A thousand small cruelties

I’ve been interviewing people recently who are looking for work in South Wales for two different projects. The reports will be out shortly, but the messages are so powerful I’m previewing them over the next couple of weeks.

What I’ve seen is that people who are unemployed experience daily, small cruelties that make life in already difficult circumstances much, much worse.

Some small cruelties were routine thoughtlessness, such as switching the time of an appointment with a Job Centre Plus adviser.  What is doubtless seen as an admin convenience in the Job Centre  leaves the unemployed person to hang around for four or five hours with nowhere to go to keep warm and dry, and no money for a cup of tea.  Because the people I interviewed walk the 3 miles to and from the Job Centre to save the bus fare, there’s no way they can go home before they have to return for their appointment. This would be a nuisance if it happened very occasionally, but it occurred so often to almost everyone I interviewed that it began to look like a campaign of harassment.

Deductions from benefits were another issue. Not only were benefits already low, at £71 a week  for a single person, but more than half of those I’ve been interviewing didn’t even get that. One person told me that weekly  deductions  were made from her Job Seekers Allowance for a small pension that she only received twice a year, another was paying back a Crisis Loan from some time ago, and a third was paying a fine.  On top of this, more than half of those I interviewed did not receive enough Housing Benefit to cover their rent, either because they ‘under-occupied’ their homes or because their rent was higher than their local housing allowance.  This meant they had to find a further £14 a week, as they had  not been able to get a smaller home. It’s absolutely right that people pay what they owe, but to take it out of already very, very squeezed budgets without regard to timing or affordability adds unwarranted pressure.

And then there’s sanctions.  

The impact of sanctions themselves is certainly not a small cruelty –  losing ALL benefits except Child Benefit for one, two or even eight weeks, left people literally destitute.  When sanctions hit, there’s no food in the cupboard to tide you over, no credit for gas and electricity, no emergency savings or even coins down the side of the sofa.

Let’s be clear – this is not about people’s benefit being cut because they’re working illegally or not looking for work. People are being sanctioned for minor transgressions, which are often disputed by claimants, such as missing a re-arranged appointment with an adviser (even though the letter notifying the change arrived after the appointment),  or supposedly applying only for three not four jobs a week (because of problems logging into Universal Job Match).  As appealing against sanctions simply prolongs the period without benefit, surprise surprise, hardly anybody does.

The smaller cruelty is the constant threat of being sanctioned. It is so easy to fail to meet a Job Centre requirement accidentally. A late or lost letter, forgetting your user name, being told different things by different advisers – they happen to all of us, quite a lot of  times. The difference is that if you are a Job Seeker, a minor administrative hiccup can result in no food or heating for weeks.  Because people are being sanctioned for matters outside their control, they have an ever-present fear of falling over a precipice.

Above all, the people I interviewed want a job.

Their ambitions are modest – something full-time, with reliable hours and pay slightly above the Minimum Wage is their dream.  Their dream. They’re willing to travel, they’re willing to do most types of things, they just want a job.  I saw no evidence at all that treating claimants harshly delivered their dream – on the contrary, I saw people who were stressed, frustrated and very, very hard up. 

Victoria Winckler is Director of the Bevan Foundation