This week’s interviewee works for a council, helping people to find their way around the benefits system
“My job involves advising people on how to claim benefits, doing advocacy work and representing them at tribunals. We sort out the problems they encounter – administrative errors and decisions we think are unreasonable – and make sure they get the correct benefits.
I’ve worked in the field for years, and our relationships with other organisations have steadily improved. We work with Jobcentre Plus (JCP), the pension service, the disability and carers service, and HMRC as well as local authority housing and council tax benefit offices – and it’s generally been a good experience. Since JCP brought in call centres it’s become faster to make a claim, but harder to tackle individual problems: we used to phone up the local office and sort things out between ourselves. Still, we’ve set up local groups where we can get together and highlight any procedural problems, so we’re still improving the way things are done.
For years, both Conservative and Labour governments backed take-up campaigns to make sure that people claim the benefits to which they’re entitled; but under the coalition, welfare rights are very much out of fashion. The big thing at the moment is ‘getting scroungers off benefits’, and the press seems to be blaming claimants for the state of the country. Disabled people tell us they’re encountering hostility, when the vast majority receive very little money and would like to work if they could.
This attitudinal change is linked to changes in disability benefits, with the expansion of medical assessments and the introduction of a points system to assess whether people qualify for support. I thought that the system we had until 2008 was a good one, but it’s since been tightened up several times and now it’s very hard to qualify. Since April, for example, you only get six points if you’re “at risk” of suffering incontinence at work; you need 15 points to qualify, and you’ll only get that if you’re incontinent at least once a month.
What’s more, some of the medical assessors seem to interpret the rules very harshly. I’ve been told that if you can get your hand an inch above your head, that counts as “reaching over your head”. And while people are told that it’s their responsibility to show up at a medical assessment, I’ve heard of cases where the fact that they’ve managed to make it there – or even to sit down in the waiting room – is used as evidence that their disability isn’t that severe.
Because more people are being found fit for work, we’re lodging more appeals with HM Courts and Tribunals Service. And the good news here is that people do at least get paid the minimum level of Employment and Support Allowance while they’re waiting for a ruling; that’s crucial, because there’s a massive backlog of appeals and the process is taking well over a year. I put one in last February, and it’s now scheduled for June.
Even when a tribunal rules in the appellant’s favour, that’s not necessarily the end of it. We had one client who’d worked all his life, then had an accident at work. The assessors knocked him back, then he won at the tribunal; but a few weeks later, the assessors called him back in again and gave him zero points. Luckily, in that case JCP revised the decision and restarted his benefits – but people not fit for work are being deprived of benefits here. I’d hate to think that these assessors might be getting bonuses for interpreting the legislation very harshly.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere is very poor in our council because – like most – it’s making big cuts in jobs and services. Many council staff are scared and uncertain, and the communications from the leadership are often poor: I’ve seen bizarre web-based consultations where, for example, people are asked which services should be cut or protected. That kind of approach wouldn’t give our clients a proper voice: many don’t have the internet access or the skills to get involved like that.
Our clients are already saying to us: “What’ll I do if this service gets cut?” If we couldn’t support them, lots of very vulnerable people would end up sinking into real poverty. Even the tribunals service is worried, because currently we support appellants through the system; if the tribunals have to go through everything themselves with the appellants, things will slow down and their backlog will grow even bigger.
When these reforms started, the philosophy was about helping people with disabilities to find work. But it doesn’t feel like that now; it seems to be just about getting people off disability benefits in order to save money. Very vulnerable people are being treated badly – and many of them have worked and paid taxes for their whole lives, only to find that they can’t call on the state when they need to. I know that we need to become more efficient, but it would be nice to have some justice too.”