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Our benefits system has become a racket for cheating poor people
Excellent article about a welfare system run by and for Hooray Henry's in Westminster on a powertrip, with no regard for the poorest and most vulnerable in society.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/02/benefits-system-racket-cheating-poor-disabled-woman?CMP=share_btn_tw
That our benefits system is broken is no longer up for debate. Ministers are told universal credit is a fiasco and MPs weep over starving families in one of the richest societies in human history. Even rightwing tabloids run grim updates on how men with terminal cancer are declared fit to work just weeks before they die.
Such cases are described as shameful. As failures. They are lined up like so many one-offs – not representative of fair-play Britain. But Pike and her colleagues know different. They see a system that routinely snatches money out of the hands of people who need and are entitled to it and bullies claimants with contempt.
Welfare advice has almost vanished after years of Conservative cuts to councils and legal aid. Pike started out at a council, until it was forced to cut back its welfare advice service. Nowadays, if you’re disabled or unemployed, you’ll most likely get a few leaflets “signposting” you to other services, which themselves can’t help much. As for someone to represent you at a hearing, as Pike is for Moira, “It’s a desert out there,” says Alan Markey, head of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers. So the people who need welfare advice can’t get it, even while they’re being short-changed of their benefits. Just as the government is making the welfare system meaner, blunter and more prone to malfunction, it is also hacking away at any means of redress.This means poor people are bilked out of millions of pounds that are rightfully theirs. One of Pike’s colleagues, who also advises at the food bank, went through his records for the Guardian and calculated that he filed 36 appeals in the past year. Fifteen still await conclusion, but of the rest, 20 out of 21 DWP rulings were overturned after a welfare adviser got involved.
In just one year, Pike and her colleagues won a total of £852,288.84 back from the DWP: benefits wrongly withheld, years of back payments, compensation to cover the debts claimants racked up. And that’s for just one food bank in one pocket of London. Multiply it for the rest of the country, and you realise that this isn’t about a few bad decisions or rotten apples. It is a predatory system. Last May, the DWP was forced to admit that it has a target to refuse 80% of requests for any reconsideration of benefit decisions. Poor and often seriously ill people with legitimate claims to state support have been left to starve by the government, in order to save money that has been recycled into tax cuts for rich people and big businesses. This happened under “compassionate Conservative” David Cameron and continues under Theresa May, who promised to “always act in the interest of ordinary, working-class people”.
Such cases are described as shameful. As failures. They are lined up like so many one-offs – not representative of fair-play Britain. But Pike and her colleagues know different. They see a system that routinely snatches money out of the hands of people who need and are entitled to it and bullies claimants with contempt.
Welfare advice has almost vanished after years of Conservative cuts to councils and legal aid. Pike started out at a council, until it was forced to cut back its welfare advice service. Nowadays, if you’re disabled or unemployed, you’ll most likely get a few leaflets “signposting” you to other services, which themselves can’t help much. As for someone to represent you at a hearing, as Pike is for Moira, “It’s a desert out there,” says Alan Markey, head of the National Association of Welfare Rights Advisers. So the people who need welfare advice can’t get it, even while they’re being short-changed of their benefits. Just as the government is making the welfare system meaner, blunter and more prone to malfunction, it is also hacking away at any means of redress.This means poor people are bilked out of millions of pounds that are rightfully theirs. One of Pike’s colleagues, who also advises at the food bank, went through his records for the Guardian and calculated that he filed 36 appeals in the past year. Fifteen still await conclusion, but of the rest, 20 out of 21 DWP rulings were overturned after a welfare adviser got involved.
In just one year, Pike and her colleagues won a total of £852,288.84 back from the DWP: benefits wrongly withheld, years of back payments, compensation to cover the debts claimants racked up. And that’s for just one food bank in one pocket of London. Multiply it for the rest of the country, and you realise that this isn’t about a few bad decisions or rotten apples. It is a predatory system. Last May, the DWP was forced to admit that it has a target to refuse 80% of requests for any reconsideration of benefit decisions. Poor and often seriously ill people with legitimate claims to state support have been left to starve by the government, in order to save money that has been recycled into tax cuts for rich people and big businesses. This happened under “compassionate Conservative” David Cameron and continues under Theresa May, who promised to “always act in the interest of ordinary, working-class people”.
