Monthly Archives: August 2017

Poundland implicated in work experience scandal – again

Poundland said it had signed a deal with the DWP to take jobseekers on work experience on condition that it was voluntary [Image: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters].

Poundland seems to be turning into a serial abuser of jobseekers.

It is now five years since Cait Reilly (remember her?) took the DWP to court for forcing her to stack shelves at one of the discount retail chain’s stores. It was forced labour, not voluntary, the company paid her nothing (she only received benefit money) and pocketed all the profits.

In May 2013, This Writer worked out that companies using jobseekers in this way were making profits of almost £1 billion per year – and were being funded by the taxpayer to do it. The public purse lost more than £16 million in the 2012-13 financial year.

And they’re still doing it.

Because nobody has ever bothered to stop them.

Poundland has been criticised for employing jobseekers, without pay, for up to two months under a deal with the government.

Several of those who have worked on the scheme told the Guardian they had worked up to 30 hours a week for at least three weeks stacking shelves in Poundland. They were told that the work experience was voluntary but one said: “I had no say in it really.”

It’s not clear how many jobseekers have been used by Poundland under the scheme as the government said it did not collect information centrally and the work experience was managed locally by jobcentres across the country. However, one store in Bolton has taken on 21 placements since last August, according to information provided in response to a freedom of information request by the Boycott Workfare pressure group.

Source: Poundland ‘gets jobless to work for free under government scheme’ | Business | The Guardian

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NHS blows £21 million on consultants telling them how to cut costs

If they want to save money, why not dispense with the consultants and think for themselves? Who are the experts, after all?

Health and social care bosses across England have spent £21m on management consultants to help draw up plans to overhaul regional NHS services.

A Pulse investigation, based on Freedom of Information request to all 44 ‘Sustainability and Transformation Partnership’ (STP) regions, found that some areas have spent millions of pounds on external consultants to help them draw up the plans, which in many cases involve cutting frontline services.

Local GP leaders said these sums were ‘difficult to justify’ when money was being removed from frontline services.

The plans were first announced in December 2015, with the aim of making £22bn worth of cuts to the health services by 2020/21.

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May-be, May-be-not: PM u-turns over when she plans to quit and nobody is surprised

Only days ago, we were discussing the sheer optimism of Theresa May’s plan to remain as (nominal) prime minister until September 2019 – now she has backtracked on this story, saying she’ll lead the Tories into the next general election.

Here she is, reciting her interview answer as though she was taught it by rote:

May-be she thinks that election won’t be until 2022.

If so, she has clearly crossed the line into lunacy. Look for her in your nearest wheat field soon. Check out the crazed look in her eyes during that clip.

May-be she has alternative information, showing that an election could happen much sooner. Autumn, perhaps?

If so, it is perfectly likely that she believes she’ll lead the Tories into the next election and on until September 2019.

If so, she has clearly crossed the line into lunacy and you should look for her in your nearest wheat field soon.

Theresa May has said she wants to lead the Conservatives into the next general election, telling the BBC she intends to remain in power “for the long term”.

Speaking in Japan, the PM said her job was not just to deliver Brexit but to define the UK’s place in the world and also to tackle domestic “injustices”.

Some reports have suggested she could stand down in 2019 after EU withdrawal.

Source: Theresa May insists she is ‘here for the long term’ – BBC News

https://twitter.com/KamBass/status/903003614674915336

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Latest UK-EU Brexit spat is the vaguest yet

Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator, said hopes of a divorce deal in October looked doubtful [Image: Patrick Seeger/EPA].

This is ridiculous.

No sums of money have been mentioned, although David Davis has admitted that the UK has “obligations”. He just won’t say what he thinks they are.

Nevertheless, the British team thinks the EU is trying to extract more than its legal entitlement, on the basis of an “unsatisfactory” paper that runs to less than four sides of text and some tables.

But the UK has not published any paper at all on the Brexit financial settlement.

How vague can they be? This is not negotiation; it is obfuscation.

The UK has told EU negotiators their sums on the Brexit bill do not add up, as talks on Britain’s separation from the bloc hit deadlock.

Tensions boiled over in Brussels as the EU accused Britain of failing to reveal its hand on the financial settlement. UK officials hit back at the EU, saying some claims for money had no legal basis.

Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, vented his frustration amid slow progress during the third round of talks, which conclude on Thursday. “To be flexible you need two points – our point and their point,” Barnier told reporters. “We need to know their position and then I can be flexible.”

Meanwhile, British negotiators fumed at suggestions they were not serious – a charge levelled by Barnier on Monday because the UK has not published a paper on the Brexit financial settlement.

Source: UK tells Brussels negotiators their Brexit bill sums do not add up | Politics | The Guardian

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‘Lobbying’ Act is performing exactly as intended: Stopping charities from campaigning

Introduced in 2014 and dubbed the ‘charity-gagging law’, the Lobbying Act provides a set of rules for charities that publicly campaign in the run-up to elections [Image: Getty].


We knew this would happen when the so-called Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act was imposed on the UK, back in 2014. It was labelled the “Gagging Act”, for crying out loud!

And we had hard evidence of it in February 2015 – more than two years ago, when John Pring of Disability News Service wrote: “Disability organisations have been intimidated by new lobbying laws – and the risk of losing government contracts – into failing to campaign on key issues like social care and welfare reform in the run-up to the general election, say disabled campaigners.

“They fear that the “sinister” impact of last year’s Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act [also known as the ‘Gagging’ Act], and the trend towards funding charities through government contracts to provide services, are ‘closing down all debate’.”

I remember attending meetings with my MP, who at the time was the Liberal Democrat Roger Williams. He made promise after promise to stand up for free speech – to our faces – then went back to Westminster and told us that cosmetic changes made by the Conservatives meant there was nothing to worry about.

We all knew that wasn’t true, and in the 2015 general election Mr Williams was replaced…

By a Conservative!

Local politics is insane. And the “Gagging Act” has been given free rein to live up to its name.

Labour has vowed to repeal it – but Labour is not in office, due to bizarre decisions by the voting public in June this year. Perhaps it’s time to vote sanely?

More than 100 charities have warned that they are being gagged by controversial government legislation that they claim is preventing them from campaigning on issues affecting the poorest and most marginalised groups in society.

An open letter signed by 122 organisations including Save the Children, Greenpeace and Christian Aid says campaigning is being “lost” from public debate due to the “draconian” requirements of the Lobbying Act.

Dubbed the “charity-gagging law”, it dictates what charities can do publicly in the 12-month run-up to elections in order to ensure individuals or organisations cannot have an undue influence over the vote.

Given the possibility of a snap election, charities say they are not able to carry out political campaigns now for fear of being hit with retrospective fines.

Read more: More than 100 charities claim they are being gagged by anti-lobbying rules

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‘Parallels of history’ shared by Anne Frank Center – about Donald Trump

Good point, well made?

In the past, the Anne Frank Center has publicly demanded that Twitter suspend President Donald Trump’s account, accused Trump of driving the United States “off a moral cliff,” and was critical of former Press Secretary Sean Spicer when he said that Hitler “didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”

And in their latest attack on President Trump, the Anne Frank Center shared a list of recent actions by President Trump to highlight the “escalating parallels of history.”

https://twitter.com/AnneFrankCenter/status/902187913085165569

Source: Anne Frank Center Tweets List Of President Trump’s Recent Actions, And People Are Disturbed

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People with multiple sclerosis are the latest victims of PIP misery

[Image: Getty.]

People with multiple sclerosis are the latest to be demonstrably victimised by assessors for the new Personal Independence Payment benefit, which has replaced Disability Living Allowance.

When Tories introduce a change in the benefit system, it can only be in order to inflict harm on claimants – and that is certainly the case with PIP, a benefit that This Site has suggested should be renamed Starve The Disabled (STD).

Eligibility criteria for the benefit have been narrowed – not because they made it possible for people who did not deserve state benefits to claim them, but because the Conservatives wanted to cut the benefit budget.

Benefits are paid according to the amount of cash available, rather than a claimant’s health and needs.

And a review of the way the benefit is administered ignored evidence that proved assessors are dishonestly misrepresenting claimants’ health conditions.

All of these could contribute to the £6 million per year cut in PIP payments to people with MS. These are people who will never get better, yet the Department for Work and Pensions is claiming their conditions no longer exist, in order to deny them their benefit.

This Site says the DWP has long been unfit for purpose and should be replaced with a better system, along with all its unfair benefits and corrupt assessors.

Cruel Tory changes to disability benefit have stripped £6million a year from multiple sclerosis sufferers.

New figures [from the MS Society] … show MS suffers who moved from the old Disability Living Allowance onto a new system, Personal Independence Payments.

Officials downgraded or denied help to nearly a third of 8,800 MS sufferers who were reassessed for PIP in the three years to October 2016.

These sufferers were in the group receiving the highest payments to cope with reduced mobility.

In a second group, known as ‘daily living’, 3,400 people receiving the most help were reassessed of which 800 had support downgraded or denied.

The MS Society estimates this cut was worth £4.9million a year in lost benefits for the first group and £1.1million a year for the second.

Read more: Cruel Tory disability benefit changes strip £6million a year from people with multiple sclerosis

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Tory underfunding of NHS is £3 billion higher than reported. Surprised?

The report says the target for NHS trusts to end the financial year with a deficit of just under £500m is a ‘next to impossible task’ [Image: Peter Byrne/PA].

This is a nightmare that could be erased overnight if the Conservatives would only stop underfunding the National Health Service in England.

Funding increases for the NHS have fallen from 3.6 per cent to 1.3 per cent this year.

But the service is being asked to absorb further increases in demand and costs, meet stretching savings targets, improve A&E performance and deliver new commitments for cancer and mental health provision – and balance the books.

Meanwhile, billions of pounds worth of efficiency savings have been absorbed by inflation and reductions in the tariff paid per patient, meaning they have achieved nothing.

Nuffield Trust says even with a further £1.8bn in sustainability funding, providers will have to make cost savings of £3.6 billion or 4.3 per cent of operating costs in 2017-18.

So shouldn’t the NHS funding increase be 5.6 per cent, if trusts are expected to break even? Or is This Writer missing something?

NHS trusts in England ended last year with an overspend almost £3bn more than previously reported after temporary funding boosts and one-off savings were stripped out, according to new analysis.

The Nuffield Trust found the actual overspend in 2016-17 was £3.7bn, compared with the £791m reported by NHS regulators, which was already above the £580m maximum sought by health service bosses.

In a report published on Thursday the thinktank also says the NHS faces a “next to impossible” task in hitting the target of ending the current financial year with a deficit of just under £500m.

Source: NHS trusts’ overspend is £3bn higher than reported, study claims | Society | The Guardian

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Are food banks now the UK’s ONLY growth industry?

This graph is nearly three years out of date. If anybody can provide a new version, please feel free to send it in via the comment column.

If you want to know why food banks have proliferated, look to the United States.

That’s where the Conservative Party adopted the policies that lead to food banks; that’s why they have become the UK’s only growth industry.

The policy, adopted by former President George W Bush, was known as ‘starving the beast’, and involved tax breaks for the very rich, creating a deficit in the US Treasury, which made it possible for him to claim public services were costing too much – and then cut public services.

Result: Instant destitution for people who relied on those public services – and the rise of foodbanks.

As in the US, so has it been in the UK.

I warned you about this, years ago.

When austerity was in its infancy in the UK a few years ago and I made my first visit to food banks around the country, the people queueing for help expressed a common anxiety: that this might become the “new normal”. Everyone hoped it wouldn’t yet here we are, in the summer of 2017, and food banks are now ubiquitous. Legions of citizens, including tens of thousands of children, now rely on these stopgap facilities to meet basic nutritional needs. And a recent report alarmingly predicts that their use is likely to rise with the impact of policies such as benefit freezes and the roll out of universal credit. To see how this has happened we need only to look across the Atlantic.

The UK’s journey down the road of dismantling its welfare state and blaming the needy follows closely in the footsteps of the American system and the narrative that has shaped it. While the richest are awarded lavish tax cuts, millions of people are rendered desperate and destitute, and inequality is cemented. This is indeed the “new normal”.

Source: Food poverty is the ‘new normal’ in the UK. We adopted it from the States | Society | The Guardian

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Why are we being distracted from the sanction system that is killing benefit claimants?

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign]


Has anybody pointed out that the number of deaths in the UK’s benefit system has risen, year on year, along with the number of sanctions applied to claimants?

The ever-relevant Frances Ryan, writing in The Guardian, makes excellent points about the continuing devastation wreaked by a benefit system that focuses on penalising, rather than helping, the vulnerable.

But, two years after This Writer forced the government to admit that nearly 100,000 sickness benefit claimants died between January 2011 and February 2014, it seemed worthwhile to compare the number of deaths per year with the number of sanctions.

Fair warning: This is only using the figures for ESA.

In 2011, the number of people on ESA who were adversely sanctioned totalled 4,462 – 33 per cent of the 13,490 who died that year.

In 2012, there were 12,710 adverse sanctions – 64 per cent of the 19,940 who died that year.

And in 2013, there were 22,560 adverse sanctions – 82 per cent of the 27,370 who died that year.

I know.

It’s not enough evidence to demonstrate a link between sanction and death.

But it is enough to warrant further investigation.

Shall we have another Freedom of Information request?

More than 70,000 people on the out-of-work sickness benefit (employment and support allowance) ESA had their benefits stopped between December 2012 and December 2016. More than 5,000 had them stopped for at least six months. That’s wheelchair users and people with learning difficulties left with bare cupboards and cold homes.

The vast majority of recent ESA sanctions – more than 90% since December 2015 – have been a punishment for people failing to take part in “work-related activity”: anything from skills training or drawing up a CV to community work placements. Disabled people going through the system repeatedly report this can mean being sanctioned for not going to a meeting despite being in too much pain to get out of bed.

This is not a coincidence but, rather, reflective of a political culture that has fetishised getting disabled people into work at any cost.

It’s the same thinking that from April resulted in many people on ESA permanently losing £30 a weekunder the guise that it would give them an “incentive to work”.

Two years ago, there were warnings sanctions were unfair, excessively punitive, and causing destitution. Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has found there is no evidence sanctions actually work. Yet barely any modification has been made. In July, the Department for Work and Pensions announced that people with mental health conditions who have their jobseeker’s allowance sanctioned will now be eligible for immediate access to hardship payments – as if not leaving a young mum with depression without food for two weeks is vast progress.

Social policy reform based on the premise of removing the money people need in order to live is always shameful. But to do this to disabled people – who are receiving benefits because they are not well enough to work – is a stain on the national conscience.

Source: Too ill to get to the jobcentre? If you’re disabled you may still be sanctioned | Society | The Guardian

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