Category Archives: unemployment

DWP back in court over legacy benefits during Covid – and staff are set to strike

Habitual cruelty: if you thought the Tories stopped persecuting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities during the Covid-19 crisis, think again.

The Department for Work and Pensions has had an easy time of it from the media over the past few years, partly because of the Covid-19 crisis.

And this is surprising because the DWP’s behaviour during that crisis has not covered it in glory.

As many thousands of working people suddenly found themselves claiming Universal Credit in order to make ends meet, they were granted a (temporary) £20-per-week uprating to keep them sweet and make them think UC is a fair benefit for people on low incomes.

People on so-called ‘legacy’ benefits like Employment and Support Allowance didn’t get the uprating.

Some of them grouped together to challenge the deliberate omission in the courts – which dismissed their case last year.

But they were back at the High Court on Wednesday (December 7, 2022) for an appeal. Here‘s The Canary:

If successful, the case could be worth up to £1,500 to every legacy benefit claimant. The court livestreamed the appeal, which you can watch by clicking through to YouTube here.

Claimants have been forced to take the DWP to court numerous times in recent years. Invariably, these cases have seen people fighting for their basic rights.

The Canary has witnessed first hand in recent years chronically ill and disabled people, and non-working social security claimants, having to fight the DWP – the government department charged with allegedly supporting their welfare. It’s perverse that they have to battle the department for their fundamental rights in the first place. However, this is indicative of a system where their treatment as second-class citizens is entrenched.

Meanwhile, members of the PCS Union who work at the DWP are striking from December 19-31 – because they want more pay. The irony is striking.

That being said, it would be wrong to suggest that working people should not be paid enough to make ends meet. If they don’t have that, they should be awarded it. That should go without saying but in a Tory-run UK we can’t count on it any more.

This Writer only wishes that those DWP employees would have the presence of mind to realise that it is hypocritical to complain about having too little to survive after having denied it to people with long-term illnesses and disabilities for so many years.

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Liz’s legacy: crashing pound and pensions, housing crisis, inflation, unemployment. What’s to be done?

Liz Truss: “Duh… what did I do?”

Economist Richard Murphy has given his verdict on the result of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s new economic direction for the UK – and it is damning.

But he has also done something far more important; he has suggested ways forward for the UK. Principal among those is making sure the Conservative Party is never allowed into power on its own again, so it can never again ruin the finances of millions of people for the benefit of a few spoilt rich kids.

It’s the first positive series of suggestions This Writer has seen.

See what you think – and be sure to send those thoughts in via the comments section:

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Tories cut redundancy pay for 91,000 civil servants during cost of living crisis

Another Tory rip-off: the government wants to reduce the civil service by 91,000 employees – AND cut their redundancy pay by nearly 26 per cent while doing so.

How many levels of wrong is this?

At a time when the cost of living is ramping up steeply, with huge inflation and astronomical energy prices, one might expect any national government to need all the civil servants it can have, to administer measures to ease the burden on the population.

Instead, the Tories are cutting the UK’s civil service by 91,000 people.

But that’s not all.

After giving civil servants a derisory two per cent pay increase – in reality a massive pay cut due to the 9.4 per cent inflation rate – the Tories are adding insult to injury by cutting redundancy pay by more than a quarter (25.9 per cent).

Their rationale for doing this adds insult to (double) injury.

They reckon in a time of “high national debt and increasing cost pressures” the Civil Service Compensation Scheme should be “affordable” to the taxpayer – who has nothing to do with it.

Money for the scheme is created by the government. We pay taxes to keep inflation within reasonable boundaries (according to at least one economic theory) but with inflation almost entirely dictated by energy prices and Brexit-related shortages, taxation doesn’t make that much difference any more.

It’s just another silly “divide-and-rule” tactic, trying to turn us against civil servants by saying paying them a decent redundancy package would be an attack on people who pay taxes.

More details of this sorry story are available here.

The good news is that, when the Tories tried to cut civil service redundancy pay in 2017, it was forced to stop when unions successfully took court action to protect their members.

The PCS union has announced that it will fight the current proposals as well.

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Interest rate rise will hit your wallet hard and cause a deep economic recession

The Bank of England: its interest rate rise will hit you hard in the wallet.

The Bank of England has increased interest rates by a huge (for these times) 0.5 per cent in an apparently inexplicable move that won’t do anything to stop the current enormous increases in the cost of living.

What can possibly have possessed the Monetary Policy Committee at Threadneedle Street to do this monstrous thing?

The bank’s own forecasters are predicting that inflation will remain above 10 per cent until at least October 2023, putting huge pressures on ordinary people.

The bank is already predicting that the UK will fall into recession this year, and the interest rate rise will prolong it – so that, in three years’ time (after the next general election, take note), unemployment is expected to stand at six per cent of the workforce – and rising.

Energy prices – the main cause of the cost-of-living crisis – are expected to fall back during this period, although the predictions don’t take this into account. The hike in interest rates will not reduce the cost-of-living crisis in any way.

And the ultimate result, as Professor Simon Wren-Lewis points out in his latest Mainly Macro article, will be to reduce inflation to a point far lower than the Bank of England’s two-per-cent mandate permits. Who benefits from that?

Professor Wren-Lewis adds that it is possible the bank expects a new Tory prime minister – whoever that may be – to introduce support for people on low incomes in a bid to stop the excessive inflation and recession.

But there is no indication from either Liz Truss or Rishi Sunak that they will do that; tax cuts promised by Truss will go to rich people and/or corporations.

And, as Professor Wren-Lewis points out,

Excessive monetary tightening based on a guess of fiscal loosening is a dangerous game to play.

Sadly for most of us, the danger applies only to the poor, working people who actually keep the economy moving.

Source: mainly macro: Why does the Bank of England appear to be ignoring its mandate?

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More than 1,300 DWP staff to lose jobs: will the service to claimants get EVEN WORSE?

Employment in the UK is a “remarkable success” says Raab – as his government makes 1,300 DWP jobs redundant in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis.

Yes, some of the most hated civil servants in the UK are likely to lose their jobs in a back-office shake-up of the Department for Work and Pensions.

Offices are being closed across the country, meaning 12,000 DWP employees will be moved to different sites. A further 1,300 people will not be moved as there are no suitable sites near them; they will lose their jobs.

But these jobs are said to be going from offices in areas of high economic deprivation, making a mockery of the Tory government’s “levelling-up” agenda.

The PCS union said the offices closing with no alternative site being offered to staff are in: Aberdeen, Barrow in Furness, Bishop Auckland, Blackburn, Bury St Edmunds, Chippenham, Exeter, Gravesend, Kirkcaldy, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Southampton, and Hanley in Stoke-on-Trent.

Labour’s shadow secretary for work and pensions, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “In closing DWP offices and cutting jobs in areas including Stoke, Burnley, Bishop Auckland, Doncaster, Southampton and Kirkcaldy, Therese Coffey has exposed the Tories’ rhetoric on levelling up to be utterly hollow.

“Ministers are today cutting quality public sector jobs from communities who need them in the middle of a devastating cost of living crisis.”

The decision seems to be motivated by a calculation that the DWP has more real estate than it needs – so this is about selling off land for money, Weren’t we all led to believe the government is making cash hand-over-fist due to increased fuel (and other) prices?

In all, 13 processing sites are set to close by June 2023, but more job losses are feared over the closure and relocation of 29 other sites.

Announcing the closures on March 17, Work and Pensions minister David Rutley said no “front-of-house Jobcentre Plus” services would be affected because “the services we are talking about are primarily telephony and digital”.

Reading between the lines, this suggests that it will take even longer than the hours it already does to contact the DWP about a claim by phone or online,

And the PCS union’s Mark Serwotka seems to be implying that this is the payoff for DWP staff who were taken on to handle the extra work caused by the Covid-19 lockdowns.

With the government winding down its Covid restrictions – despite a new surge in infections, hospitalisations and deaths – these “work units” (as the Tories describe people like you and me and especially benefit claimants) are now surplus to requirements.

“The government was quick to clap civil servants at the start of the pandemic – they’re even quicker to scrap them now they’ve declared the pandemic over.

“Our members have worked tirelessly behind the scenes, keeping the country running, paying out benefits to almost two-and-a-half million families, helping them to put food on their table and keep a roof over their head.

“But now, as food and fuel prices rise faster than ever, they’re being abandoned by the government and left to fend for themselves.”

I fear this is the truth of the Tory DWP slim-down: former employees transformed into claimants in the most deprived areas, at the worst possible time, receiving an inferior service from the organisation they used to represent,

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Raab refuses to accept the facts of unemployment

Tories aren’t working: Labour’s poster referred to the parties the Conservatives under Boris Johnson held while the rest of us were in lockdown but may be equally applied to their failure to address – or even acknowledge – increased unemployment.

Boris Johnson has been misleading us about employment figures.

The facts came out when Labour’s Stephen Timms revealed during (Deputy) Prime Minister’s Questions that Sir David Norgrove of the UK Statistics Authority wrote to Johnson, three weeks ago, saying the prime minister is wrong to say employment is up.

But Dominic Raab wasn’t paying any attention. He contradicted Timms’s claim and ran out the hoary old line about unemployment being higher after Labour governments leave office than when they start.

Pathetic – and misleading. We need a correction of the record.

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Embattled Tories kick down hard – they want to make benefit claimants suffer

Sanction centre: the Tories are giving unemployed Universal Credit claimants just four months to get a job in the sector they want before demanding that they take what they’re offered or face sanctions. But who will profit? The jobseeker – or the employer?

This Writer has never understood why working-class people vote for the Conservatives when the Tories always attack them.

This is especially true when the Tories are themselves under attack, so it should be no surprise to anybody that they are victimising benefit claimants again.

This time it is unemployed people on Universal Credit who are taking the brunt of the pain:

Unemployed workers will be forced to take up a job in any sector or face swift financial sanctions under a crackdown designed to fill hundreds of thousands of vacancies.

Claimants will be given just four weeks – down from three months – to find a job within their preferred sector. After that point, if they fail to make “reasonable efforts” to secure a job or turn down any offer, they will have part of their universal credit payment withdrawn.

The move, which is part of an initiative to get 500,000 people into work by June and fill 1.2m job vacancies nationally, comes as Boris Johnson seeks to reassert control over the political agenda amid the “partygate” crisis.

See? It’s a distraction tactic.

The important question is: how much do these jobs pay?

Unemployed people aren’t likely to care if they take a job in their preferred sector; the priority for anybody at times of hardship is to get one that pays the bills.

And this is the problem.

The Conservatives have spent nearly 12 years, since they slithered back into office in 2010, pushing wages down – so the average is now thousands of pounds less than it used to be (in real terms).

And people are struggling.

Do these 1.2 million new jobs pay a living wage?

Or will anybody taking them still be claiming Universal Credit, simply to survive?

That’s a government subsidy for employers, of course – not a benefit for the employee.

It’s not acceptable and, as the government, the Tories should be ensuring that it doesn’t happen.

But they won’t, because they haven’t bothered at any other time since May 2010.

The remarkable thing is that, knowing the Tories are victimising the electorate, voters still send them back to Parliament. In the name of all that’s sane, why?

Do middle-class voters really think that these punitive moves against vulnerable people are saving the rest of us from supporting scroungers, benefit cheats, and people who are just too lazy to work?

Do working-class voters – the ones this police attacks – really think a Tory government provides an opportunity for them to become billionaires, by hard work and struggle? Has it not occurred to them that they work much harder than those people and still get nowhere because the system is stacked against them?

People need to think about what Tory policies actually do – and ignore the propaganda. Then they need to vote accordingly.

Source: Universal credit claimants face tough sanctions in UK job crackdown | Benefits | The Guardian

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New DWP sanction system could have TOUGHER punishments for claimants

[Image: www.disabledgo.com]

This is extreme, even for the Department for Work and Pensions.

It seems there are moves to toughen up the sanction system for people on New Style Employment and Support Allowance and Jobseekers’ Allowance, even though sanctions were only introduced a few days ago.

The DWP has a new watchdog organisation, the Social Security Advisory Committee (what happened to the Bonfire of All The Quangos?) that reckons the system isn’t harsh enough.

Apparently it is possible for people to claim both Universal Credit and JSA or ESA – but if they are sanctioned, it can only be applied to UC.

This means that such claimants would be in a better position financially than people on only one of the benefits; if the sanctioned amount was more than the value of the UC element of benefit payments to a particular claimant (it could be zero), then the total sanction could be as low as zero.

The SSAC wants the penalties to apply to both benefits that are being claimed.

Considering the arbitrary nature of the sanction system, This Writer considers the current situation to be a valuable protection for claimants. We have all heard horror stories about people who were sanctioned and subsequently died because the DWP got its decision wrong.

It seems the problem lies in the fact that sanctions are decided on the advice of a DWP work coach – a single civil servant – whose attitude to the job may vary between very extreme positions, depending on who it is.

Work coaches are supposed to help claimants write a “claimant commitment” that sets out their obligations as claimants of the state payments.

The commitment should be accessible, clear, tailored to the claimant’s needs and the state of the local labour market, and agreed by both the claimant and the DWP, and claimants should be properly informed.

In fact, research has shown that some work coaches aren’t using their discretion fairly or reasonably and opt for generic, rather than tailored, actions. Some work coaches were found to be copying and pasting actions from a shared document which had become standard in their local Job Centre.

There were examples of lone parents not being informed of their right to reduced work searches, and re-assessment interviews lasting just 10 minutes.

If brutal sanctions are applied to people on two benefits, on the say-so of the people responsible for such abuses of the rules, then hideous injustices may result.

Suggested examples include sanctions being applied to elderly disabled claimants now looking for work in their 60s and suffering poor health. How would they survive if their work coach turns out to be a “power maniac who enjoys putting the disadvantaged down”?

Ministers have not (yet) approved any suggested changes but we all know the DWP’s reputation for bloodthirstiness. How long will it be before this new opportunity to cause misery is seized?

Read more here: Exclusive: Benefits watchdog wants tougher punishment for jobless and disabled claimants after DWP bungles new sanctions system | Westminster Confidential

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Benefit sanctions: if you’re on new-style JSA or ESA, brace yourself!

Sanction centre: people on New Style ESA and JSA are about to be hit by the most arbitrary and unreasonable process ever foisted on large numbers of the public by a cruel government – the DWP’s sanctions regime.

The Department for Work and Pensions has decided that people on New Style Employment and Support Allowance, and Jobseekers Allowance, have life too easy.

So the DWP has introduced sanctions for those benefits. They came into effect on November 3 – did anybody notice?

The DWP says the rule change means that New Style JSA and ESA claimants who do not meet the responsibilities agreed in their Claimant Commitment, without having a good reason, will lose some or all of their payment.

But those with experience of how sanctions work in other benefits will know that claimants are likely to face unreasonable demands from the DWP that will be followed by a loss of benefits.

Sometimes they may be informed that their benefits are being sanctioned for transgressions that they have not committed or for failing to attend interviews to which they were not invited.

They may also be sanctioned for failing to attend interviews, even if they have provided good reasons. Being admitted to hospital – and therefore unable to communicate with the DWP – is never accepted as a good reason.

Of course, the DWP has not mentioned this. Its statement said: “As is the case for Universal Credit claimants, if someone in receipt of new style JSA and ESA fails to do what they have agreed to in their Claimant Commitment without good reason – such as having or caring for a child, or a change to a health condition – their payments may be reduced for a set period.”

This is particularly amusing – in a bitter way: “Sanctions are only applied as a last resort when a claimant is not engaging with the commitment they have made. If someone disagrees with a decision they can ask for it to be looked at again.”

Experience suggests that sanctions are less likely to be applied as a last resort than as a first response – especially if you are claiming ESA.

Of course it is entirely possible that the DWP will actually police its new system fairly…

But This Writer will believe it when I see it. I may have a long time to wait.

Source: DWP sanction rules will now apply to New Style ESA and Jobseekers Allowance claimants – Daily Record

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Is the DWP pushing benefit claimants into Workfare again?

It seems Therese Coffey is sending benefit claimants back into an old scam.

The Work Trials scheme doesn’t appear to be an exact return to the Mandatory Work Activity scam, but may be Workfare by another name in practice.

Unemployed people claiming state benefits are put into unpaid work with companies for up to 30 days, with the possibility that it could lead to a paid job at the end of that time.

But will it?

The DWP says it checks to ensure that employers are offering genuinely worthy opportunities that could lead to employment.

But are they? Or are they only saying that, in order to get their hands on people who will do the work of fully-paid staff for nothing – and then throw them away after a month?

The people doing the work would receive only around a quarter of what they would get on the government’s so-called living wage – a minimum amount that is actually much less than what people need to survive without claiming any benefits at all.

Stewart McDonald, the SNP’s Glasgow South MP, said the scheme ran against what he had been told by the government:

“I have previously been told by Government ministers that unpaid work trials are exploitative and against the law and I see clearly that this is absolutely not the case when the Government’s own departments are helping create such unpaid work trials.

“Jobseekers and those on benefits participate in these programmes out of good faith, sometimes for up to 30 days at a time, and it is not right should they receive no wage and no guarantee of a job at the end of it.”

This Writer agrees. I have spent years campaigning against Workfare.

But the proof of what this policy does will be in the number of people who succeed in getting a long-term job with it.

Do any readers have experience of it, and has it done you any long-term good?

Source: DWP accused of ‘exploiting’ benefits claimants with unpaid work trials – Daily Record

Have YOU donated to my crowdfunding appeal, raising funds to fight false libel claims by TV celebrities who should know better? These court cases cost a lot of money so every penny will help ensure that wealth doesn’t beat justice.

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