management] – how do you expect us to be able to cope [with these cuts]? What [management] said is that you have to do extra hours to make up your pay. But what about the quality of our daily life?” one careworker, Lango Gamanga, told me at the time.

Another careworker – a woman called Sandra Jones – said: ”I came here all those years ago and I worked hard and then I got more leave and more wages. I’m 48 now. I don’t want to go back to how I was when I was 30… we’re not asking for a pay rise or anything like that. We’re just asking for what we had.” As for me – I’m asking the DWP to examine the work habits of every councillor and overpaid twat, lawyer and consultant who was involved in that disaster. And every outsourcing disaster. From beginning to end.

And that’s my two cents there.

Although I also have this to say:

The only field of endeavour that is remotely conducive to decent wages is, of course, strong (militant, I mean) grassroots trade union organisation. That’s all that ever really stands between most people and wage oblivion. People who are facing wage oblivion right now are perfectly aware of that, of course. That’s why so many people who are in that category are involved in strike action as we speak (have a look at this list to see the extent of that) . It’s also another reason why the DWP can go fuck itself. People whose earnings are low and/or about to be made lower are never usually thrilled about it, in my experience. They don’t need punishment, or their housing benefits removed, or their work habits examined. They need better wages and they need unions that are committed to fighting for those wages ahead of all else.

Last week, for instance, workers at the One Housing group (a company which provides supported housing and is making surpluses) began another five days of strike action in protest at their employer’s plans to cut pay by £8k a year in some cases. We wrote about that dispute here a few weeks ago when the same group of workers were striking:

“A week before Christmas, 245 letters were sent out. They instructed everyone to sign up to the pay cuts before 21 December. There was a very low union membership at the time, but 70 per cent of the staff didn’t sign – and soon became unionised.

“This triggered endless one-to-one consultations,” said a staff member called Peter. “You would see members of staff in tears, talking about how they’d lose their house – we’d already had our pay frozen for four years previously. It was just an admin exercise, but we got the cuts delayed for 22 months. Now they’ll come in February 2014.””

The really brilliant part of this was that the One Housing Group CEO Mick Sweeney had accepted a pay increase of just over £30,000 – at around about the time when his staff were faced with pay cuts of £8000. There’s a man whose working habits could stand some examination.

Meanwhile, just up the road, workers at Equinox Care, a charity which provides support services for people with drug and alcohol problems and mental health conditions have been fighting a similar attack on their wages. Earlier this year, Equinox workers and unions were given proposals for annual pay cuts of £2,000 – with some people being told to accept reductions of £8,000. Jobs were also be downgraded and downskilled.

Unfortunately, their CE, Bill Puddicombe, just about blew a valve when I rang him to ask why he was wrecking people’s lives in this way. He was furious. As far as he was concerned, I just didn’t get the world in which small charities were forced to operate. That world was cutthroat and that world was competitive and the only chance a place like Equinox had if it was to compete for contracts was to smash wages. The thing is – I do get that world. I get it all too well. I have to operate in a similar world myself. I just refuse to accept it. So, I asked this pissed-off Bill why he didn’t channel his fury/energies into something more constructive – finding new business, for example, or campaigning at council and government level for better contracts. Someone will have to sooner or later: there’ll be nothing left if they don’t. Puddicombe’s staff even told me that they had ideas for areas in which new business could be pursued and had tried to share them to no avail. Wouldn’t pursuing those avenues be a better work habit? Shouldn’t senior management have those skills? Couldn’t CEs pursue national agreements to exclude wages and terms and conditions from tenders for new business? It is genuinely impossible to entertain those ideas? Apparently so. Puddicombe said he couldn’t pursue new business without smashing wages (which was, many suspected, the reason that he’d been put in post in the first place). Only conclusion to draw – that there are a lot of bad working habits at the decision-making level. Ingrained bad work habits. “This is the only show in town” work habits. “Only a wild hippy like you would seriously suggest the race to the bottom for wages isn’t inevitable” work habits. Work habits that the political class refuses to break.

Protests and government extremism

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From yesterday’s DPAC, Black Triangle and Mental Health Resistance Network action in central London:

So interesting that the Taxpayers’ Alliance got a free, media-wide pass yesterday to bitch again about people on benefits – on the very day that disabled protestors turned out in numbers in central London to demonstrate against the benefit and care cuts that are excluding them from work and from life (let’s not forget, what with all this Tory-Lib Dem-Labour faffing about the joys and rewards and glories of work, that some people can’t work, but still deserve and want to live. Which means they’re entitled to benefits). So. Pity, really, that I didn’t see Matthew Sinclair skulking round Westminster yesterday (I presume he lives in this country, or at least visits it). I may just have walked on over and offered to shove the morning’s various ironies right up his arse (I speak metaphorically, I am sure).

Another time, perhaps. Hopefully, even. In the meantime, here is some video from yesterday’s DPAC, Black Triangle and Mental Health Resistance Network protest in central London. This one is outside the DWP and starts with the line of underpants that people left out the front for Iain Duncan Smith. I gave some thought to leaving IDS the sweaty pair (was a hot day) of knickers I was wearing – on which I would have written that plenty of us (taxpayers all, btw Mr Sinclair) are happy to pay for social security, thanks very much. We certainly would rather pay for social security than for the chance to bankroll Iain Duncan Smith into pissing away whatever’s left of the exchequer on a second pass at Universal Credit.

There was a good turnout at the protest and clever targets, just as the BBC was a clever target on Monday. Yesterday, protestors paid visits to the Department of Health (to make the point again that Hunt has no mandate to cut and sell the NHS and that social care cuts, particularly to vital funds like the Independent Living Fund, will prevent people from participating in exactly the work and independence that the Taxpayers’ Alliance so publicly excites itself over) the Department of Transport (to campaign for the accessible transport which would aid independence in a way that endless government lip-service re: inclusion does not), the Department of Energy and Climate Change to protest about the fuel poverty many must live in while energy companies hoover up unreal profits, and the Department of Education to oppose government attacks on inclusive education. And last, but by absolutely no means least, the Department for Work and Pensions.

A few words on extremism

People carried and wore signs which read “proud to be an extremist”: a reference to the comments Paul Maynard made earlier this year: “Pat’s Petition, We Are Spartacus and other extremist disability groups that do not speak for the overall majority.”

I like to mention this so-called extremism in relation to many of the protests I attend these days. If I say so myself and I do – the things I have to say on this aspect of protest can’t be said often enough. It seems to me that we’re fast reaching a point where a mere objection will be described as extremist: a raised voice, or a sit-down protest (I thought of this when I watched a small group of anti-fracking protestors superglue themselves to the Bell Pottinger building a couple of weeks ago) is somehow translated by the mainstream as galloping insurrection (not that I would mind a bit of that either).

I make a couple of points here. The first is that sitting outside a government department and holding a banner which outlines your objections to service cuts is not extremism. It really isn’t. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It really, really isn’t. Occupying a pavement outside the DWP and stringing up a row of underpants on which you’ve written a few rude words and drawn Iain Duncan Smith’s face (see video below – his face works brilliantly on an arse part) is not extremism. As I said during last month’s anti-fracking protests – gluing yourself to a building and refusing to move in protest at corporate plans to devastate your own planet is not extremism. It’s actually a very logical response to corporate plans to devastate your planet. By comparison, selling a public health service to your private sector mates when you’re in government – now that is extremism. It’s an extreme act. At the very least, it’s grand larceny. Taking public money from people who need public services and can’t get to work, or college and/or through life without those services, and giving that money to private companies – that’s extremism. Blowing big bloody holes in the planet with fracking gear is extremism. Those are actions that are likely to deliver extreme (read dangerous) results.

So.

The second point is that these protestors surely do speak for a majority. They speak for people who object mightily to the government’s cutting and selling of the NHS – see the Save Lewisham Hospital protests over the last year if you want to get a feel for that. They speak for people who are forced to watch as their fuel bills rise and rise as energy company profits grow. They speak for people who believe that social security ought to be a safety net for anyone in need, as opposed to a gravy train for the likes of Serco, Atos and Capita.

The problem is that more people need to hear them speak. This is where one of the major challenges lies. The political class does not want to hear these people and it absolutely does not want anyone else to hear them either. It was no surprise at all on Monday to find the BBC ignoring the protestors who’d shut down the BBC’s very own front entrance in protest at that broadcaster’s appalling “reporting” of benefit cuts, public sector cuts and austerity. No surprise either to find that yesterday, the enormous number of government and press worthies who inhabit the Westminster bubble and literally never leave it managed, somehow, to miss a large procession of people in wheelchairs, carers and supporters protesting in said bubble. A lot of tourists worked out that something was going on and asked questions (“what is happening? Is it a protest?”), but the silence elsewhere was loud.

The day finished with a lobby to deliver a disability manifesto – in, of course, a spectacularly inaccessible parliament committee room. At least half of the people who wanted to attend had to sit outside in the hall in their wheelchairs. That said it all, to be honest – a big bloody Up Yours from the government to everyone.

Disabled People Against Cuts block front entrance of BBC Portland Place

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Post updates below

Some video I took at today’s DPAC protest in Portland Place. People in the group locked themselves together outside of the front door in protest at the Beeb’s rubbish coverage of social security cuts and austerity. And fair enough, too. The BBC has been garbage on these all-important topics. On the NHS, it’s been nowhere. The video shows people arriving, then Mark Thomas speaking (he was doing some work at the BBC and came over to say a few words in support of the protestors – good man) and then the closed doors.

Got to go out now – so more to say and more video to upload later on. Will observe for now that the response from the BBC was a bit…twatty. It was all a bit “JESUS CHRIST – PROTESTORS!!!! FILL THE MOAT AND PULL UP THE DRAWBRIDGE!!!” I mean – really. There was all sorts of rushing round to close the doors and pushing and shoving by Security and absolutely no sign of the many worthies who populate that building. If I was one of the Beeb’s many senior types (chances of my ever becoming one are diminishing by the hour, I imagine) I’d have just invited the group in and said – okay, let’s have a chat.

But – nobody said that. Pity. Sooner or later, somebody’s going to have to talk to someone.

Update Tues Sept 3:

More video from yesterday, in which Security got heavy and protestors explained why the BBC needs to wake its ideas up and fast. There’s text on the video and have also put it under the vid:






They’re absolutely right. Iain Duncan Smith in particular has been caught lying, exaggerating and talking total shit about benefit claimants, but he continues unchallenged by media outlets which should make it their business – their only business, if you ask me – to challenge government.

Text:

Protestor: Please understand why we’re doing this
Security officer offscreen: I do. I understand

Protestor: We’re licence payers and they need to do more proper reporting. They need to stop blocking our voices. They’ve got to get our message out. They blocked the NHS protests. Our NHS. Everybody out here uses it and they stopped people from getting the
story out. The people out there need to know what is happening in this country and people are dying.

Get some of your staff out here and see what’s going on, because they could be next.

Protestor 2: The government are churning out proven lies and they’re being caught out over and over again telling lies, Iain Duncan Smith is supposed to be talking to a parliamentary committee for grossly misusing statistics and misrepresenting benefit claimants in this country.

What’s happening is that this organisation behind us, the BBC, has given up on all efforts to be impartial, are running wildly and gleefully with the blatant propaganda that would put Nazis to shame about anyone who doesn’t fit a very, very narrow concept of what is considered an acceptable citizen.

Outsourcing disasters

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Our NS latest from the Secret Cuts series:

“One of the many concepts that free marketeers refuse to abandon in the face of all evidence is the idea that the private sector is better at providing public services than the public sector. Private companies have been cashing in on this fable for years at council and government level. As we file this report, another glorious outsourcing triumph is breaking: the Ministry of Justice has asked police to investigate alleged fraudulent behaviour by Serco staff in its Prisoner Escort and Custodial Services contract.

The national news stories are coming at such a rate we can barely keep up with them. But what happens at a local level often slips under the radar. That’s why we’re crossposting and adding to this False Economy blog by Kate, which features a list of some of the many spectacular council privatisation failures of the past few years (hat-tip to Barnet Unison for the idea – they published a Top Ten Commissioning Failures list last month).

The list below shows how much councils have spent to get out of private sector contracts and/or to deal with contract disputes and cost overruns. A lot of the companies featured on this and Barnet Unison’s list are sniffing excitedly around the NHS – to which they’ll doubtless bring this long-honed craft of getting heaps of public money, ditching service the second the contract is framed and delivering huge returns to their shareholders.”

Read the rest here.

Advising GPs not to provide support information for disability benefit appeals

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If you’re looking for the the rollling blog/story on the above and the Bro Taf and local medical committee statements – they’re here on this link.

Excerpt:

“This is an update to the stories a number of us have been running about GPs being told not to provide support information to ESA claimants who are appealing Atos fit for work decisions.

The ante is being upped, here: Pulse is reporting “that Local Medical Committee leaders are considering a ‘just say no’ campaign to support practices who refuse to take on unfunded work.” The story says that LMC leaders have: “already drafted a letter to help them turn down patient requests for support when appealing against their benefits being withdrawn.”

Read the full post and LMC statements.