Did the DWP’s cruel trick force a man into crime?
Faceless: The DWP has developed an attitude in which its employees don’t care what happens to the people relying on them. They just process the numbers.
I don’t think Carl Poynton’s story is unique. The DWP is supposed to help people survive but since the Tories took over this has become a cruel pretence.
Released from prison on Christmas Eve, he applied for benefits – but the length of time it takes the Department to process an application meant he was sure to run out of money long before any payment arrived.
So he applied for the short-term benefit advance loan that is offered to claimants in dire need, even though it meant he would have to pay the money back from any benefit award he received.
The DWP said he was eligible for such a loan…
… and then offered him eight pence.
He was left with no alternative – as far as he could tell – other than shoplifting.
A man who needed money until his benefits were sorted was offered a loan of 8p by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). This is Lancashire reported that Carl Poynton ended up in court for shoplifting after the DWP’s decision.
The Canary story quotes a report by the Prison Reform Trust that says nearly half of adults are convicted of another offence within a year of release.
With government help like this, is it any wonder?
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It is not unusual, i know of at least one case where a person was sanctioned, they were actually warned that what they were doing was not a good idea, they still carried on, the person got there money back after a lot of toing and froing, what they were not told about during this time was the amount of shoplifting related activities that occurred that amazingly stopped once benefits were restored, you don’t need to do a maths test to work out the obvious and the link, then again basic common sense and dwp is something that does not really work very well together anyway