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DWP still as appalling as it's possible to be

Started by Pingers, February 25, 2020, 04:56:30 PM

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Buelligan

Quote from: Sony Walkman Prophecies on February 26, 2020, 02:03:37 PM
I'm half-Welsh. Chill out. Not everything is part of a wider move in some grand hegemonic proletarian struggle.

Being half-Welsh excuses what?


Cerys

Accidentally spitting on people when attempting to say 'ch' and 'll' correctly.

Blumf

It get's better!![nb]For certain large negative values of 'better'[/nb]

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/dwp-benefit-death-suicide-reports-cover-ups-government-conservatives-a9359606.html
QuoteThe Department for Work and Pensions has been accused of "a cover-up" after destroying reports into suicides linked to benefits being stopped.

Around 50 reviews into deaths following the loss of social security payments before 2015 have been shredded, officials have admitted – blaming data protection laws.

However, the data watchdog has said there was no requirement to destroy the reports by any particular date and that a "public interest" exemption could have been used.

The sister of Tim Salter, a benefit claimant who killed himself soon after his benefits were stopped in 2013, accused the DWP of "trying to cover up" what was happening to "vulnerable" people.

...

This week, Labour MP Debbie Abrahams fought back tears in the Commons as she read out a list of 24 people who died after problems with their benefits.

On 69 reviews since 2015, she told ministers: "This is just the tip of the iceberg. We do not even know the actual number of people who have taken their own life as a result of what they went through."

Paul Calf

They know. They don't care.

Eugenics enthusiasts in government. This is the far right.

Janie Jones

Quote from: Janie Jones on February 25, 2020, 10:08:54 PM
Fucking hell, that's harsh. They've just taken £300 a month off my quiz-team friend but he was prepared for that because he is physically fit and well. He has severe and enduring mental illness and his psychiatrist had warned him he hadn't had a single long-term patient who had avoided losing some or all of their entitlement.  I had thought they were much less harsh on people with degenerative physical disabilities but that's awful, Cerys.

My friend texted me matter-of-factly when he got the letter last week, saying he's not going to appeal, he's just going to kill himself, but not until after his mum dies because it would upset her too much.

Just to update this: my friend lost disability benefit and as a result of that, a further £67 off his ESA. In total he lost £500 a month. The good news is he's asked for a mandatory check, and he's decided to appeal after that. This is due to the replies in this thread, so thank you.

His assessment emphasises his physical fitness and good social skills but I'd like to see anyone who doesn't understand hidden disability give him a job, if he's such a catch. For one thing, his meds absolutely fuck him up, he sleeps 12 hours a day minimum and he's twitchy and sweaty. For another he's often paranoid, intense and unsettling with his delusional word-salad soliloquys and responses to unseen stimuli.  I suppose the argument would be, 'None of this precludes him from getting a job in a warehouse or filling shelves at Aldi,' but it does make him unreliable and difficult to work alongside.

It's true that his previous package of benefits on Higher DLA was pretty generous; you'd have to be earning around £25K to have as much cash in hand as he had to spunk on the fruities and spend in pubs and cafes. I see why people might think that's not fair. But what the DWP have done to him now is brutal and he and his elderly mum are eaten up with worry.

Johnny Yesno

DWP says it is 'shocked' by its own disability tribunal record

QuoteBBC Panorama found the DWP lost 17 of 134 claims of discrimination against its own disabled workers from 2016-19.

And it paid out at least £950,000 in both tribunal payments and out-of-court settlements in that time.

QuoteThe DWP has lost 12.5% percent of its employment tribunal cases for disability between 2016 and 2019.

On average over this period 3% of disability discrimination claims were lost by employers.

Inspector Norse

I had the pleasure of meeting the DWP at a charity do once. It was surprisingly down to earth and very funny.

By chance I came upon contact details for someone called the 'independent case examiner' who nevertheless despite the 'independence' has a dwp email address. I'd never heard of this post so I wrote a letter about a misconduct matter (separate from what I've spoken about elsewhere - I am a ley line of misconduct in officialdom it seems) and have now been told there is an internal procedure to go through first. Again the address I've been given for that is something I've never seen and I've been quite busy with this sort of thing on and off for many years.

The police began an investigation twice after I reported what I did, which both stalled apparently due to lack of records at the DWP past a certain point in time. I was angry enough to overcome despondancy following the first end of the investigation and go back insistent on more effort. My current complaint to the DWP will be about what happened and the DWP's record-keeping, that has let a person in a position of responsibility dealing with vulnerable people escape consequences. I'm thinking of using blogging and social media and possibly picketing the assessment centre if these two procedures don't get results of some kind and I'm making a point of saying that in my letter for the internal procedure. While it's separate from the other situation I've written vaguely about elsewhere here, my anger about four years of shocking treatment has put me in a zero tolerance frame of mind and fueled my pursuit of this DWP situation. It's believable to me that the records are genuinely lost but just as believable that the investigation instead led to records being destroyed. What happened to me is very likely the tip of the iceberg, opportunistic doctors being familiar enough to the public even in environments where not everyone is vulnerable. I've sent letters to Guardian journalists about the three strands of my situation while I'm still able but no one replies. Letters went to seven local journalists last week over an issue an actual journalist would be interested in, but presumably these seven names just take dictation from a tuppenny a'penny editor type with a tash and don't really have the building blocks of autonomy, a soul etc.

After there's been a disaster like someone starving or doing themselves in many journalists get copy out of writing that up and saying, 'mistakes were made, warning signs were not heeded' but it does seem that none of them would lift a finger if they had the right information in time. Much systemic conduct in the UK goes on without any scrutiny from the kind of people you'd think would be all over it.