Rat bites on his legs from three days of sleeping rough

Dear Editor,

I read with great interest the excellent Rochdale Online article: "Tougher disability benefit assessment may have taken “serious” toll on mental health".

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/99216/tougher-disability-benefit-assessment-may-have-taken-serious-toll-on-mental-health

Read in conjunction with today’s Rochdale Online article:

'Budget cuts, poor coordination and access to services threatening to undermine progress for those with most complex needs'

http://www.rochdaleonline.co.uk/news-features/2/news-headlines/99218/budget-cuts-poor-coordination-and-access-to-services-threatening-to-undermine-progress-for-those-with-most-complex-needs

This coverage brilliantly highlights some of the serious failings in care for a wide range of people with complex needs and or mental health issues.

Sadly in some cases in the welfare safety net there are now apparently more gaps than net.

With the above in mind I am writing to share and express my grave concern about the benefit sanctions system, which is of personal and professional concern to me and very many other people in Rochdale.

I know this from the numerous recent conversations with local people about their benefit claims, their damp, in some cases squalid, housing conditions, their mental health conditions the stresses and strains they are now undergoing simply to keep their heads above water financially and their heads up proud as individuals in spite of the pressures of depression and despair which take their unremitting toil on themselves, their families and their children.

If I am aware of these stories, regular readers of Rochdale Online will I'm sure have stories of their own; if we are aware of the fast deteriorating social situation in our communities, surely our MPs, councillors and decision makers should know as well.

Last week I personally referred two people to the RBH Housing centre at St Alban's House. One with several rat bites on his legs from three days of sleeping rough at the back of a Rochdale gym where he'd been attempting to keep warm beside the external heating pipes. Another, who had not eaten for five days, except the left over food he'd scavenged from takeaway bins and skips. He was not registered with a GP, so was unable to get his vital epilepsy medication.

Another a young woman who'd had to flee her home in the early hours of the morning fearing domestic violence in an argument over whether her husband was going to put pint of beer on the pub bar or put food on his family’s kitchen table. Wearing nothing more than a t-shirt, jeans and her slippers she was carrying a young baby in her arms wrapped in carrier bags in a desperate attempt to keep the rain off her child she preferred to walk the streets of Rochdale in the rain than risk a beating at home.

Another, a working man, who had been told by his Human Resource's Manager less than eight weeks before Christmas that he was "financially unviable" less than twenty-four hours after submitting a GP sick-note which meant that his employer, a call centre company regularly posts million pound profits, was unwilling to pay him his paltry Statutory Sick Pay entitlement, and would rather sack a British worker, in direct contravention of UK Employment Law, than accept he was legitimately signed off by his GP as being unable to work for 'three working days' because of work related stress brought on by twelve hour shifts, where employees have to log in and out simply to use the toilet, and sleepless nights worrying about whether his family home was going to be repossessed by the mortgage holder, as thousands of other homes have been in the North-West recently.

It is shameful that these things are happening in the twenty-first century. More so it is shaming that our local councillors are not hammering on doors demanding something be done immediately as our town is apparently is allowed to slowly crumble into social collapse and vital frontline provision allowed to be sacrificed on the altar of back-door privatisation and austerity measures that balance the countries financial failure by the richest 1% on the backs of the rest of us, the 99% of us who played no part in the credit crunch other than to bail out the very same banks who created this appalling mess in the first place.

In March 2015 the then Select Committee for Work and Pensions published a report into the system. The conclusions exposed the serious flaws of the system, questioned the absence of evidence that sanctions actually work, and called on the government to undertake a full and independent review. This call has subsequently been repeated by the social security advisory committee, who say the regime should be put on hold until a 'robust and urgent review' has taken place.

Churches and food banks are witnessing a significant rise in food bank referrals and a greater number of families in hardship because they have been sanctioned. A report, 'Time to Rethink Benefit Sanctions', published in March by a coalition of major UK churches - the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Church in Wales, the Church of Scotland, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church and Church Action on Poverty - provides substantial evidence that sanctions have a disproportionate impact on those who are most vulnerable: young people, people leaving care, homeless people, single parents, the mentally ill and those with long-term illness.

The research draws on data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and highlights that:

• In 2013-14, sanctions affected almost 100,000 children. 
• People who receive the sickness and disability benefit Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) because of a long-term mental health problem are being sanctioned at a rate of more than 100 per day.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) insists that sanctions are only used as a last resort and for a 'tiny minority'. However, the churches and the 'Guardian' newspaper have both calculated from DWP data that almost one in five jobseekers are sanctioned each year - and the rate has doubled since 2010.

The hardship payment system does not prevent severe hardship for many people. The majority of people who prove that they cannot afford the very essentials of life still must wait two weeks before they become eligible for a hardship payment – and the payment itself arrives even later. This obviously causes real hunger and suffering.

I've asked my Member of Parliament, to immediately ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to:

• Commit to a “full independent” review of the benefit sanctions system
• In the meantime, remove the two-week waiting period before “non-vulnerable” people can receive a hardship payment
• Suspend sanctions for families with children and for people suffering from mental ill health.

Even at the height of the 1980s economic recession food banks were virtually unknown in our country's infrastructure, except perhaps in the form of Miner's Support Group food distribution centres in coalfield communities to support near starving strikers and their families. Now hardly a week goes by without food banks somewhere being set up or in need of supplies top feed hungry families in the UK.

Local people may have seen the black and white archive photograph of Gracie Fields alongside the Rochdale Soup Kitchen in the 1930s - make no mistake it is to the modern day 'soup kitchen' and the Universal Credit 'Online Digital Workhouse' we as a society are all headed if George Osborne's austerity measures become an actuality.

DWP plans to put advisers in food banks - this seems to indicate they expect food banks to be around for a good deal longer still. These measures, along with DWP proposals to put mental health workers in every job centre also seem to be at least a tacit admission they are expecting more people with mental health issues to be either sanctioned or claiming benefits and that the need for food banks needs to be formalised by the State.

It does of course beg the question should it really be easier to see a psychiatrist at your local job centre or have the several weeks wait for Cognitive Behavioural Therapy through our local NHS providers?

I would respectfully urge our local political class of all parties to immediately start addressing and prioritising these above issues as a matter of pressing urgency lest the despair that far too many local people are struggling with on a daily basis turns to inward despair and total abandonment of and disillusionment with our system of democratic representation and public accountability.

Or I fear worse still that with too many people understandably feeling that the system neither cares nor understands their lived experience and that they truly no longer have 'nothing to lose' the unpredictable social consequences of rising frustration and marginalisation may well turn from apathy and despair to anger - that is a lesson of British social and economic history down through the centuries. That our rulers have forgotten, or else ignored, at their peril. I sincerely hope they will be mindful of the fact that to every action there is always a reaction.

Yours faithfully,

 

Andrew Wastling