The RNIB, benefit sanctions and the DWP

Whilst many of my blind friends have their views in terms of the RNIB I do think this issue needs bringing to that attention. I personally have no problem with them as it stands and to get nit picky with an organisation that is looking to put sight loss on the mainstream is foolish at best and stupid at worse. In the guardian today a RNIB spokese person had the following article published which I felt worth sharing for all. “Charity considering dozens of cases against department relating to their failure to send out benefits letters in braille or large print • • The Guardian, Wednesday 19 February 2014 20.29 GMT The RNIB said one claimant was forced to take out payday loans to feed himself after DWP advisors stopped his ESA and housing benefit. Photograph: Chris Ison/PA The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) is threatening the Department of Work and Pensions with court action for suspending the benefits of a blind man after he missed appointments which he was only informed about through letters he was not able to read. The RNIB has prepared five legal cases against the DWP and said it was looking into a further 50, which relate to the department's failure to send out benefits letters in braille or large print format . In a number of cases, the DWP suspended recipient's benefits leaving them in desperate circumstances, the RNIB said. The charity's intervention emerged as the DWP published figures showing the total number of sanctions against benefit claimants in the year to September 2013 was 897,690, the highest figure for any 12-month period since jobseeker's allowance (JSA) was introduced in 1996. The figures published by the Department for Work and Pensions cover employment support allowance (ESA) and JSA. The figures published yesterday also showed that independent tribunals were upholding nine out of 10 appeals against the DWP. Before the coalition, the number of successful tribunal appeals in any 12-month period was well under 2,000. It has risen to more than 14,000. The RNIB said one claimant – a blind man in his 30s who only wanted to be named as Robert – was forced to take out payday loans to feed himself after DWP advisors stopped his ESA and housing benefit on numerous occasions over a two-year period. After having worked most of his adult life, the man from Essex began receiving ESA in October 2011 and asked the DWP to send him communications in braille. But discrimination lawyer Samantha Fothergill who is representing Robert in the county court for full financial damages and injury over his benefit suspension, said he was only ever sent regular print letters which demanded further information and his attendance at appointments. The deadlines for the DWP's demands lapsed before Robert could get outside help to read the correspondence and his benefit payments were stopped. "His benefits got suspended but the letters also telling him they were suspended weren't accessible to him. So he didn't know. The first he heard about it was when his direct debits from his bank account stopped getting paid." Racking up bank charges, and extra payments, Robert was eventually forced to take out a payday loan at a steep interest rate to pay for food. Fothergill said he eventually received backdated payments plus a consolatory payment of £50 but remains "very angry". "We get these complaints all the time," said. She added that the DWP's system for sending out accessible information was "appalling" and "not fit for purpose". The DWP were "making blanket decisions" to sanction people rather than looking at their individual circumstances. The DWP said it could not comment on individual cases but that forms were available in braille or large print and that advisers were "on hand to help". "Anyone who has their benefits suspended should contact us and can, if necessary, appeal," the spokesperson added. The RNIB's threat of legal action comes as Archbishop Nichols, the most senior Catholic in England and Wales, said the Coalition's benefits system was becoming increasingly "punitive" and was leaving people destitute. Responding in the Telegraph on Wednesday, David Cameron rebuffed the criticisms saying that benefit reforms introduced by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, were part of a "moral mission". The total number of JSA sanctions in the year to 30 September 2013 was 874,850, the highest since the payment was introduced in 1996. It compares with 500,000 in the year to 30 April 2010, the last month of the previous Labour government. In the year to 30 September 2013, there were also 22,840 sanctions imposed on claimants of ESA – the chief benefit for the sick and disabled – in the work-related activity group. This is the highest for any 12-month period since sanctions were introduced for claimants in October 2008. The figures were taken from the latest quarterly set of sanctions totals published by the DWP. Ministers have conceded the issue needs addressing by setting up an independent inquiry into how benefit sanctions are communicated to claimants. Critics claim the DWP is operating a culture of fear with jobcentre staff given implicit targets to sanction claimants. The large numbers come before the government introduces tougher rules that will require claimants to do more to prove they are actively seeking work. The success rate of those sanctioned claimants who take their cases to an independent tribunal ran at 20% or less under the previous Labour government. Under the coalition, it has risen dramatically to 87% in the 3 months to 30 September 2013. Duncan Smith said: "This government has always been clear that, in return for claiming unemployment benefits, jobseekers have a responsibility to do everything they can to get back into work. Research by the Disability Benefits Consortium, the RNIB said, showed an increasing number of disabled people are becoming reliant on food banks as a result of sanctioning policies. Steve Winyard, RNIB's head of campaigns and policy, said that thousands of disabled people were losing payments as a result of sanctions, and that included many blind and partially sighted people. "Too often DWP and its agencies are not providing people with the information on what they need to do to receive benefits in accessible formats, like braille or large print. RNIB has won cases against DWP for these very failures. But sanctions have led to blind and partially sighted people being forced to rely on food banks whilst they wait for the government to correct its own mistakes," Winyard said. “

Iain Duncan Smith, what kind of man is he?

I’ve been shocked but not surprised by the BBC’s latest show of “we pay your benefits” carefully depicting benefit claimants and trying to push the government’s propaganda and ideology and it seems to be working as far as I can tell. Even in today’s Guardian IDS as some people have called him is claiming he is very pleased with his work on welfare and says we must do more though. “This government has embarked on one of the most aggressive programmes of welfare reform Britain has ever seen, and we already have a proud record of achievement. There is no doubt that changes to the welfare state are desperately needed. Our reforms will put an end to people being left on sickness benefits year after year; they will eradicate the trap that has left so many better off on benefits than in work; and they will ensure the benefits bill is sustainable over the longer term. Questions have been raised about whether the dramatic pace of our reforms is too difficult to implement. But these doubts ignore my department's proven track record of delivering change and show a lack of ambition from the people raising them. Look at what has already been achieved.” He may see it as a achivement in hammering the poor but I do not see it this way at this most brutal attack on the poorest in society in a generation. As Laurie Penny who I’m not always a fan of in her piece in the New Statesman today wrote “The camera may not lie but sometimes it tells truths you weren’t expecting. As the government’s flagship benefits cap is rolled out across the nation, amid protests from homelessness charities, women’s rights groups and food banks already overwhelmed by demand, the BBC is devoting hours of its prime-time schedule to pitting the underpaid against the unemployed. The spectacle of one single mother telling another in the tin-can aisle at the supermarket that she’s greedy because she wants her kids to have a hot meal says a great deal about modern Britain. It tells us whose suffering matters and whose children will never have their dinner dissected for our scorn on national television. The BBC1 programme Nick and Margaret: We All Pay Your Benefits (11 and 18 July, 9pm), echoing the rhetoric of the Department for Work and Pensions, pits “taxpayers” against “shirkers” and asks how we can “make work pay”. Of these gristly little semantic nuggets of state propaganda, “making work pay” is the most noxious – a mantra that’s incanted by every jobsworth Tory in every debate, in line with the logic that if one repeats a lie for long enough it will function as truth. Taking away benefits will not “make work pay”. The reason why work doesn’t pay is not that benefits are too high. It is that wages are too low. The latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show that, with the rising cost of living, there have been 40 consecutive months of contraction in real wages in the UK. In many occupations, the basic pay is too low to cover rent, food and bills, especially in London and the south-east, where housing costs are out of control. This is why a large proportion of housing benefit is paid on behalf of those who are in work, straight into the pockets of private landlords. Then there’s “the taxpayer”, a phrase that is deliberately misused to imply that only those in waged work pay taxes. Everybody who buys a warm Cornish pasty puts pennies into the Treasury. Drawing an arbitrary distinction between “taxpayers” and “people on benefits” implies that those who rely on state support are taking money directly out of the pockets of workers, when they are being supported by a system to which we all contribute, which is there to help all of us should we find ourselves ill or unemployed. The anxiety to separate the interests of “taxpayers” from those of the unemployed falsely suggests that unemployment benefits are now the main drain on the state. Despite savage welfare cuts, state spending on unemployment remains high because unemployment remains high, for the simple reason that one cannot “incentivise” people into jobs that aren’t there. A far higher proportion of state spending goes on subsidising tax cuts for multinational corporations and arms dealers, maintaining our nuclear weapons programme and having a military presence abroad. “Taxpayers”, though, are not being invited into the homes of devastated Afghan families, taken on tours of the Trident base or shown around the mansions of offshore millionaires and asked to make judgements about how their taxes are being spent. The idea is preposterous. Poor people are supposed to make moral judgements about other poor people only. We can afford to offer Vodafone billions in tax breaks but God forbid some kids in Ipswich get a second-hand PlayStation. “