New rules at DWP – to stop benefit claimants getting help from elected representatives
Underclass: If you’re a benefit claimant, the DWP wants to prevent you getting help from your elected representatives.
The Tories are trying hard to turn benefit claimants into an underclass – now they are being forbidden from seeking advice from their elected representatives.
New changes imposed by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) require claimants who have approached politicians for help with a benefit appeal to sign a waiver form explaining why they have done so, rather than going directly to the Job Centre.
The changes also require claimants to state exactly what they have discussed with their elected representative before information can be disclosed regarding an appeal.
To This Writer, the explanation would be simple: they want their appeal to succeed, and it has more chance with a politician helping than with DWP lickspittles who get a bonus every time a claimant is knocked off the books.
Recently it seems an approach to local newspapers can also be rewarding.
Politicians themselves are up in arms about it.
SNP MSP Linda Fabiani was quoted as saying:
The Universal Credit system is fundamentally flawed and needs to be halted. With so many loopholes and barriers put in place to stop claimants receiving the support they are entitled to, it’s no wonder people come to their MSP for support.
Neither the DWP, nor Boris Johnson’s Tory government, has the right to stop people approaching their elected representatives for help and support – that’s what we’re here to do.
This is just the latest extension of the hostile environment introduced by this right-wing Tory government designed to lock people out from receiving the financial support they are entitled to.
Quite right too.
And if this rule is being rolled out across the UK, it is every local politician’s duty to fight it.
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How can this be legal? My MP’s my elected representative. He tells the DWP what to do, not the other way around. The DWP can’t magically wish that away.
Given everything that has gone on in the Tories’ reign, I don’t know why this particularly has made me so angry.
Perhaps the fact that after my supporting my sister from 2011 for many years after she was transferred from IB to ESA (I cannot begin to tell you what a utterly stressful and Kafkaesque experience that was) as I luckily had experience of benefits advice, the main thing that finally helped my sister was the intervention of her local MP.
I think there must be someone, somewhere. indeed a whole department, who have been been tasked with simply making the DWP an even more cruel and Kafkaesque place to enter, people with such twisted minds they relish the opportunity to make the poor and disabled suffer even more. May they rot in hell.
On what basis does this arise, I have never heard of it, and as far a I am aware nothing has changed in respect of regulations/guidance?
I can see a legal challenge coming here! Why would the DWP want to know everything, unless it is so they can deny it or find a way around it so the claimant cannot win!
Now that practically all of the MPs in the South are paid up members of the Blue Rinse brigade most would be glad of not having their surgeries contaminated with whinging plebs seeking help with avoiding their now well tried killing machine.. Universal Discredit. It will only get worse as these power crazed “insert appropriate nouns” finally realise that they do not even have to pretend they are good guys for more years than I wish to think about..
Totalitarian!
RTU IDs sent Chris greyling to justice so that they could take away help for the peasants so more would fail or give up before they reached tribunal stage now they taking away MPs help aktion T4 picking up speed
WTF?!?!
Obviously because your MP acts on your behalf and writes directly to the DWP and the S of S if necessary. Answers have to be given and in a timely manner, as well as any actions promised. If the DWP reneg, fail or change/partially fulfil an agreed action, then your MP will follow up.
I resorted to using my MP when I had been waiting 2+ yrs for reassessment to ESA support group and Maximus had cancelled the WCA 4 times either when I got there or literally minutes before I’d have to leave.
Maximus still mucked up, so back to MP, who got it sorted, and an apology from a DWP senior manager with her DDI incase of further problems.
So even giving it a very generous underestimation, if DWP are getting just 1 “deal with this issue now” letter from each MP a day that’s potentially 3250 a week. But we know the real amount is going to take us into telephone number figures
If you’re underclass on Universal Discredit (thanks for that Dez, totally appropriating that from here on in), you are not living in a free country but an open prison, with an indeterminate “death by bureaucracy” sentence permanently imposed on you by the powers that be, for the heinous crime of being poor.
This latest move from the Tories will deny the UD (UC) underclass even more representation, this time by their MPs, y’know, the ones that they still (presently) have the right to vote for.
So, all other avenues of representation are effectively being narrowed down to just one: “representation” by DWP brown shirts primarily through the online Universal Discredit portal.
Who are they coming for next?