Tory policy on ‘zero hours’: Beggars can’t be choosers

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beggar, benefit, choice, choose, chooser, coach, Conservative, Ed Miliband, employer, esther mcvey, exploit, force, holiday, Job Centre, Jobseeker's Allowance, JSA, Labour, mandate, Mandatory Work Activity, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, national insurance, NI, pay, pension, people, politics, Sheila Gilmore, sick, social security, subsidise, taxpayer, Tories, Tory, UC, Universal Credit, Vox Political, welfare, Work Programme, Workfare, zero hour contract

Isn’t it nice to see some clear blue water emerge between the main political parties on an important issue?

Less than two weeks after Ed Miliband announced that he would tackle the “epidemic” of zero-hours contracts if Labour wins the next general election, the Conservatives have confirmed that Universal Credit – if they can ever get it working – will force jobseekers into those very contracts.

Labour said workers on zero-hours contracts should not be obliged to be available outside contracted hours; be free to work for other employers; have a right to compensation if shifts are cancelled at short notice; have ‘clarity’ from their employer about their employment status, terms and conditions; have the right to request a contract with a ‘minimum amount of work’ after six months, that could only be refused if employers could prove their business could not operate any other way; and have an automatic right to a fixed-hours contract after 12 months with the same employer.

At the time, the Tories said the number of zero-hours contracts had increased under the last Labour government, which had done nothing about it.

This tired excuse has been trotted out far too many times to be taken seriously any more, but it may have led some members of the public to believe that the Tories were distancing themselves from zero-hours contracts as well. They are, after all, supposed to be The Party of More Choice. Perhaps they are, themselves, less than keen on this kind of exploitation.

Not a bit of it!

The Guardian revealed yesterday that conditions will be imposed on the receipt of Universal Credit, meaning that – for the first time ever – jobseekers could lose their benefits if they refuse to take zero-hour jobs – for three months or longer.

Currently, people on Jobseekers’ Allowance are able to refuse such jobs without facing penalties.

The policy change was revealed in a letter from employment minister Esther McVey to Labour MP Sheila Gilmore. She said Job Centre “coaches” would be able to “mandate to zero-hours contracts” – basically forcing them to accept this kind of exploitation by employers.

The DWP has also stated: “We expect claimants to do all they reasonably can to look for and move into paid work. If a claimant turns down a particular vacancy (including zero-hours contract jobs) a sanction may be applied.”

The message from the Conservatives – the Party of More Choice – is clear: Beggars can’t be choosers.

Their chums on the boards of big businesses want more profits, and know the way to get it – employ people on low pay and with no employee benefits. Zero-hours contracts mean you can be made to work fewer hours than you need in order for employers to have to pay National Insurance credits for you. You don’t get sick pay; holiday pay; or a pension. And you’ll probably still be on benefits, meaning the work that you do is subsidised by other hardworking taxpayers, most of whom earn only a little more than you do.

It’s a racket – as bad as workfare/mandatory work activity/the work programme/whatever-they’re-calling-it-today, in which taxpayers subsidise work carried out by jobseekers for participating employers, hugely boosting those firms’ profits while ensuring that the number of people without proper, paid jobs remains high.

Their attitude is that, if you don’t have a job, you are a beggar.

Beggars can’t be choosers.

So they’ll choose what you do, and they – or their boardroom chums – will benefit from it.

If you are a working taxpayer, think about this before casting your vote later this month – and especially before you do so in May 2015: A vote for the Conservative Party means more of your fellow citizens will be prevented from getting proper jobs and becoming contributing members of society by the greedy – and idle – rich.

A vote for the Conservative Party means more of your tax money going to subsidise fat business board members who already have more money than they can ever use.

A vote for the Conservative Party means a better life for them and their friends – and a poorer life for you.

You’d have to be mad to choose that.

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Bullying in Parliament over Universal Credit?

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Angela Eagle, Atos, BBC News, bedroom tax, benefit cap, blame, bully, committee, Conservative, David Cameron, dead, death, die, disciplinary, discipline, Iain Duncan Smith, IDS, intimidate, intimidation, Labour, lie, mandatory, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, Parliament, policies, policy, politics, programme, public, public accounts, returned to unit, Robert Devereaux, RTU, social security, statement, Supreme Court, Tories, Tory, UC, Universal Credit, Vox Political, welfare, work, work and pensions, Workfare

The “bully”: Perhaps Parliament is merely giving Iain Duncan ‘RTU’ Smith enough rope to hang himself, as the saying goes – but when considering the huge list of his misdemeanours, one has to ask how much rope he needs.

Sometimes information becomes public that boggles the mind. It seems Iain Duncan Smith bullied members of the Public Accounts Committee into blaming his permanent secretary, Robert Devereaux, for the failings of Universal Credit.

That’s right – it is alleged that the man who is afraid to reveal how many people have died because of his policies, whose mandatory work schemes have proved less successful than doing nothing, who changed the law after his rules for Workfare were found to be illegal – only for the Supreme Court to rule they were still illegal, whose departmental annual report is now nearly eight months late, who lied to Parliament and the public about the success of his benefit cap and who is afraid to face the Commons Work and Pensions committee to account for himself, has resorted to intimidation because he doesn’t want to take the blame for his latest – or rather, longest-running, catastrophe.

Let’s not even get started on the Bedroom Tax!

The allegation appears in a BBC News report, under a headline that claims David Cameron is supporting the unrepentant Work and Pensions secretary. Does this mean Cameron approves of such ungentlemanly behaviour as bullying? The report states that “Downing Street said the work and pensions secretary was ‘doing exactly the right thing’ with the new scheme.”

Smith has denied claims he tried to “lean on” members of the committee to place the blame on Mr Devereaux, but Labour sources on the committee told BBC News there was a “concerted” effort by Tory members to shift the blame, with extra meetings and discussions over amendments “pointing the finger” at the permanent secretary.

But David Cameron’s official spokesman was vague in his support from the Secretary-in-a-State. Asked if it was proper for a secretary of state to approach members of a select committee ahead of publication of a report, in the way alleged of …Smith, he said: “There are procedures that are in place for the relationship between departments and select committees and that is something the Department for Work and Pensions have been very clear about.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?

Labour’s shadow leader of the Commons, Angela Eagle, has demanded an urgent statement from …Smith: “This morning we learn of a wholly improper attempt to lean on members of an independent select committee of this House by Mr Duncan Smith and his parliamentary team to try to put the blame on the permanent secretary.”

She was wrong.

We don’t need a statement. We need disciplinary procedures.

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PIP policy hitch while Tory boys bitch

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20m, 50m, bastards, BBC, Department, Disability Living Allowance, DLA, DWP, EU, european union, Iain Duncan Smith, Job Centre, Jobseeker's Allowance, John Major, Maastricht, mobility, Pensions, Personal Independence Payment, PIP, returned to unit, RTU, secretary, Sir, social security, spat, UC, unemployment, Univeral Credit, welfare, work, Work Programme

Stumble in the (political) jungle: Who wants to see two Tory clowns drawling weak attempts at wit when their party’s policies are bringing the country to its knees?

Even boxing promoters would have had a hard time talking up the ‘spat’ between the so-called Grey Man and the Quiet Man of politics.

The hyperbolic talents of Don King would be hard-pressed to hide the fact that what Sir John Major and Iain Duncan Smith need, more than anything else, is a sense of proportion. People are suffering, and all they do is squabble.

It was Major who opened hostilities. In a speech on Tuesday, he questioned Smith’s attack on the British social security system, saying: “I truly wish him well. But it is enormously complicated and unless he is very lucky, which he may not be, or a genius, which – the last time I looked – was unproven, he may get some of it wrong.”

We were to see evidence of this very quickly, as the government has been forced to announce that its plan to shift people from Disability Living Allowance to the new Personal Independence Payment has been delayed. Instead of rolling out across the whole of England, Scotland and Wales next week, it will now happen in only certain areas.

If their condition changes, claimants in Wales, the East and West Midlands and East Anglia will transfer to PIP. Otherwise, everybody will remain on DLA.

The announcement echoes one earlier this year, in which Smith’s much-trumpeted Universal Credit rolled it, not so much with a bang as with a moan – in just one pilot area, where only the simplest cases were handled.

For those affected, this can only be a relief. PIP will be payable to fewer people than DLA because it has tougher requirements. For example, people used to qualify for the mobility component if they could not walk 50m; under the new benefit this has been cut to 20m for no good reason.

Sir John’s remarks revived hostilities between himself and the Work and Pensions Secretary that have been dormant since the early 1990s, when Smith was one of a group of Tory rebels who campaigned against the decision to sign the Maastricht Treaty for European Union integration.

In an interview at the time, Sir John described his opponents as “bastards”. He repeated the phrase in Tuesday’s speech, admitting its use was “unacceptable” – but then he added that his “only excuse was that it was true”.

Smith, nicknamed ‘Returned To Unit’ (or ‘RTU’ for short) by this site in recognition of his many failings and unanswered questions about his army career, responded by telling the Evening Standard: “I just say I think we should all look at each other and be a little more pleasant.”

Is that so, Iain?

May we take it that this is a new policy, and you will be telling staff in all your Job Centres and every DWP office, up and down the country, that they should be more pleasant to the people who have to use the excuse for a service that they provide?

Are they now to stop trying to bully people off Jobseekers’ Allowance any way they can, and to actually start treating their fellow citizens with the respect that has been missing from those places since you took over as Work and Pensions Secretary?

Perhaps the private Work Programme providers you pay to take these people off the unemployment statistics will start actually trying to help our unemployed people, instead of putting them on pointless courses in things they know already and pocketing the lion’s share of the cash?

No?

Well, that’s no surprise to anyone. You don’t listen to anything but your own beliefs. It’s long past time you grew up and admitted the failures inherent in Universal Credit, PIP and all your other reforms. In other words, get your priorities right.

And Sir John? That goes for you, too. You have no right to the moral high ground when your government set the scene for many of the problems we have today.

The verdict: Universal Credit is a Governmental Disgrace

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allowance, Amyas Morse, benefit, benefits, budgeting loan, child, Coalition, computer, Conservative, Department, Department for Work and Pensions, Director General, DWP, employment, government, housing benefit, Howard Shiplee, Iain Duncan Smith, income based, Income Support, IT, Jobseeker's Allowance, Labour, Liam Byrne, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, NAO, national audit office, Pensions, people, politics, returned to unit, RTU, social security, support, tax credits, Tories, Tory, UC, unemployment, Universal Credit, Vox Political, welfare, work, working

Can the DWP do anything right? Universal Credit joins the Work Programme and the murderous administration of Employment and Support Allowance on the list of Iain Duncan Smith’s failures.

The National Audit Office has published its ‘early progress’ report on Iain Duncan Smith’s flagship Universal Credit scheme – and it is damning.

The report states that, after years of development in which £425 million was spent on the scheme, the Department for Work and Pensions does not even have a detailed view of how Universal Credit is supposed to work.

I should just stop there and spend the rest of this article discussing that one piece of information. After months and years of listening to ‘RTU’ ranting about how Universal Credit was going to be a revolution in benefit claims, we now know that he does not know – and never bothered to work out – how his revolution was going to be delivered!

Nor does Howard Shiplee, the ‘director general’ who has been talking it up on the media over the last few days.

Universal Credit is an attempt to “simplify” six major areas of social security into one streamlined payment system. They are: Income Support, income-based Jobseekers Allowance, income-based Employment and Support Allowance, tax credits (child and working), housing benefit and budgeting loans.

However: “Poor control and decision-making undermined confidence in the programme and contributed to a lack of progress,” the report states. This is directly attributable to the Secretary of State – it is his failure.

The report – and we should remember that this is from an organisation concerned with whether the government is spending our money wisely – concluded that the DWP has not achieved value for money.

The department was over-ambitious in both the timetable and scope of the programme, the report states. This is interesting in itself. How can its scope be “ambitious” if nobody even knew how it was supposed to work?

According to the NAO: “The Department took risks to try to meet the short timescale and used a new project management approach which it had never before used on a programme of this size and complexity. It was unable to explain how it originally decided on its ambitious plans or evaluated their feasibility.” In other words, from its employees right up to its ministers and Secretary of State, the DWP could not justify the risks it took with taxpayers’ money and never bothered to investigate the likelihood of failure.

“Given the tight timescale, unfamiliar project management approach and lack of a detailed plan, it was critical that the Department should have good progress information and effective controls. In practice the Department did not have any adequate measures of progress.”

The report singles out for particularly strong criticism the computer system intended to run the new benefit. “The Department is not yet able to assess the value of the systems it spent over £300 million to develop… Over 70 per cent of the £425 million spent to date has been on IT systems,” it states.

Then it says, “The Department, however, has already written off £34 million of its new IT systems and does not yet know if they will support national roll-out.” So the systems are not – to use a favourite DWP phrase – “fit for work”.

In fact, some parts don’t work on any level at all: “For instance, the current IT system lacks a component to identify potentially fraudulent claims so that the Department has to rely on multiple manual checks on claims and payments.” Meaning: In the single Job Centre where UC has been introduced, employees have been working out claims on paper.

“Such checks will not be feasible or adequate once the system is running nationally.” It seems amazing, but Iain Duncan Smith probably needed to see that, written down in black and white, or he might never have considered the possibility.

Problems with the IT system have delayed the national roll-out of the programme (and for that, considering all of the above, we should all breathe a long-drawn-out sigh of relief). “In early 2013, the Department was forced to stop work on its plans for national roll-out and reassess its options for the future… The Department will not introduce Universal Credit for all new claims nationally in October 2013 as planned, and is now reconsidering its plans for full roll-out.

“Instead, it will extend the pilots to six more sites with these new sites taking on only the simplest claims. Delays to the roll-out will reduce the expected benefits of reform and – if the Department maintains a 2017 completion date – increase risks by requiring the rapid migration of a large volume of claimants.”

The DWP intends to spend £2.4 billion on Universal Credit up to April 2023. To put that in perspective, that’s twice as much as the government loses on all benefit fraud – not just those being bundled together here – every year. And this will “increase risks”.

The spending watchdog found that the DWP took some action at the end of 2012 to resolve problems, but was unable to address the underlying issues effectively.

“The programme suffered from weak management, ineffective control and poor governance,” said Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office.

Despite all this, the report incredibly states that “the programme still has potential to create significant benefits for society, but the Department must scale back its delivery ambition and set out realistic plans”.

Liam Byrne will no doubt seize this as an opportunity, yet again, to offer Labour’s help to find a way forward and bring Universal Credit back on track. He should be discouraged from doing so. This ‘flagship’ hasn’t so much sailed as sunk.

Universal Credit is a FAILURE.

It should be SCRAPPED – before that idiot Smith wastes any more of our money on it.

Living under the threat of welfare ‘reform’

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Atos, bedroom tax, benefit, benefits, blogger, carer, Coalition, Conservative, council, council tax, debt, Department for Work and Pensions, Department of Work and Pensions, disability, Disability Living Allowance, disabled, DLA, DWP, economy, Employment and Support Allowance, ESA, government, Grant Shapps, Liberal, Liberal Democrat, local authority, member, Mike Sivier, mikesivier, MP, Parliament, pension, people, Pickles Poll Tax, politician, politics, Reform, tax, Tories, Tory, UC, Universal Credit, Vox Political, welfare

If I could force Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs, politicians, and supporters to read what follows, I would. It was sent to me today in response to my article, Bedroom tax will put people on streets while homes go empty, and details exactly what the author – a fellow blogger going by the monicker Clarebelz – expects will happen to her after the bedroom tax and other so-called welfare ‘reforms’ come into effect, starting in April 2013.

This is not fiction.

It is what this person expects to become her reality.

While you are reading it, please ask yourself: Do you want to live in a society that treats its most vulnerable like this?

“I went shopping today to my local town with my carers. I only go a couple of times a year to get necessary things that are not available either online or at my local village. I had to pay for these things with a credit card.

“As the deadline for paying bedroom tax and council tax draws near I, along with others commenting here and elsewhere, are feeling ever more hopeless about the whole situation. I just wanted to go to bed when I came back, unable to face another day worrying about how the hell I’m going to manage when I’m hardly managing now.

“I pay back out of my DLA and ESA to the local authority £3,000 per year (it’s a myth that people with no assets pay nothing for care). My care plan has just been reduced by 25 per cent, the LA justifying that by saying, “We don’t fund that activity/job anymore”. Initially they wanted to cut it by 75 per cent, but I took advice and fought it. The activities/jobs that they won’t fund I still need, which will cost in the region of another £1,500 per year. When I next have a financial review, if they don’t reduce my contribution to take account of this, and I’m forced to pay rent and council tax, this will wipe out my food budget.

“And, if I lose out under Universal Credit, then I may as well just end it all because I am not going to be forced to go cap in hand to family or friends to survive; I couldn’t stand the humiliation after all I’ve been through both personally and physically, and such a situation makes you very vulnerable to abuse. A friend of mine had her DLA taken away and because of her mortgage costs she was left with £12 per week to live on (she daren’t apply for a flat anywhere as most are in horrible blocks that are drug/thief ridden). Her so-called friends offered help willingly at first, then they started bullying her and taking advantage of her. She got her DLA back, but she is still in a terrible psychological state because of the way people treated her. No thank you: I’m not going to go through that!

“Prior to complete destitution, I intend to demonstrate/beg on my street. I’m going to make large boards with my message on it, and get my carers to wheel me onto the main road to sit all day if necessary, so that the whole community can see what the government are doing to the vulnerable. I refuse to be hidden away like I was many times before when I used to go days or even a week at a time without heat, light or food. And whole winters without heat. No, this time I’m going to make sure that everyone knows. I’ll have nothing left to lose.

“This disgusting, despicable government has stolen the last two years from me through fear. I’ve just started painting again and doing other creative things that I used to, but it’s really hard to feel inspired when you’ve had the life sucked out of you, especially when your illness leaves you with little life left to do anything.

“I say that I’ll end it all, but really, we need to stick around so that the public can see our predicament. It’s just like others, it all feels so hopeless.

“By the way, my care plan assessor inquired about the bedroom tax for me from someone she knows at the DWP. The assessor said that the bedroom tax hits those of working age, which I knew anyway, but – interestingly – she said that the DWP person told her that the government has informed them that, once they have dealt with housing benefit in relation to people of working age, they will then move on to apply the same sanctions to pensioners, because many larger homes belong to pensioners who won’t move.

“So yet again the government are liars. Two years ago this autumn, Grant Shapps stated in a TV interview that the new rules would not apply to existing tenants; obviously not true. You can’t believe a word they say.

“Well, sorry to go on and on, but it’s been one of those days when I feel like, “What’s the point?” My home doesn’t even feel like my home any more; I have recurrent nightmares of my clothes and all my belongings strewn in the street, and my coming home to find a family have just moved in.

“It’s a horrible feeling.”