Welfare Commission: humanising decision making and appeals in the benefits system
By Maeve McGoldrick | February 9, 2010
Today the Department for Work and Pensions Select Committee publishes its report on decision making and appeals in the benefits system, the headline press coverage reports that overpayments due to error had soared from £400 million in 2000, while overpayments due to fraud and mistakes by claimants dropped. As part of the solution the select Committee is calling for a Welfare Commission to be set up to simplify the benefits system. We welcome this news and believe that any redesign should place a one-to-one service to claimants at its heart; ensuring efficient and humanised service delivery. We have a few specific recommendations for the Commission to consider
- Reduce the complexity of claim forms,
- Make crisis loans more accessible and immediate,
- Addresses the inconsistency of the earnings disregard across all benefits to ensure accidental fraud is not committed resulting in benefits being automatically stopped.
Last year the Community Links advice services were used by a total of 12,400 local people. At our drop-in advice sessions 37.8% were benefits related cases, of which 73% were a result of DWP error. Our advice services continue to be in high demand, services cost several hundred thousand pounds per year - funded by local authorities and the Legal Services Commission. This cost to the tax payer could be dramatically reduced by the simplification of the benefits system and increased competency with the administration process.
Research by AdviceUK in Nottingham reveals that 42% of the demand at advice agencies in the city is ‘failure demand’ - demand caused by failures in the system of public administration. Reducing this would save significant amounts of money and free up advisors to carry out valuable work with clients, supporting them to resolve their long-term problems.
Many of our clients have used our advice services in the past; some have had their benefits mistakenly stopped on more than one occasion. The knock-on effects are increased borrowing and debt, eviction problems and in many cases people falling into the informal economy, working cash-in-hand to cover costs as a last resort. Debt related advice has doubled, and our advisers believe this is in part due to the recession-related rise in claimant figures, and benefits being stopped or delayed as people struggle to find formal work.
Our campaign, Need NOT Greed has been calling for a simplified benefits system. A system which is easier to navigate could help prevent the rise of informal economic activity caused by people struggling to survive poverty. At the launch of the Need NOT Greed campaign in February 2009 Terry Rooney, chair of the DWP select committee said
“There is a treadmill of being in the informal economy out of Need NOT Greed. The striking thing is that the national benefits system is geared up to serve millions, but everybody is an individual - it’s how you can recognise everyone’s needs and requirements. You need a totalitarian system and there are enormous challenges - but ones that need to be faced and met.”
A local campaigner and user of our advice services said
“the system wears you down, I am constantly just surviving. Every time you pick yourself up and try to move forward the system lets you down again. It’s the same old problems for everyone and none of us round here trust it anymore. How can something you don’t trust be able to help you?”
Rising unemployment is increasing demand for welfare benefits at a time when public funding is under severe pressure. Spending time building productive relationships with people using services is time well spent; not an extravagance. These relationships are instrumental to efficient delivery of public services. We hope that a Welfare Commission is established as it is evident that change is necessary - but change must put the needs of the service user at the heart of the system.
Topics: Benefits, Communication, Informal Economy, News, Regeneration, Research, Welfare, debt, employment | No Comments »
£16bn of benefits go unclaimed every year
By Maeve McGoldrick | February 3, 2010
Community links is one of the 27 charities challenging government today over the £16bn in benefits that go unclaimed every year. The campaign, coordinated by Citizens Advice, wants government to set targets to improve the take-up of means-tested benefits, ensuring that money earmarked for some of the most vulnerable people actually reaches them.
It’s an issue we’ve been aware of for some time. About 12,000 people visit Community Links’ advice service every year for support with benefits, housing and debt. Last year we helped them claim over £1.3m in benefits they were entitled to but not receiving.
Last year’s Benefit Take-up Task Force, which we sat on, looked at the issue and some progress was made as a result. Targets for housing benefit take up have now been included in the Audit Commission’s Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) for local authorities, and there is support from the Treasury to push this.
However the difficulty lies in the fact that, as always government departments do not work together very well. As different departments issue different benefits - HMRC for Working Tax Credits, DWP for out of work benefits, local authorities for housing benefit - it makes it very difficult to create and impose targets for benefit take up as a whole. There is a concern that targets will deter agencies, acting as a barrier to encouraging them to do more. This complexity is also one reason why people don’t access them in the first place.
Nevertheless it is clear something must be done. Citizens Advice highlight that four out of five low paid workers without children (1.2bn households) miss out on tax credits worth at least £38 per week, a total of £1.9 billion, and as many as half of working households entitled to housing benefit do not claim it. There’s a similar story with council tax benefit, pension credit, and child tax credit.
Access to these extra benefits could take households above the point of desperate struggle, into a situation where they’re able to look forward and plan for the future. There are many reasons why people don’t claim everything they’re entitled to - we frequently meet people who just don’t know about them, people who think they could get them but are left baffled by the complexity of the system, and those who want to but don’t know how.
Targets will ensure that local authorities, job centres, and other offices make active efforts to ensure people access all their benefits - better advertising, more support, more accessible information. Therefore we fully support Citizens Advice on this benefits take-up campaign.
Topics: Benefits, Child Poverty | 1 Comment »
The Tower Block of Commons and the “Internal Orient”
By Richard McKeever | February 2, 2010
Last week we debated the portrayal of poverty in the media and touched on the poverty game show format - last night Channel 4 screened the first in the series the Tower Block of Commons following Members of Parliament as they spend a week living with families in Tower Block Estates across the UK.
The aim of the exercise was unclear. Was it to present to policymakers the everyday reality of their voters struggling through recession? To demonstrate how difficult it is to get by without a second-home allowance and a charge account at John Lewis? Or was the aim to portray the people living in social housing as workshy layabouts?
Just as the focus was unclear at the outset so was the documentary makers’ approach. At times hard-hitting exchanges, for example about drug misuse, provided a genuine insight to life on the estates. Yet the game show format meant challenging moments were interspersed with exchanges which ridiculed stereotypes - the MP’s were each provided clothing by their hosts to make them fit-in resulting in a comedy costume competition.
Building one-to-one, personal contact enabled a couple of MPs to express real concern about improving the circumstances of their hosts. However what did the MP’s think would happen to the damp, mouldy bathroom after “their” resident had been re-housed? It would simply be occupied by the next on the waiting list - without changing the underlying conditions.
Whilst warm relationships were established with individuals each of the MPs, to different extents, demonstrated their distance from the lives of some of the UKs neglected communities. The audience watching on TV were invited to participate in the “Us” side of an “Us and Them” equation, gazing at the residents of the Tower Block as if they were aliens.
We have written before about the process of “othering” and referred to Ruth Lister’s definition
‘Othering’: people in poverty are thought about, talked about and treated as ‘Other’ and inferior to the rest of society. A dividing line is drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and the dividing line is imbued with negative judgements that construct ‘the poor’ variously as a source of moral contamination, a threat, an undeserving economic burden, failures in the meritocratic race, an object of pity or even as an exotic species to be studied.
There is a long history of people living in poverty being viewed as “other” dating back to melodramatic Victorians exploring the “Internal Orient” of London’s East End this TV programme reverts to simplistic stereotyping of people in poverty and, in reality, adds nothing to our understanding.
Topics: Attitudes | 3 Comments »
My experience at the Jobcentre
By Guest | February 2, 2010
Simon Gibson works part time as a community worker, volunteers with Community Links, and is taking a Community Development course. This is his experience at the Jobcentre
This is my first blog about my experience of being unemployed. I was made redundant after 20 years of working. I had never really taken much time before to find a job and usually just took whatever I could find.
This time I was unemployed I had reached a stage in my life (aged 41) where I wanted to make sure I just didn’t do anything but something I really wanted to do.
Luckily I was offered a job, 16 hour part-time work in something I really wanted. However, the information I got from the Job centre was that I was not entitled to any benefits unless I was actively looking for full time employment. I have since discovered this is not true.
It seems that the Job Centre is obsessed in getting people into work even though it might not be the work they want to do. There was no real understanding of my situation and I was not really treated as a person who needed to be worked with and understood. It was all about looking for work regardless of whether you are ready or know what is right for you.
Topics: employment | No Comments »
To sum up - poverty in the media
By Will Horwitz | January 29, 2010
It has been a fascinating week of discussion on the blog - we’ve had 20 authors grappling with the issue of how poverty is portrayed in the media, approaching it from very different angles. So what have we learnt?
The way the media portrays people on low incomes is neither positive nor reflective of the true situation. Those covered are often the tiny majority who are also criminal or antisocial - the ‘visible poor‘. Meanwhile poor people of the past are portrayed as nobly struggling, while those of the present are seen as feckless scroungers. And young people often get a particularly raw deal in the media.
There was less agreement on why this distortion occurs. Some focussed on the role of journalists, highlighting how little many journalists know about the lives of those they report on, and how they often don’t take the trouble to find out. Others blamed it not on the journalists themselves but the media as a whole, where a desire to shock and sensationalise can override all other considerations.
On the other hand, perhaps charities have to shoulder some of the blame for being overly hostile towards those journalists who are genuinely interested. And politicians and their language have a powerful influence, both in promoting negative stereotypes, and reacting to them. Indeed, it could be argued that government have thwarted their own ambitions for tackling poverty by turning the public against poor people.
So finally, what do we do about it? There’s perhaps a role for better understanding between journalists and charities, ensuring they work together rather than against each other. Perhaps ignoring the mainstream media and producing your own content or starting conversations in communities is the way forward. And JRF’s excellent guide to reporting poverty is being taken into journalism schools and promoted to students, hopefully influencing the next generation of reporters.
However, I can’t help feeling there is more we could do. Is there room to seriously engage with politicians on this issue, pointing out that stigmatising poor people is a direct barrier to tackling poverty? Are there ways we could engage the media better with people on low incomes? An idea that hasn’t been mentioned this week, but that I’ve heard before, is of a citizens’ panel that holds to account media outlets offering negative portrayals.
This discussion certainly isn’t over, and perhaps over the next few weeks we can keep it going, on this blog or elsewhere. In the meantime we can challenge negative portrayals wherever we see them and perhaps come up with some more concrete proposals for harnessing the power of the media to better represent and promote the interests of people on low incomes.
Topics: Attitudes | 1 Comment »
Reality Bites - TV’s Poverty Game Shows
By Richard McKeever | January 29, 2010
Coincidentally, while we have been debating representation of poverty in the media on the blog this week, staff from a TV production company turned up unannounced at our building in Canning Town yesterday seeking “poor people” for a new series of a reality TV programme. Whilst people are waiting to see advisers about their debts and benefits, or picking up youngsters from after-school clubs, researchers handed round flyers asking if people were “struggling to make ends meet” - and inviting them to participate in a reality TV show. It’s not the first time we have been approached to put people up for this type of “Poverty Game Show”.
Topics: Attitudes | 1 Comment »
“We cannot be this rich and see people that poor”
By Maeve McGoldrick | January 29, 2010
In 2004 Gordon Brown described how Michael Buerk’s report from Ethiopia on the famine 20 years earlier had spurred the country into action, with people feeling that “we cannot be this rich and see people that poor“. Gordon Brown, then chancellor, told the media that world poverty was the most important issue of our generation and called on the media to help fight global poverty. In doing so he warned that mass amounts of awareness would not guarantee effectiveness, that the first media drive to tackle poverty in Africa in the 80’s had a huge effect on the UK, but the second time around in the 90’s it was less successful in practical terms “Having shocked people in the 1980s, it is harder to re-shock them and re-shock them again” he said
Topics: Attitudes | No Comments »
An alternative to mainstream media - conversations in communities
By Guest | January 29, 2010
Liam Purcell works for Church Action on Poverty, whose annual Poverty and Homeless Action week starts on Saturday.
It’s interesting that the Community Links blog is focusing on poverty in the media this week. Right now, we at Church Action on Poverty are in the middle of preparing for our biggest annual effort to raise the public profile of poverty issues. Each year, we work together with our partners Housing Justice and Scottish Churches Housing Action to run Poverty & Homelessness Action Week.
Topics: Attitudes, Voices from the Ground Up | 1 Comment »
The ‘enterprise myth’ lays the blame for poverty on the poor
By Guest | January 29, 2010
Mike Chitty is a trainer, adviser, consultant and writer on the themes of enterprise, entrepreneurship, leadership and management
“We can help turn your dream into a reality* ”
*subject to eligibility
So says an enterprise marketing campaign aimed at some of the poorest communities in Leeds. But it could be just about anywhere. The enterprise fairytale is ubiquitous.
Topics: Attitudes, employment | 1 Comment »
Poverty in the media - commissioning priorities
By Guest | January 29, 2010
Spectacle are an independent television production company. A recent project looked at how the media portrays people in poverty, working with individuals featured in documentaries like The Tower and Rich Kid Poor Kid. Claire Sharples, project coordinator, reflects on whether poverty can ever be properly portrayed on TV.
Poverty is a problem faced by both individuals and society. Society commentators are an exclusive group, selected via a hierarchy and instated within a system. How representative can their voice be of the individuals who, because of the restrictions of their experience, do not rise through this?
Topics: Attitudes | 1 Comment »
We spent a week debating the way poverty is portrayed in the media, generating over 20 fascinating posts from a wide range of authors. 