This is our official response to the Scottish Government’s proposed bill. While their overall aims remain positive, there are several areas of concern. We have highlighted these and will continue to campaign on them. We are also very aware that campaigns on specific issues can easily be set in competition with each other for limited funds. They have to be part of a bigger campaign for a refocusing of priorities and redistribution of resources, with greater emphasis on investment in real social security. As we wrote in our leaflet for last weekend’s Indy rally, ‘The Scottish Government has recognised social security as a human right, but it could and should be much bolder in its redistribution of the few resources we have and in challenging Westminster’s power to leave Scottish citizens destitute… [we must] do all we can to “work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” – and then push to be able to do more.’

The picture shows Jeane Freeman, the Minister for Social Security

Social Security (Scotland) Bill – a response from the Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network

1/ There are a lot of good things in the Bill, as well as a lot of things that have been phrased to leave options open. We hope that there will be plenty of opportunity for consultation and political oversight on the development of these crucial outstanding practical details. Meanwhile, we would like to highlight a few concerns that we have over the Bill in its current form.

2/ We are pleased to see social security classified as a human right and hope that this has implications beyond the devolved benefits and also implies additional assistance to people suffering under the administration of reserved benefits. Besides assistance to formal advice services, this should include more help to informal support, such as friends and family and mutual support or other volunteer groups. It should also include instructing Police Scotland to take more account of the unequal dynamics operating in Jobcentres and other DWP facilities, and to prioritise diffusing angry situations and avoiding criminalising people who have been put under strain by severe and often arbitrary regulations. It should also include help for people who have been sanctioned – and clause 46 3) opens up possibilities for doing this.

3/ The provision of short-term benefit assistance to help people appealing decisions is welcome, but this could be much more beneficial if extended to include people appealing reserved benefits. This could be especially important for people who have put in a Mandatory Reconsideration after being found ‘fit for work’ and then find themselves having to sign up for JSA or Universal Credit and comply with stringent jobsearch rules.

4/ Clause 30 2) would appear to suggest that failure to provide further information when requested could result in a failure to meet eligibility rules. This could prove problematic for the significant number of people with chaotic lifestyles. However, the accompanying discussion paper appears to suggest that decisions would be made on the basis of the limited information, which would generally prove a better option.

5/ The liability to repay an overpayment due to official error is highly problematic, even with the presumption that this will not generally be pursued. Uncertainty, and the consequent inability to make financial plans and benefit from financial security, has a major impact on wellbeing all round. This could cause major hardship, punishing people who have done nothing wrong, and runs counter to the supportive role that discussions about the Scottish Social Security system have led us to expect.

6/ We are also concerned that the requirement to notify changes be administered with discretion, so that small delays and inefficiencies and the omissions resulting from difficult and chaotic lives do not result in criminalisation.

7/ We are glad to see the inclusion of a Carer’s Supplement and hope that this will prove a step towards a genuine Carer’s wage.

8/ We would like to see the future Scottish Disability Benefit providing mobility help for everyone over 65 who needs it.

9/ Familiarity with the experience of people made to go through a Mandatory Reconsideration before accessing an independent appeal demonstrates that the main function and result of such a system is to severely discourage access to appeals. It is therefore very disappointing to see this replicated in this Bill. We hope, of course, that a more sensitive Scottish system will result in fewer errors, but those that remain should be able to be addressed independently without delay.

10/ We remain very concerned about the situation of people having to apply for PIP before the new Scottish benefit comes on line, and the impact this has for people who have fallen foul of the tick-box application system and especially of its mobility ‘test’. We would like to see much greater use made of the Scottish Welfare Fund to provide discretionary help to this group, backed by more Scottish Government funding.

11/ We are also concerned about failures of Discretionary Housing Payments to meet current and future needs. People can get into major problems and risk becoming homeless due to lack of awareness of the availability of DHP and also to poor administration. (E.g. because Edinburgh City Council provided too little too late, several families in North Edinburgh have faced eviction.) This situation is set to get much worse when the housing benefit cap is extended to social housing next April. The Scottish Government needs to make more provision for this.

12/ We would also like to express our support for the points made in the submission by Professor Paul Spicker, both those we have also included above and those we have not mentioned because we have not experience of our own to add.

Written by Dr Sarah Glynn

for the Scottish Unemployed Workers’ Network

22 August 2017

We have received this prompt and positive response to our complaint about people being refused permission to take notes in PIP assessments. We hope that the assessors also respond as positively. If anyone suffers similar problems, please let us know.

From PIP Customer Service Support at Independent Assessment Services (the new name for Atos Healthcare):

I am sorry to hear that you have encountered two occasions where the Health Professional has not allowed the accompanying individual to take notes.

This is something, that as an organisation, we allow and not something that should be refused.

I will certainly speak to the assessment centre involved to prevent this from happening in the future.

 

The guidelines for PIP assessors make it quite clear that anyone going to an assessment, or any person accompanying them, can take their own private written notes of the meeting. The same is true for Work Capability Assessments for ESA. These notes can be doubly important. They can help keep track of the questions asked so that you can make sure that the crucial issues are covered, and they can provide a vital reminder if/when the case goes to appeal. But when our friend accompanied someone to a PIP assessment at the ATOS-run centre in Dundee, she was told firmly that note taking was not allowed. I had been given the same message some months back – and informed them that this was incorrect – so we can assume that this has happened to others too. Our friend was told that she would have to tell the assessment centre first and get the notes copied by them afterwards, which suggests the assessor may have been getting confused with the rules about sound recordings, but, whatever the cause, the result was unreasonable and unacceptable. We are writing to ATOS to ask them to ensure that their assessors are aware of the DWP’s own guidelines.

You can find the guidance document for PIP assessors here.  Clause 2.7.12 reads:

Claimants and companions attending a consultation with the claimant are entitled to take notes for their own purposes. The claimant or companion may keep the notes and does not have to provide a copy to the HP, although the HP may record that notes were taken. The notes are for the claimant or companion’s own purposes and are not an official record of the process.

What happens to help with the Bedroom Tax when you move onto Universal Credit? That was a new question and we had to look up the answer, but we are pleased to report that Shelter Scotland makes it clear that, just as with Housing Benefit, you can apply for help from the council via a Discretionary Housing Payment. We hope the man who asked the question will now get his full benefit again.

John’s situation is more difficult. He told us that he had missed his Work Capability Assessment after the date had been rearranged, and had then had his ESA claim closed down. We helped him arrange an appointment with Dundee North Law Centre, and after he gave me back my phone I asked him the details so we could write them down for him, but he had already forgotten them and we had to ring back; proof both of his need for ESA and the difficulties of someone in his situation actually managing to get through the process of qualifying for it.

There was little we could do to help Callum, but his predicament demonstrates yet again how disconnected the system is from anything that might genuinely help people improve their job prospects. He is starting a college course, and because he has changed direction too many times he isn’t eligible for a bursary. But because the course provides full time training he isn’t eligible for any buroo money either.

An additional unreachable problem was provided by the seagull who chose to place itself high up on the building above us with its rear end protruding over the edge…

Frankie told me that it had taken two whiskies for him to be able to leave the house in order to get to the jobcentre. His mental health problems include severe anxiety and agoraphobia, and, although he has been off drugs and clean for three years, he was worried that the stress of compulsory appointments was going to push him back to relying on the drugs again. This was not helped by the likelihood of running into old friends from his drug-taking days at the buroo. But Frankie had been moved from the ESA Support Group to the Work Related Activity Group after his recent Work Capability Assessment, and he had to go to the jobcentre to be given Work Related Activities.

We met him just as we were setting up our stall, and I went in to the jobcentre with him. His advisor was nice enough, but yet again we encountered the absurdity of a system whose bureaucratic rules seem to be ever further divorced from what they are purportedly supposed to be for. She listened as Frankie explained his particular difficulties – there is never any acknowledgment that expecting people to spell out their problems in an open plan office is inappropriate – and she then suggested that he could go to his local peer-supported job club, where they would help identify his needs and improve his skills. She was suggesting this, she explained, because she thought he would find it helpful, but since it was entirely voluntary it couldn’t count as official ‘steps’ on his ‘journey back to work’. So – although no-one on ESA can be made to apply for jobs, and Frankie is a long way from being able to work – she was requiring him to prepare a CV and sign onto Universal Jobmatch, the DWP’s jobsearch website. This, she told him, was compulsory, though not sanctionable, but we wouldn’t suggest he put that to the test.

We urged Frankie to get in contact with Welfare Rights and put in a Mandatory Reconsideration asking to be moved back to the Support Group, but meanwhile he will have to go through this box-ticking rigmarole. We also emphasised to his jobcentre advisor that he should be contacted by phone whenever possible, and he was told that he doesn’t have to go back to the jobcentre for another three months. And we made sure that the advisor crossed out the email address that she had asked him to give her, so Frankie can, at least, open his email without fear of being chased by the jobcentre checking up to see if he has completed tasks that no-one seriously engaged with his future would consider remotely helpful.

We can’t stress too strongly that the damage of Westminster’s attack on the benefit system goes much further than  its immediate impacts, and that was sadly evident at this weeks’ stall. If our last two weeks’ stalls were relatively quiet, this one made up for them.

Almost the first person we met had been bumped off ESA, and the subsequent stresses were making his condition worse. This was not helped by the jobcentre having lost a crucial letter so he was waiting for a week’s back payment. We spend a lot of time advising people how to proceed through the minefield of Mandatory Reconsideration, JSA application, doctor’s notes and appeals (see the back of our Know Your Rights Leaflet), but – what is almost as important – we also listen to people and take them seriously, in sharp contrast to how they can be treated inside the buroo.

A woman described the worries and stress, as well as financial difficulties, of losing her sickness benefit after twenty years; and yet another person passed ‘fit for work’– who we advised to see Welfare Rights for debt advice as well as for help with an appeal – told us that the stress of it all was destroying his marriage.

Another woman was receiving ESA, but was suffering major fears over pressure from the jobcentre to look for work that she felt quite unable to cope with. We were able to tell her, to her great relief, that the jobcentre cannot make anyone on ESA apply for a job; but the stress of her situation was causing her to stammer noticeably when she spoke to people outwith her friends and family, although this was not a problem she had had before.

And then there was the young woman with two boys with special needs, and health problems of her own. As a result of bad decisions at medical reassessments, her household income had just dropped by £300 a week. She had taken out a mortgage previously when she had been in work, and now she was at risk of losing her home. Worse, her social worker had observed that her children looked underfed. Meanwhile, she was attempting to help her teenage friend who had grown up in care, but whose aftercare support seemed to leave a lot to be desired. The friend was pregnant and had been left with nothing to live on as a result of an eight- week sanction. Her treatment under this system will already be affecting the next generation. These two women were getting help from a dedicated volunteer, but the so-called welfare system was letting them down so badly in so many ways that we suggested that they take their cases to their MP or MSP.

All these knock on effects will have major financial as well as human costs, as they put extra stresses on health and social services. It can sound callous to put it that way, but the point needs to be made because it undermines the argument that governments can’t afford to put more money into benefits. In fact, even before looking at the ethical case, they can’t afford not to invest in decent social security.

As the picture shows, we also provide an occasional dog-sitting service. Thanks to Gary, Tony, Norma, Chris, Duncan and Jonathan for help with recent stalls – and especially Dave, SUWN stalwart, who is currently in hospital after succumbing to a heart attack, but who we expect to welcome back at his post as soon as he is well again.

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Yesterday I gave a talk about our SUWN book as part of Edinburgh Book Fringe. Here is the window of the Lighthouse Bookshop (formerly Word Power) ready for the event. – Sarah