More from Liverpool and doing it yourself: organising against the bedroom tax

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It starts snowing as we walk towards the Methodist church on Banks street in Garston for Wednesday’s anti-bedroom tax meeting. It’s as cold as a morgue out here. Everyone remarks on the glacial air. It underscores the fact that homelessness – the endgame of a vile “initiative” like the bedroom tax – would be beyond appalling. I have to walk around the block to use time up while we’re waiting to go in. The woman who usually opens the church for the meetings is a bit late this evening and the thought of an extra ten minutes out in the freezing air makes me want to sit in the bus-stop and bawl.

Anyway. There are people I know here now. This is the second bedroom tax meeting to be held in Garston and quite a few people have returned this week and so there is a friendliness and familiarity to things. This is, I suspect, what organisation looks like. I have no idea where it will go, but I can see why Labour worthies are worried that it’ll get there without them. People are making their own connections. People have been making their own connections for a while.

I talk again with John,* the 56-year-old man I met here last Wednesday. He’s unemployed and liable for two bedrooms if the bedroom tax goes through: he’s living in the three-bedroom house that he’s lived in all of his life. He says there are only two bedrooms, really: the smallest one is so small that he and his mother (who died some years ago) never used it for anything but storage. If he has to pay for the two “extra” ones, he’ll have to find about £40 a fortnight out of a jobseekers’ allowance of around £130.

He’s in an impossible situation – and a ridiculous one, as it turns out. He tells me that his housing association has asked him if he’d consider moving into a two-bedroom property from his three-bedroom one, because it doesn’t have any one-bedroom flats available. The thing is: “they said you can move into a two-bedroom flat, but you’d still have to pay the bedroom tax (for the extra bedroom) on that. So, that’s moving and paying for the privilege of moving. I said – well what’s the good of that?”

What good indeed. If, as John says, you factor in the cost of moving (and he doubts very much that he could pay it) to a two-bedroom place and then a one-bedroom home if one ever became available, surely he and the state would be better off if he just stayed where he was. But this is not about finance. It was never about finance. It is – as many people say this evening – about maliciousness and causing terrible instability and pushing people who claim any sort of benefit out of homes into the cold.

That’s why, John says, “we’ve got to show them if you know what I mean. Liverpool people will take a lot, but when they get pushed too much – it’ll be like, that’s enough. If it does get bad, you’ll get people who have never done it before who are going to rob. They’ll be saying: I’ve got a family to feed, I’ve got a wife to feed – do you pay your bills or starve… once October (and Universal Credit) comes in, it’s going to go Boom, you know.”

Margaret*, who is from Speke, feels very much as though she’s being pushed too far. She has two-bedroom flat which she was moved into about 13 years ago so that she could care for her 87-year-old mother who lives nearby. “I’ve saved the state thousands of pounds in carers’ fees (by providing that care service for her mother)” she says through gritted teeth. “That’s how I’m served for doing that.”

She’ll have to pay for the extra bedroom out of her small benefit. “They don’t care where you find it. They don’t care if you’re on the bones of your arse.” Her housing association rang several weeks ago “to tell me I was one of the chosen to pay and I said Yes, I know. [The woman on the phone] said “the government has asked us to ask all of our tenants if they would be interested in taking a lodger.”” Margaret thinks she will be affected by cuts to council tax benefit. She’s waiting to find out how much she’ll be expected to pay. “This is malicious. [They think] we’re no good. We’re not bringing a profit to anyone, so what use are we? This is just the thin end of the wedge.”

Her friend, Eileen*, agrees. She also has one spare bedroom that she’ll be asked to pay for. Her son, meanwhile, has two young children – a boy and a girl – who’ll be expected to share a room, because they’re both under ten.

In the meeting itself, I’m struck again by the fact that there are no councillors or MPs present. This is the fourth meeting I’ve attended in ten days and I’ve not seen an elected representative at one. It’s hard not to conclude that people are on their own with this – that if they’re really going to overturn this policy and protect social housing for good, they’re going to have to do it themselves. March 16 may be a great day, but my concern is that it will prove mainly to be a great day for Labour. There’s a lot of very good organisation taking place as we speak. It’s been taking place for some time. Why wait and wait and wait to actively support it? (Rhetorical question, that).

I do note that nobody asks where councillors are this evening (they did ask that question last week). They talk more about the sort of action they can take themselves.

“You can do lots of things,” says one of the women who is from the Dingle organising group. “You can open your gob and you can talk. They’ve suppressed people’s voices and this has been going on and we haven’t even been aware of it. They cut all our social places and they’ve trapped you in your homes. So people are scared and are thinking we’ve got to accept it, because we’re on our own. They’ve done the media. They’ve done the radio. It’s seeping out a little bit, but not enough. They’ve done it in such a way that people are all trapped now in their house.”

One of the older men who was here last week says “this not the first time in Liverpool [where we’ve had this kind of attack]. We’ve had years of it – when we had proper unions and docks. The young people have a different attitude now. They’re not political like in the 50s and 60s. The kids come at it from a different angle. They’ll just do it. If you got kids, you know what I mean.”

“We can bring it together as one community,” the woman from the Dingle group says. “Everyone has a talent. There’s a person who is good at communicating – so you send that person out. There’s a person that’s good at words – so you put that person out there. You’ve got to do this for your kids, right. My son was very negative, but he’s started to ask what is going on. I’ve got his interest now and that is massive. They need us to take the lead and to show them how this is done.”

*surnames withheld

Terminal cruelty of the political class: report from Garston bedroom tax meeting

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To Garston, now, where South Liverpool Combat The Bedroom Tax has organised a tenants’ meeting in the small hall of the Methodist church hall on Banks Street. There is a big turnout of local tenants, as there generally has been at these meetings – probably about 50 people on a freezing night for this first Garston meeting which was advertised mostly with leaflets and posters.

Once everyone’s in, there’s standing room only at the back. Two organisers, Jane Calveley and Adrian Gibbons, sit up front to answer questions and to explain how people in Dingle and Bootle are organising against the tax in their areas. The idea is for people for people to take leaflets away and get their groups going themselves, free of top-down structures and/or nefarious external political opportunists. Preserving that part of the scene could be a challenge in itself now that Labour is thrashing around trying to find the centre of it. I do sometimes wonder if there’ll be much left by the end of that.

Most of the people at this meeting are older – probably in their 40s, 50s and 60s. There are long-term tenants: people say they’ve been 30 years in a house, or 20 years, or “I’ve lived in the same house all my life” – statements like that. This post is a basic report of the sorts of questions that people asked and the topics the meeting canvassed. Some of the questions will appear incomplete: the bedroom tax is an inexact perversion and people had obviously heard things, or bits of information and were trying to find out the full story with their questions. I talked to a number of people at this meeting and at Monday’s one at St Bride’s as well and will write a more detailed piece soon.

Suffice to say for now that the bedroom tax is one of the most inhuman, backward-looking policies I’ve yet heard proposed and anyone who thinks it has merit in any form ought to be imprisoned permanently. They’re taunting people with homelessness, for god’s sake. That’s all this is. It is news to nobody that this “policy” will largely be undeliverable – you’ll see from this report that people are already being told smaller homes are not available and tenants, who are often already struggling financially, just won’t have the money to pay for “spare” rooms. That became very obvious as the evening rolled on. The tax does nothing to address homelessness, or housing shortages. It is there purely to inspire loathing of tenants and terror in tenants themselves. Which is why people are braving the rain and the cold to turn out to these meetings – meetings that have been growing across Liverpool in the last month or so, I might add. More attention should be paid to them.

I’m withholding names for now.

———–

The meeting begins with an older man at the back asking the question that people have asked at all the meetings and protests I’ve attended to date: “Why aren’t the (Liverpool city) councillors here now?” he says. “Where’s the councillors now?” There is plenty of murmuring when he puts that one out. There’s a message is coming through loud and clear here and Labour councillors want to wake up to it. Babblings from recently-annointed anti-bedroom tax warrior Liam Byrne don’t appear to be doing much to reassure people who are actually going through all this. They want to know where people are now.

Calveley knows where the councillors where, as do a number of us who have spent the afternoon at a protest outside Liverpool Town Hall. “They’re passing the council budget cuts in the town hall,” she says. “That’s where we’ve been before we come here.”

“There’s not one of them here,” the elderly man says angrily.

“There’s a big meeting now where they’re passing all the cuts,” Calveley says grimly.  Around the room, people shake their heads at that news. Nobody is impressed. It is telling, to say the very least, that councillors would still rather be seen at a meeting where they’re cutting services than at a meeting where they could be saving them.

We move on.

“The councils and the housing associations should work with tenants groups, trade unions and all the bedroom tax campaigns that are springing up all over the country to build more homes,” Calveley says. “I’m actually talking council housing. Now, I’m going to open it up to the meeting.”

“I applied for a one bedroom house and I was told there is no one bedroom houses, or flats, in the whole of Liverpool,” says an older woman who is sitting just behind me. “So, if I want to get to a smaller property, I’d have to go out of Liverpool. But all my family live in Liverpool – so where would that leave me? I don’t drive – so where would that leave people like me?

Another woman asks if it is true that there is a cap on housing benefit for pensioners who are on pension credit if they “went private to a one bedroom flat….so you’ve had to spend your pension money to make that up…is that right?”

A man who says he is 56, unemployed and living in the three-bedroom flat that he’s lived in all his life asks straight out: “What happens if you can’t afford it [the tax]?”

“That’s why people have to fight it,” a woman says, “because people can’t afford it. They can’t afford it, literally.”

“Can you get your house taken from you?” the man asks. Everyone reacts to this: there’s shuffling and murmuring as soon as he says it.

“They can’t just kick you out,” says a woman who has come from the Dingle group to share information at this meeting. “They have to go through a process.”

The first man – the one who’d asked where councillors were – asks if there is a reason why housing associations shouldn’t pick up the bill. “You pay rent,” he says furiously. “It’s not even your flat, or your house. It’s their house – so why not let them pay [the shortfall between rent and the tax]?”

“They’re not going to pay,” an elderly woman at the back of the room says.

“Well, why not?” the man asks. “You’ve got to stand up for this stuff.”

“They won’t pay it,” says the woman from the Dingle group. “I asked them. I said – you can refuse to implement it. What they’re saying is that they know that you are poverty-stricken, but they still want their money.”

The woman who said she’d been she’d have to leave Liverpool to find a small flat asks how much money Liverpool mayor Joe Anderson earns. Various figures are suggested. I find these myself and the figures people talk about are close to those. All get a hostile reaction.

Another man at the back of the room says that he’d been to see Citizens’ Advice about the tax a couple of weeks ago. “The lad behind the counter was telling me like – it’s not just you. There are thousands like you.”

A woman asks a question about legal aid. She’s concerned that people’s chances of fighting the tax and eviction through the courts might be affected by cuts to legal aid funding. “You know how legal aid is being cut – so what happens to people wishing to fight it in the courts? Like this lady said before – she is prepared to move, but they can’t give her [a one-bedroom house in Liverpool]. Surely that makes it their problem, not hers? If this went to court, what representation would this lady get? With legal aid?”

“The people of Liverpool fought against the poll tax,”says the older man at the back. “If we can do that, we can do this. It’s only the Tories who would think of this, though. Next it will be – you’ve got too many windows.”

Bedroom size is discussed in detail, as it has been around the country. A number of people ask how big a room must be for classification as a bedroom. The figure everyone discusses is 70 square feet – “so one thing everybody can do really practically is measure your bedrooms,” people say.

“So, if it’s a boxroom – they can’t charge bedroom tax on a boxroom?”

“You need to measure it.”

“One of the things that we’ve been talking about in Dingle is getting letters made up to send back to people to say – you can say this isn’t a spare bedroom. It isn’t big enough,” the woman from the Dingle group says. (This is, just by the way, one of the aspects of the whole wreck that I find most upsetting: the thought of all these people – a lot of them older, as I say – being put in a position where they must grovel round on all fours with tape-measures for the pleasure of rich Tories. There’s something about that image which doesn’t sit well with me at all).

There is a lot of concern raised about getting into debt, or more debt: “Can they do like they do on the council tax – when they send you letters and you’re paying them money and it’s going up and up and up (as court costs and fines are added)?” one woman asks. “If you have that and the tax on top? Does it build up if you’re waiting for appeal?”

An older woman asks if people are allowed to take in lodgers now – there is confusion about the rules for subletting. “Also, if you were to go into private housing, what is the most benefit that they will pay you?”

A man asks if benefits will be docked if bedroom tax payments can’t be met: “you know with the council tax, they can take the money from your benefits. Could this happen with the housing one?”

It is appalling stuff and it goes on and on. There’s not enough time for everyone’s questions.

It becomes very clear that people here are in an impossible situation with the tax. After the meeting, I speak at length with the 56-year-old man who is out of work and on the brink of a battle to stay in the house he grew up in. He says that the house has three rooms, but one has never been used as a bedroom, because it is too small. He and his mother only ever used it for storage.

“The way I look at it – because of the fact that you claim housing benefit, you get a slap in the face for it. I sign on every two weeks. It’s not easy to find work. I get about £130 a fortnight and I think the bedroom tax will cost about £40 a fortnight – that has to come out of jobseekers. I said to them – this is going to be hard like. I find it hard at the moment to pay for the food. I haven’t got that 40 quid.”

Anyway.

How many bedrooms have MPs’ flipped houses got on average?

People who need 24-7 care talk about the very real possibility of losing it

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Guardian article by me (with the video interviews) on the closure of the independent living fund:

“High on the list of this government’s god-awful initiatives is a vile recent decision to close the Independent Living Fund and devolve it to councils. You may have been wondering how low things would go with this government. This story should give you some indication.

The ILF was set up in 1988 as a stand-alone fund to which people with severe disabilities could apply for money for added carer hours. That extra money meant that people could afford to pay carers for the help that they needed – round-the-clock, in some cases – to live independent lives. It meant, in other words, that people with severe impairments could look forward to more than a life spent staring at walls in under-resourced care homes. Which is as you’d hope. Anyone who is even vaguely human wants to know that certain support systems are in place. Suffering a serious injury and/or disability, which let’s not forget, any of us might, is surely challenging enough without also finding that your human right to independence is in society’s ever-burgeoning “can’t afford it” category.”

Read the rest here

Tories turn the clock back further: closing the Independent Living Fund

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As in the Society Guardian today and the print version tomorrow:

The people in the videos on this page are all recipients of Independent Living Fund payments.

The ILF was set up in 1988 as a standalone fund to which people with severe disabilities could apply for money for added carer hours (the ILF tops up council care funding for recipients in this article). That extra money meant that people could afford to pay carers for the help that they needed – round-the-clock, in some cases – to live independent lives. It kept people out of residential care.

In 2010, the Independent Living Fund was closed to new applicants. Then in 2012, the coalition government announced that it would “consult” on the future of the fund for the ILF’s 19,000 existing users. The upshot of this was, towards the end of last year, an extremely unpopular decision to close the fund and devolve it to local authorities.

The money will not be ringfenced. It will be left to already cash-strapped councils to fund care for people with the most complex – and expensive – needs. That prospect is dire in the current council funding “environment. Councils can’t meet demand as it is. Many are tightening eligibility criteria for care. FOI numbers reported in the Independent last year showed that more than 7000 disabled and elderly people had lost some or all of their state-funded support after cash-strapped councils changed their rules on who qualified for social care. Councils have already been taken to court for trying to restrict care services, or for increasing charges for care, or capping the amounts that they spend on claimants.

There are links to more stories about the ILF closure at the end of this post.

Sophie Partridge (writer and actor. Requires 24-7 care support. Islington council pays for some of that care and the ILF the rest).

“We can’t be cast as victims all the time. It’s difficult, because we do have to fight the good fight wthout appearing pathetic cripples.

My PAs (carers) do everything physically that I can’t do for myself – like me getting up, going to the loo, washing, dressing, cooking for me, cutting my food up, cleaning, laundry, driving me in my van… the idea of going into a carehome is too scary to even contemplate to be honest with you. We have to ensure that that does not happen.”

Gabriel Pepper (Walthamstow writer. Waltham Forest council pays about a third of his care costs and the ILF the rest)

“I’ve had three brain tumours. The [third] tumour is deep frozen in my brain through a process which has changed the DNA somehow.

I don’t believe that the Tory party will ever hang their heads in shame, because they don’t have shame, but I believe that it can be shown that they’re not above the law. And I think that people should be prosecuted for crimes which they have done against humanity.”

Penny Pepper (Islington writer and journalist: Also requires 24-7 PA support. Islington council pays for just over half of that support and the ILF the rest).

“I’m assessed as needing 24/7 (care) and ILF pay roughly just under half of that and Islington council pays the rest. The council funding would not be enough to retain my personal assistants.

This bizarre idea that you can eat sandwiches and lie in bed and use incontinence pads that is coming our way – that will effectively mean the end of my career… You’re faced with these choices now. It’s like – [you can choose] neglect at home, or residential care abuse. A lot of us are saying – [we prefer] neglect.”

Kevin Caulfield (working and studying to be a barrister. Care part-funded by Hammersmith and Fulham council and the ILF):

“[I started by] using domiciliary care agencies – which were not meeting my needs. A different person was coming from the agency every day. I was a man in my 30s and I was having to go to be at 9.30, ten o’clock in the evening. It was incredibly stressful,
particularly for somebody who had recently acquired a significant impairment.

[Consistent care] has enabled me to stabilise my health. I’ve been able to work during the last 20 years, 15 years. I’ve been able to go to college – I’m training to be a barrister. These are things that I would have been able to do in my life if I wasn’t a disabed person – but certainly things that I couldn’t do without the support of my local council [with a payment] which is backed up with top up money from the Independent Living Fund.”

More on the ILF:

Discussions with people affected by the closure of the Independent Living Fund

DPAC: vigil at court hearing to save the Independent Living Fund

Why can’t we find out more about Atos mental function champions?

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Update Tuesday 30 April: Discussion of the DWP’s confirmation that Atos does not report to the department on the performance of mental function champions

Because this has turned into a long blog which I’ve been updating for several months, I’m going to start this update with a brief background for new readers:

For several months now, I’ve been trying to get the DWP to explain how it quantifies the performance of mental function champions. Mental function champions are the individuals whom Malcolm Harrington suggested that Atos add to the work capability assessment process to “spread best practice amongst Atos healthcare professionals in mental, intellectual and cognitive disabilities.” The role was created as a concession to the many serious concerns that people have raised about the appalling effects of the Employment and Support Allowance work capability assessment on people with mental health illnesses (I wrote a long article about that, the experiences of people I’ve interviewed and attended WCAs with and concerns about WCA descriptors and outcomes here. There’s a good anlysis of concerns around regulations 29 and 35 here). Mental function champions do not advise or support ESA claimants: they provide advice and coaching to Atos healthcare professionals.

Last year, on November 5, Mark Hoban told parliament that “we have introduced a mental health champion in every single assessment centre throughout the country.” Actually, he had not. The DWP told me that 60 of these MFCs were in place and that they largely worked a phone advice line. The DWP didn’t want to go further than that: its officers told me to contact Atos for more on MFCs.

Pinning Atos down on the details has been a struggle, as readers of this blog will know. Since late last year, a group of Newcastle mental health service users and support workers and I had been asking Atos to agree to a meeting up between us and MFCs. There were concerns about the real impact of MFCs on WCAs for people with mental health problems.

Harrington observed in his year three review: “…mental function champions have been introduced at a regional level, rather than in each assessment centre as was originally recommended. Given scarce resources, the review supported this approach… Some representative groups claim that awareness of the champions is low, and that those who are aware of them believe they have little or no impact on the quality of mental function assessments. The review asked Atos to report on the effectiveness of their mental health champions. They said that their healthcare professionals found the champions to be ‘a great resource’ and that they were of ’great use to put any uncertainties into perspective’.”

We wanted to meet with at least one MFC because of the uncertainty about the role and its impact on WCAs for people who must go through them. It’s all very well to claim a champion is a “great resource” and of “great use” but that claim needs to be quantified, especially on a topic as serious as this. Considerable concerns remain about the experiences of people with mental health illnesses as they go through work capability assessments. Transparency around the MFC role is required and that is why we sought a meeting. The meeting went ahead very recently, on the proviso that I did not attend (you can read the story of the attempt to set up that meeting below, on the original blog).

Several things have happened since I first posted this blog. The development I’m updating here is that Hoban and the DWP concede that Atos does not report back to the department on MFC performance. We’ve been trying since February to get details about the measures Atos uses to report MFC performance to the DWP. The North Durham MP Kevan Jones has also been pursuing questions on this topic in parliament as you’ll see below.

The questions I sent to the department early in February 2013 were: “Could you let me know what measures there are for reporting MFC performance to the DWP and if there are such reports, where they are kept – ie, does Atos report to the DWP on topics like the number of calls MFCs take, the topics they cover, satisfaction rates from HCPs for the service, etc?” The DWP finally came back today and said that “Atos don’t report back to the DWP on things like that” and recommended that I ask Atos for its reporting procedures. There are alarm bells going off all over here. How can the department monitor the impact of MFCs on the work capability assessment if it does not formally monitor the role?

Kevan Jones has been trying to find out more via the parliamentary route and getting nothing helpful from Hoban:

25 March 2013:

Kevan Jones (North Durham, Labour) Hansard source (Citation: HC Deb, 25 March 2013, c991W)

“To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to whom Mental Function Champions (a) report and (b) are accountable; and how such a reporting process is documented.”

Mark Hoban (Fareham, Conservative)

“Mental Function Champions report to their line managers within Atos Healthcare. There is an annual appraisal process for all health care professionals.”

And then most recently: 10 Apr 2013

Mr Kevan Jones: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (1) what performance measures are in place to evaluate the effectiveness of Mental Function Champions on workplace capability assessments;  (2) what data his Department collects, maintains and holds on the performance of Mental Function Champions.

Mr Hoban: “There are no formal performance measures around the role of the mental function champion and no separate data is held on the specific performance of mental function champions but routine monitoring of the quality of assessments and customer satisfaction takes place as part of the contractual arrangements between DWP and Atos Healthcare. In addition, Professor Harrington’s second review noted that the mental function champion role is being well-utilised and that health care professionals have welcomed the advice and support.”

He doesn’t measure the performance or impact of this role? How does he know what real impact it has had on an assessment process that has been so problematic for people with mental health problems? More importantly – how do we?

More soon.
—————

This is an update for Sunday April 28The meeting went ahead. More on this soon. Neither Atos nor the DWP have been able to produce reporting information, KPIs, or monitoring information for us on the MFC role, despite repeated requests.

Update Sunday March 24 There has been movement of a kind on this, with a meeting of one hour set up. More on that and other developments soon.

Update Thursday 14 February 2013: Atos has been in contact and discussions are underway to set up a meeting. Interesting. They reckon they sent an email to a generic email address of one group on the list and made a phone call a week or so ago – a fairly half-hearted attempt to set up a meeting if you ask me, but at least we’re underway. Ish. I want to know what this role really does, or doesn’t, do for people with mental health problems who must go through WCAs. I’ve seen plenty of examples of the problems WCAs cause people and more needs to be known about this MFC role – the role that was created to, purportedly, improve WCAs for people with mental health problems. More soon.

———-

Original blog:

For several months now, as readers of this site will know, a group of Newcastle mental health service users and support workers and I have been asking Atos to agree to set a meeting up between us and Atos’ work capability assessment mental function champions. (Mental function champions do not advise or support claimants: they provide advice and coaching to Atos healthcare professionals).

I’m posting this article to let you know that despite repeated assurances from Atos that our meeting will be organised, it hasn’t been. Atos keeps saying it’ll set a meeting up for us, but never does. We call Atos and we email Atos and they say they’ll get right onto it. They don’t. So we call Atos and email Atos and they say they’ll get right onto it. They don’t. So, we got in contact with Atos again about a fortnight ago and were assured that a call would be made and a meeting would be set up. Nothing’s happened. It has occured to us that Atos doesn’t want us to meet with mental function champions. Or something. We’re sure that they’re there, etc. We just want to see them and find out more about the “role.”

Mental function champions are the individuals Malcolm Harrington suggested that Atos added to the work capability assessment process to “spread best practice amongst Atos healthcare professionals in mental, intellectual and cognitive disabilities,” whatever that means. Last year, the DWP told me that 60 of these MFCs were in place (I suppose we take that as written for now) and that they largely worked a phone advice line. Mark Hoban went somewhere else with it, into territory that may best be described as make-believe: on November 5, he told parliament that “we have introduced a mental health champion in every single assessment centre throughout the country.” The DWP rowed back on that and admitted that there wasn’t a mental function champion in every single assessment centre in the country. There were/are 60, apparently, and they’re mostly on the phone. The DWP didn’t much want to talk about that: its officers told me to contact Atos for more on MFCs. And as I say – pinning Atos down on the details has been a struggle.

In his first-year review of work capability assessments, Harrington observed that concerns had been raised about Atos assessors’ knowledge and understanding of mental health conditions. “The short training course in mental health that Atos assessors receive is proving nowhere near adequate to allow them to accurately assess applicants,” MIND said in the review.

I’d take it a good few steps further than that. Complaints and concerns about the appalling effects of WCAs on people with mental health problems are, as I’ve written before, widespread and well-documented: work capability assessments and descriptors for disability benefits place too much emphasis on basic physical readiness for work, do not account for the fluctuating nature of some mental health illnesses and assume that everyone is always in a position to offer a detailed picture of their circumstances. Once found fit for work, people’s benefits are cut, they must appeal or apply for jobseekers’ allowance, they can fall behind on their rent and bills and their mental health really begins to deteriorate, as this doctor will tell you. I have witnessed some of this myself, having attended work capability assessments with people who have mental health problems and followed them as they have gone through the stressful appeals process. Stephen, a 54-year-old man with schizophrenia who was one of those people, got a zero-points score in his initial WCA assessment, but was placed in the ESA support group on appeal – a monumental turnaround by the DWP that made everyone involved wonder at the criteria. Claimants with mental health problems have sought recourse in court: last month, the courts heard a case which, if won, will put the onus on the DWP to make sure medical evidence from practitioners is sourced from the start of the ESA application process for people who have mental health problems.

Those issues being very much the case, it is understandable that people with mental health problems and their supporters want to know how the MFC role works. Meeting with champions and asking them about their daily role seemed as good an approach to this as any. It certainly seemed a better approach than asking Atos directly, given the thin results that has yielded.

I asked Atos to explain exactly who MFCs are and the skills they bring to WCAs. Atos’ response was short on specifics: the company had, apparently, “invited leading external experts in mental health to help shape the role for the mental function champions,” and the champions “work alongside our healthcare professionals, supporting them in a range of different ways.” The word “alongside” could be considered a stretch – as we’ve seen, the DWP said that MFCs advise Atos HCPs down a phone (“telephone-based support” Atos calls it). Details of the “different ways” support was provided were not forthcoming in the response I received. I received this instead: “Our mental function champions are selected for the role because they have considerable expertise within the mental function field. They may already have higher training or a higher qualification in the field of psychiatry or have experience working in Mental Health, Learning Disability or Cognitive Impairment.” Presumably, the word “may” there means that some may not. There’s an awful lot of Maybe going on here.

Anyway. People want to meet with MFCs because they want to know more about the “role” and see it in action. It’s important. It’s very important. The MFC role is, it could be said, to be the main means by which concerns about WCAs and mental health problems have been “addressed” (ahem) to date. So – people need specifics. They need to know how, on a day-to-day basis, the role “spreads best practice” so that it improves WCAs for people going through them – assuming that is what is does. As I’ve observed – the jury’s out on that one. Things are too difficult for people going through WCAs for this topic to be left at a few press statements from Atos. I know we’re not the only people who are interested, too. I’m also pretty sure that Atos doesn’t want us to be.

A nasty cut: people affected by the closure of the independent living fund

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Update 6 February 2013: more video and updates on this story here.

Penny Pepper

Photo: Penny Pepper by Charles Shearer at snapsthoughts

This is the first of a collection of videos we’re doing which feature people who will be directly affected by the government’s atrocious decision to close the Independent Living Fund (the ILF).

The ILF was set up in 1988 as a standalone fund which people with severe disabilities could apply to for extra money to pay for added care and support. That additional funding made it possible for people to live independently in their homes, rather than in residential care. For some people, the ILF paid for entire care packages. For others, ILF money was used to top up council funding for care. Most of the people who appear in these videos require round-the-clock care which – unsurprisingly – comes with a price tag.

In 2010, the Independent Living Fund was closed to new applicants.

Then in 2012, the coalition government announced that it would “consult” on the future of the fund for the ILF’s 19,000 existing users. The upshot of this was, towards the end of last year, an extremely unpopular decision to close the fund and devolve it to local authorities.

“In terms of independent living, this is the single most regressive action that the Condems could have taken,” DPAC’s Linda Burnip emailed to say. Indeed.

The money will not be ringfenced. It will be left to already cash-strapped councils to fund care for people with the most complex – and expensive – needs. That makes the whole prospect a complete shambles. Councils can’t meet demand as it is. Many are tightening eligibility criteria for care and have been taken to court for trying to restrict services, or for capping the amounts that they spend on claimants. Last year, as an example, Worcesterchire county council came up with a so-called maximum expenditure policy – meaning that if paying for someone to live at home with carers cost more than residential care, the individual would have to make up the difference themselves, or go into residential care – the sort of idea which would, as Sophie Partridge says in the video below, take everyone back to a time when people were hidden away in homes and made to sit around in incontinence pads.

So much for the advance of civilisation.

Penny Pepper

In this video, Penny Pepper – an Islington journalist and writer who has been receiving ILF payments for about 15 years – gives her views on the planned devolution.

The video starts with a few comments from Pepper about a letter (she’s holding it in the video) on the ILF closure which she received from her local MP Emily Thornberry – a letter that she says “doesn’t have any balls.”

Pepper requires round-the-clock care support. Islington council funds just over half of that. The ILF pays for the rest.

She believes that an independent funding structure like the ILF – run by people with disabilities themselves – is crucial to ensuring funding for people with complex needs.

She also says that she has found the political response to the government’s devolution proposal discouraging, to say the least. You’ll see in the video that she’s particularly disappointed with the response from Emily Thornberry, her local MP (I’ve asked Thornberry for her views on her own representation of people on this issue and had nothing back. Will keep you posted on developments if there are any).

Sophie Partridge

In this video, freelance creative practitioner Sophie Partridge, who is also a long-term ILF recipient and who also lives in Islington, voices similar concerns about a lack of political representation. She thinks that people with disabilities tend to serve as pawns in funding wars.

Any loss of care funding and hours could see her forced into residential care – an option that she says she will not contemplate. She says that councils should have fought harder to keep the ILF intact.

The lack of information that councils appear to have – or, at least, are prepared to release – about upcoming ILF responsibilities is purely amazing. Islington council (which part-funds care packages for Sophie Partridge and Penny Pepper) told me that it couldn’t predict whether or not it could match ILF funding, because the council “did not yet know the total amount to be devolved to local authorities.” Neither did the council know if it would need to fund extra staff, saying: “we do not yet know whether additional resources will be provided as part of the transition.” The council merely said, fluffily, that it would “always seek to meet people’s eligible needs in an appropriate way within available council resources.”

“Within available council resources.” Not a phrase to inspire confidence in this era.

Neither is this sentence [from the DWP]. “All disabled people, including those transferring from the ILF, will continue to be protected by a local authority safety net that guarantees disabled people get the support they need,” runs the fantasy that the DWP has posing as a ILF press release. A couple of weeks ago, I had an utterly painful phone conversation with a DWP press officer who insisted (and insisted) that the department’s ILF devolution plans must not be reported as a “cut.” I can see from your website that you write about cuts and this is not a cut! the press officer said several times. Loudly. It’s not a cut!

My two cents as I wrote in this short piece in the Guardian: if you believe that, you’ll believe anything. ILF recipients certainly don’t: a group of claimants has started court proceedings to challenge last year’s “consultation” on the closure. It’s the wider context that is the issue here. Council budgets and services are being obliterated. As things stand, an increasing number of councils now only fund people whose needs are assessed as substantial or critical in fair access to care bands. Being placed in the substantial or critical bands is no guarantee that your needs will be met, either. I’ve interviewed people who already struggle to pay for the care they need: this Lancashire woman, for example, who had been placed in the substantial band, told me that she had to stay in bed on weekends, because her care hours didn’t stretch to Saturdays and Sundays. This Cheshire woman, who was also in the substantial needs band, had run out of care hours on the day that I visited. I found her alone in her home lying next to a sick bucket. Who honestly thinks that the future holds local authority safety nets?

The early day motion which calls for MPs to fight the ILF closure is here.

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There are another two videos to come.

Save Lewisham hospital protest march 26 January 2013

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A very big turnout today with people protesting at Jeremy Hunt’s plans to close Lewisham Hospital’s new A&E department and intensive care, maternity and children’s services. Career git Hunt will make a decision on the closures at the beginning of February.

The march went from Lewisham roundabout to Mountsfield Park. There were a lot of people talking today about upping the ante with occupations and so on.

I upload this video to give you an idea of scale. There were thousands of people there (I’ve heard 15,000 – it was definitely up there). There were thousands of people at the 24 November campaign march as well. There’s been very little said about either in the mainstream press. The growing resistance to this government – and to austerity generally, no matter who is peddling it – continues to be airbrushed from the picture, but that can’t and won’t last forever.

March and protest on 26 January: Save Lewisham A&E

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From the Save Lewisham hospital campaign:

“The decision on the future of Lewisham A&E is due at the start of February. We must keep up the pressure. JOIN THE DEMO on SATURDAY 26th JANUARY to show Jeremy Hunt what we think of the proposals to close Lewisham Hospital A&E, Intensive Care and some children’s and maternity services!

Assemble at Lewisham roundabout (by Lewisham station) at 12 noon on Saturday 26th January. March past our hospital to Mountsfield Park for rally, music and giant petition.”

More on the campaign and contacts here.

Ealing council, austerity and people with learning disabilities

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Update 15 February 2013:

Utter chaos last night as Ealing’s overview and scrutiny committee considered the cabinet’s 22 January decision to close two important services for people with learning difficulties – the Learning Curve training-to-employment service and the Stirling Road daycentre. I haven’t seen such a shambles for a while, which is saying something in this cuts environment.

There was outrage as the chair tried to restrict a presentation by speakers from the Power Group – a group made up of people with learning difficulties who the council is specifically supposed to negotiate with – to three minutes. (By startling contrast, the chair later told members of the public off for not giving director of adult services Stephen Day adequate chance to speak when he was rattling on about the “savings” these closures will purportedly achieve).

In the end, people from the Power Group got five minutes or so to state their concerns about the closures and the shoddy manner in which they’d been “consulted” about the council’s plans, before they were hurried off stage. That was as repulsive as anything I’ve seen. Everyone should be entitled to speak and if people need a bit longer, they should get that. Everyone who has something to say should have the chance to say it.

People were trying to say that they didn’t approve of the closure decision, didn’t feel they’d been given anything like enough time to consider it (“we were told about it, but we weren’t told about it until it was too late” said one speaker), were worried about the overwhelmingly negative response to the closures from people who use the services and their families, and felt the council had often failed to provide the large-print and illustrated explanatory literature that some people require. They should have been given an hour to speak if they’d wanted it. That would certainly have beat hearing from Stephen Day ad infinitum. The whole thing was an absolute wreck.

Unions revealed that people at Learning Curve and Stirling Road and their families had been given even less notice and time to consider the closures than staff – about 25 days, it was said. There were gasps as it became clear that the council had yet to formally needs-assess people who attended Learning Curve to confirm the personal budgets they’ll be entitled to – and horror as speakers confirmed that up to 100 people who attend Learning Curve won’t be entitled to paid support or services at all.

As I note in the post below this update, the council claims in cabinet papers that after closure, it will “provide individual budgets for all eligible customers. People will be able to choose either a council-managed or cash-budget option and will be offered professional guidance and advice to develop their support plans, and arrange their services.” The very big problem with this is that a lot of people won’t meet the council’s criteria for “eligible customers.” According to the council’s own cabinet reports (page 3, point 2.6.5), at least 96 of the 144 people at Learning Curve won’t be eligible. Some live out of the borough and will need to apply to their own local boroughs for support. Others who live in the borough won’t be eligible, because their needs won’t be considered serious enough. This is crucial. Many people who attend Learning Curve have, or will be, placed in the Moderate or Low needs categories when the council assesses them against Fair Access to Care criteria – the standards councils use to determine eligibility for funding for care and support services. Ealing council – like so many others in this harsh funding environment – no longer funds people in the Moderate or Low needs bands.

Council officers said they could push through all assessments by about the middle of year. A disability assessments officer stood up to say that was rubbish – that the assessment process was too complex and extensive for that and that she knew at least one person who’d been waiting for an assessment for two years. Some expert or other was trucked out to inform everyone that the days of “institutional”-type facilities like daycentres were behind us. This is the usual “this isn’t a cut – it’s an advance in social ideology” line that councils inevitably try and run at these things. It’s generally rubbish.

For one thing, as one parent whose son has completed two computer-skills certificates there said, Learning Curve is a training-to-work service – it aims to help people acquire skills that will lead to employment. She was very sure that Learning Curve was not an “institution.” She saw it as the service that might just help her 28-year-old son into a job, which is something she desperately wants for him.

For another thing, not everyone will be entitled to the personal budgets that the council keeps trying to assure everyone will release people from “institutions” like daycentres and allow them to “purchase” replacement services. Saying that these cuts are all about embracing the future is disingenous in the extreme. People won’t be “freed” from an “institution” when Learning Curve closes. They’ll be left standing on the side of the road with stuff-all. As we’ve already seen, by the council’s own admission, at least 96 of the 144 people at Learning Curve won’t be eligible for financial support. There was also a great deal of debate about the purchasing power of personal budgets – I’ll be posting more on this, but it was said last night that personal budgets weren’t substantial enough to allow people to buy equivalent services from the private and third sectors.

So. It was rowdy, it was angry and it was a complete bloody shambles. Council leader Julian Bell turned up to say a few words (largely some cowardly rot about having delegated responsibility for the closure to officers) and was given very short shrift. His “central government cuts are forcing our hand” line went down like a cup of the cold proverbial. As well it might. People are sick of it.

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Update Wedneday 23 January: in front of a full gallery last night and with a lot of verbal handwringing, if you can have such a thing – “it’s with a heavy heart that we make this decision,” etc – the cabinet voted for the closures. People who use the centres and their families were furious. The decision now goes to Overview and Scrutiny in February. I spoke to the chair of that committee briefly after last night’s meeting and he seemed worried. Parents are complaining about the council’s consultation processes with people with learning difficulties – they feel the consultation was rushed, not adequately geared towards people with learning difficulties and that feedback from representative groups was ignored. More on this soon.

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Original post:

This is the first in a series of posts I’m planning on Ealing council’s plans to close a training organisation and a daycentre for people with learning disabilities. The aim is to broaden this out into wider reporting about the consulting and treatment of people with learning disabilities as further council cuts are made and as the government continues with the ESA work capability assessment and brings in the overall benefit cap, the bedroom tax, council tax benefit cuts, DLA to PIP testing and universal credit. In the past few months, a number of people with learning disabilities and parents and carers have been in touch to talk about their growing concerns.

On Tuesday 22 January (see meeting item 7 here), Ealing council’s cabinet is due to make a decision that will radically affect the lives of a group of adults with learning disabilities, and their families and carers.

The decision will be to agree to close two organisations long used by people with learning disabilities: the Learning Curve training-for-employment service and the Stirling Road daycentre.

Learning Curve is, in the council’s definition – “a fully accredited training centre, which provides training in basic skills, preparation for work, job seeking skills, office practice and retail and information technology… it also supports disabled adults in work and can help find work experience placements…its aim is to help people obtain the skills needed to get into work.“

Stirling Road “provides a wide range of services… sport and leisure, health promotion, community based projects, work-based training and travel assistance. The service is provided to promote and support people to become more independent and access their community through community-based projects.”

It won’t for much longer, though – unless people can kick up enough rough to stall the juggernaut.

They’re certainly trying: I’ve attended several protests in the last month and spoken to centre attendees and parents who are desperate to keep the two organisations open.

“There’s nothing else like it. I didn’t have to explain anything to them – the staff understood his needs,” said the mother of a young man who has earned computer skills certificates at Learning Curve and wants to work towards paid employment if he can find it (I’ll be posting more interviews and feedback from people involved as things unfold).

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