The realities of drug and alcohol problems

Posted on by

More transcripts from a series of recordings I’ve made in the last fortnight with people in Weymouth who were employed (in the armed forces in some cases), or had businesses and then went through periods of homelessness after losing their incomes. A number of these people have drug and alcohol problems.

They’re exactly the people who will be targeted as Iain Duncan Smith pushes through his plans to permit Jobcentre Plus staff to dock benefits for people who refuse drug and alcohol treatment. The irony is that most have had their benefits cut at one point or another anyway – because they failed Atos work capability assessments, or missed jobcentre appointments, or didn’t realise they had to fill in forms to reapply for benefits, or didn’t get forms because they didn’t have fixed addresses, or had their housing benefits stopped through administrative errors and so on. That’s how they ended up on the streets in the first place.

Anyway – way to go, Iain. You’ll really claw back the deficit when you kick these people into touch. If anyone caused the recession, it was surely people in these sorts of situations, as opposed to an out-of-control financial sector, etc. You’re a genius.

Criminal behaviour

Posted on by
Reply

Update Monday June 11 2012 – there’s a list of cuts to youth services at the end of this post. These are very interesting in light of Eric Pickles’ comments about “troubled” families yesterday and today. Some councils (Norfolk, for example) have cut their ENTIRE youth service budgets. Truancy officers, youth clubs, mobile units which youth workers use to travel round to meet and talk with kids in the places they hang out – they’ve been threatened and cut all over. 

Perhaps needless to day, those sorts of cuts have caused considerable (and under-reported) upset in local communities, where people are extremely concerned (particularly in the wake of last year’s riots) about possible fallout from high youth unemployment and unrest. Neither Pickles’ “initiative” nor Theresa May’s “crimbos” can disguise the fact that millions have been slashed from youth budgets, experienced youth workers’ jobs have been threatened, or cut and the kind of services which may have helped at-risk kids lost. This is quietly going on all around the country.

Thought I’d rush out a little something on cuts to youth services budgets, in the interests of crapping on Theresa May’s ridiculous criminal behaviour orders idea from the height that it deserves.

May is sonorous on punishment, but extremely quiet on the monumental cuts to council youth budgets and services that have excited (much under-reported) protests, petitions and community concern about potential youth problems and violence (particularly after last August’s riots) in recent times. Councils have tended to file those petitions and that concern in the Tough Shit pile, but we’re going to have a quick poke through it all the same.

“There is no doubt that sometimes difficult behaviour, particularly by teenagers, remains an issue of great concern in many neighbourhoods,” Enver Solomon, the Children’s Society policy direction and standing committee for youth justice chair, told the Guardian this morning, “but youth engagement programmes, community mediation and interventions that address the whole family rather than just the child are far more effective than rushing to rely on court orders.”

Enver is right. Unfortunately, we’re fast entering an era where your local council will be funding those services out of petty cash. If you’re lucky.

This post is a short outline some of those cuts to youth services. Am a bit rushed for time today, but will add to the list at the end over the next few days.

Last month, I attended a full and fraught Derbyshire county council meeting where several hundred locals turned up with a petition to save youth services that had been signed by themselves and more than 16,000 others. Local people were and are very concerned about a council proposal to cut youth service budgets by about £800,000 this year and to outsource parts of whatever is left to the voluntary and independent sectors.

People doubted that the same services could be delivered by those sectors, particularly on nearly £1m less. About 157 youth workers are likely to lose their jobs. Threatened services, as you’ll see from the video below, include a mobile service where youth workers travel around the county to talk to youngsters who might be hanging about and getting into trouble. The council confidently asserted that all sorts of voluntary and independent groups would and had come forward to fill the gaps that the cuts would open up. Unfortunately, the council was not prepared to release a list of those organisations.

Anyway – local youth campaigner Greg Roberts had collected more than 16,000 signatures for a petition to save budgets and directly-provided youth services. As you’ll see in the video below, the council spent most of the afternoon fumbling through its constitution looking for the clause that would excuse it from debating and voting on the petition. You’ll also see that this went down none too well with local people. They didn’t seem to think that the council’s plans for youth services boded well for social harmony at all.

Continue reading →

Finding housing

Posted on by
1

This is the latest in the transcripts from interviews I’m publishing as I talk to staff and service users who are dealing firsthand with fallout from public sector cuts and the recession.

This is a transcript from a discussion with a housing association officer in the southwest. The housing association assists people who are at risk of becoming homeless – because they have lost jobs, or benefits, or their rent has increased and so on. The officer talks about the fast-escalating need for social housing and the trouble that the association is having keeping pace with that need.

“Initially, the main criteria for our service is that somebody could become homeless because of their problems, but we [look at a range of issues]. We fill in a generic form with people that covers everything – from employment, to education to social [needs]. [The main thing for us is] we need to be working with them to saving their tenancy. The tenancy is the most important thing – keeping a roof over your head.

“The majority [of people come to us] now because of cuts in benefits – because of the cuts in housing benefit, because of the cuts in ESA and it’s just all a big dominos effect…

“Demand is going up massively. We’ve always been busy and even in the last year, we’ve had a significant change from people with just general housing problems to the majority of people [needing help] because of the reduction in benefits.

“Sometimes, they are looking at homelessness. Unfortunately, because of the accommodation that’s on offer, a lot of the time people are being put into accommodation that isn’t suitable for them – whether that is because they have physical disabilities, or mental health issues. That is going to have a knockon effect, because their mental health will get worse, or their physical disabilities will get worse and they will have to be moved somewhere that is maybe more supported.

“In the long term, you wonder where the government is going with all of this… the government seems to think that there are a lot more bludgers than there are. It’s the people who were already struggling who are now getting to the end of their tether and not quite knowing where to turn. They’re having to turn to foodbanks on a regular basis – rather than just every now and again when something crops up with their benefits [in the past, people used foodbanks in emergencies, when their benefits were unexpectedly delayed]. It’s now a regular event, because that’s the only way that they can feed their children.

“The reallocation of housing benefits for the under 35s – [that has had a] huge, huge massive impact. The people that were already in a one-bedroom flat are now being told that they are no longer going to have benefits to fund that. Then you’ve also got people with mental health issues who can’t go into shared accommodation, but unless they’re on mid-rate DLA, or they’ve been in supported accommodation in the past, that’s all that they’re being offered. In their circumstances, it’s wrong. Continue reading →

No country for mental health

Posted on by
1

As I continue to meet with people who are dealing with fallout from public sector cuts and recession around the country, I’m posting transcripts from interviews here (between longer articles and testimonies that are appearing at False Economy and elsewhere).

This is a transcript of an interview with a Weymouth woman who is a recovering alcoholic and was homeless. She works as a homelessness officer now. Her role is voluntary and she is still on benefits. In these excerpts from a recorded interview, she talks about mental illness, alcoholism, the abuse that people with mental health problems encounter and life in social groups and families which rely on benefits. I don’t expect that this transcript will generate much sympathy, although it should. Cameron can yell “scrounger” as loudly as he likes, but these are still real lives:

“I’ve been through just about every trauma in my life… I’ve been an alcoholic and raped and abused in all shapes and forms. I didn’t think I could go any lower. Human nature says there ain’t nothing lower…

“I was doing well. I had a home and I had a fiancé. I had a business. Life was good, relatively. Then I got scammed by some advertising companies, so my business started to suffer and I changed my priorities to concentrate on my partner who was also very disabled….not having the brain cells at the time to understand that if I concentrated on the business, I might have a bit more money to concentrate on him. Then, my housing benefit got mucked up. They stop and start the benefits on a whim – they do that.

“Then on the ninth of May, I found myself out on the street and I’m like – hang on. I don’t quite understand where this has gone. My landlord decided that he wanted me out. He didn’t care if they (the housing benefit office) would pay [the rent] or if they’d backpay when they sorted it all out – [he just said] “I want you out. I want my rent.” I owed something like £1200 in rent, which was only about three or four months rent. He wasn’t having it. He would have got it all back – but this is what social landlords are frightened of, you know [not getting their rent] , and then about 8 o’clock on the 9th of May in the evening, I suddenly found myself unexplainably out on the streets. My partner said – “Nah, that’s it,” [and he’s] gone. [So] what do I do? So after several suicide attempts, I just spent until December as a homeless person. It’s not good…

“I just spent my days wandering about. I remember one evening being sat on a bench in town and I had dark jeans on and I had white socks, because that’s all I had. When I was put on the streets, I had a couple of changes of clothes and underwear and that is all I had, plus the clothes I stood up in… I had dark jeans on and white socks and some lads come out of the nearby pub and just started cussing me. “Oh – love the socks. They’re real stylish” [she starts to cry here] and I’m thinking – “why are you doing this? You don’t know me. I’ve been sat here quietly trying not to bawl my eyes out….and just getting abused.”

“I was as guilty as a young puppy. I would see a scruffy… I hate the word “tramp”. It’s an old fashioned word, but I’d see these dirty, homeless guys, drinking or whatever they were doing and I thought there was nothing that could make me go there. I think that was my first mistake, because the minute you say that you’re not going to end up there, you can be pretty sure you’re on the slide down….I think the Lord allowed me to be on the streets for as long as I was, because I had to learn how to be humble.

“[I don’t think people understand the lack of confidence]…now, [people without housing] come to me and say “We’re not getting our benefits. We need to phone the council to see if we can get on their [housing] list” and I say “okay, phone them up -you just pick the phone up and make a phone call.” [They will say] “Can you do it for me?” and that’s when I found out that [for a lot of people] it’s not just a case of picking up the phone and making a phone call.

“I do believe that if you want to learn about life, then spend an unknown indefinite time on the streets. All these stupid, idiotic studies that politicians do – you know, “I spent a week on job seekers’ allowance.” Anyone can tolerate a week if you know that it will end, but being out there and never knowing whether that this is your last day… Continue reading →

Poole foodbank: our biggest client group now is people on low incomes

Posted on by
4
Stores at Poole Food Bank

Stores at Poole Food Bank (by @skinnyvoice)

As I continue talking to people who are dealing with fallout from public sector cuts and recession around the country, I’m going to post transcripts and points of note from interviews (between longer articles and testimonies that are appearing at False Economy and elsewhere).

Today, I spent the morning at the Poole foodbank on Longfleet. Staff and volunteers spoke about two significant trends: one, that demand for food parcels has trebled in two years and two, that their biggest client group is now people on low incomes – so, that’s people who are working, but can’t make ends meet because of rising rent, mortgage and living costs and low wages.

Poole foodbank manager Lorraine Russell said that: “Before, the primary reason (for needing food parcels) was benefit cuts or delays, but now that’s been overtaken by people on low incomes. We used to get very few low-income people, but now that has taken over.”

So much, then, for the government’s “scroungers” rhetoric.

This is a transcript of the interview with Lorraine Russell. She talks about the growing need for food parcels and the way client groups have changed as the recession as deepened:

“[This foodbank] started about six years ago, through work some people were doing with rough sleepers. There were a few people who were involved in helping with rough sleepers and a lot of food was donated at about harvest time – a huge amount of food. They thought – there has got to be a better way of managing this supply of food and from that, and from discussions with other folk, the foodbank was founded.

“I’ve been here for about four years and in that time the numbers [of people who need food parcels] have increased dramatically. Certainly, in the last month it has tripled from what we gave out [at the same time] two years ago.

“2763 people were fed last year and these weren’t all new people. Some were ongoing. The idea of a food bank is that people are given a voucher from our partners – health visitors, social workers, the CAB and health professionals. They get a red voucher if they really can’t afford [to buy] food themselves and so they bring it here and we give them a food parcel for the right number of people – single, couple, or families. The idea is that they come three or four times, over which period their presenting problem – whether it is benefit cuts, or [benefit payment] delays, or debt, or whatever it is can be sorted out, but it’s not happened like that.

“If you’re out of the benefits system, it takes an awful long time to get back in. If your circumstances change, then that alters everything. The person will be given a red voucher. The person who signs it off will tick the right box [which describes the client’s circumstances] – [it could be] benefit cuts delays, debt, or the person may be an asylum-seeker, [or a victim of] domestic violence, or [experiencing] homelessness, or sickness. And the one that we’re increasing seeing more of is people on low incomes. We usually try to signpost people to the CAB then, because they’re got their finger on the pulse, so they can help people [further]. We are a short-term emergency gap for people who can’t afford to buy food.

“Numbers are growing and we are seeing a lot of people on a fairly regular basis. Certainly, in the last six months, six to nine months, things have got worse financially and people have to pay more for their rent, or their mortgage has gone up, so they have to keep a roof over their heads and there’s not enough money for a lot of people to actually buy food for their family. Continue reading →

Pro choice demonstration, central London March 30

Posted on by
9

Some videos from today’s demonstration in Bedford Square in London, as Bishop Alan Hopes and the faithful knelt… Good to see such a turnout on the pro choice side, although the event as a whole was disconcerting. It was as though we’d been transported back 50 years and to another country… and the number of men in the anti choice camp was outrageous.

Good to see a few supportive ones on our side of the fence, though.

In this first video, an anti abortion demonstrator carried a sign with a picture of a baby on it into the pro choice part of the demonstration and stood there. That was fairly confrontational and he got the appropriate response:



Here, a man in the anti abortion crowd leans over the fence to taunt pro choice demonstrators with a rosary:





View from inside the pro choice side of the demonstration. Abortion Rights estimated that about 1000 people showed up for pro choice:




Anti abortion activists inside their fence:


Pro choice demonstrators chant:




The anti abortion group praying:



Pro choice demonstrators chanting “shame on you” at the 40 days for life group, as well they might:

Pro-choice protest against anti-abortion activism this Friday

Posted on by
6

Press release from Abortion Rights (I’ll be at this protest. No question there):

Pro-choice supporters will gather in Bloomsbury, central London (Bedford Square, London, WC1B) on Friday 30 March at 7pm, to voice their opposition to the ’40 Days for Life’ protest which has been taking place outside the Bpas abortion clinic in Bedford Square since 22 February.

40 Days for Life is a US-based Christian organisation which has been operating in the UK for several years. The group, which is opposed to abortion in all circumstances, is staging a 40 day picket outside abortion clinics in London, Brighton, Birmingham and Manchester.

On Friday 30 March, Bishop Alan Hopes, a Catholic Bishop in the Westminster diocese, will join 40 Days for Life protesters for an evening ‘prayer vigil’ in Bedford Square at 7.00pm.

Prochoice groups are planning a peaceful counter-protest during the Bishop’s visit, to express their outrage at the tactics of anti-choice activists, which cause distress and alarm to women trying to access a legal medical service, and to demonstrate the strength of support for safe, legal abortion that exists in the UK.

In recent days, concerns have been raised about the intimidation of women trying to enter abortion clinics, amid reports of protesters filming patients and staff, handing out leaflets containing highly misleading information about abortion and directing women to services known to provide grossly inaccurate and judgemental advice.

Commenting on the planned counter-protest, Kerry Johnson of Bloomsbury Pro-Choice Alliance, which was set up to oppose the Bedford Square picket, said:

“The vigil by 40 Days for Life is part of the increasing attack on our reproductive rights in this country. Our peaceful protest in response to the presence of Bishop Hopes is a great way for people to show their support for the vast majority in this country who are pro-choice.”

British Humanist Association Head of Public Affairs, Pavan Dhaliwal commented:

“Any group that seeks to restrict and remove a woman’s choice is one whose outlook is not shared by the BHA or, indeed, the majority of the population of the country. This is especially true for an organisation whose motives are entirely religious, and not at all based on evidence.”

Darinka Aleksic, campaign co-ordinator at Abortion Rights, said:

“It is vital that women are able to access abortion clinics without fear of being approached or intimidated by those who disagree with their choice. We have to send a clear message to anti-abortion groups that these tactics will not be tolerated in this country.

“At the moment, we are seeing an unholy alliance of anti-choice activists and government ministers, who are united in their desire to see abortion rights restricted. Andrew Lansley said last week that he is shocked and appalled by allegations of wrongdoing by abortion providers, yet he has been silent on these anti-choice protests taking place less than a mile from his office.” Continue reading →

A Tale of Two Barnets – statement about press comments by the Leader of Barnet Council

Posted on by
2

Barnet council leader Richard Cornelius has kicked up a fuss about the way he was portrayed in the documentary A Tale of Two Barnets.

The film features people affected by service cuts and increased charges in the borough. Cornelius agreed to be interviewed for it.

I’ve seen the film and think Cornelius would be better off shutting up and moving on. The film is certainly problematic for the council, in the sense that it features interviews with people whose lives have been made extremely difficult by council cuts and charges, but so what. That’s Cornelius’ problem. If he wants to be leader of a council which cuts services to vulnerable people, introduces parking charges that are killing trade and local businesses and pursues badly-thought-out outsourcing projects against advice – well, he needs to step up to the plate and take responsibility for the fact that people don’t like what his administration is doing. Anyone trying to justify the destruction of public services on Barnet’s scale is bound to look ridiculous.

Anyway – here’s a press release written by the film’s director and producer in response to some of Cornelius’ complaints. There’s a list of upcoming screenings at the end of it:

Following comments made to the Barnet Press Newspaper concerning A Tale of Two Barnets, film Director Charles Honderick and Producer Roger Tichborne issued the following statement.

“We are disappointed to see that Councillor Richard Cornelius has implied that there was a breach of trust involved in the way the film portrayed him. As per the agreement to appear, the filmmakers provided a list of questions prior to the film. During the interviews, Charles Honderick stopped the camera several times to clarify matters, which were not covered. As with all other interviews, the director condensed an 8 minute interview into approx 1 minute. Continue reading →