Something for Nothing

‘Something for Nothing’ 

Community Health Meeting (Maryhill)

The topic of this short presentation is welfare benefits and how they affect members of my community. Before I start, I’d like to briefly describe the famous (Marxist) principle: 

From each according to his ability

To each according to his need

This is the foundational proposition the welfare state in the UK was built upon. So, it doesn’t work like a private pension, where you get back what you’ve paid in. It fact it means some people will always get back more than they pay in and vice versa because some of us will be born chronically ill, yet be cared for from cradle to grave despite never being able to work. Others will work and pay taxes for decades, then die before retiring, so they never get a penny of their contributions back by way of a pension. The childless still pay for schools; people whose house has never burned down still pay for the fire service and those who’ve never been the victim of a crime still pay for the police.

Any competent welfare state is a collective endeavour where everyone who is able to pay does so and where those contributions are used for the benefit of all.  Societies can progress when they provide a safety net allowing everyone to contribute because it elevates them above the waterline where any fears of absolute penury are eliminated.  Of course the super-wealthy will always be protected from the misfortunes of homelessness or financial hardship, but life is precarious and at any time many in the middle can find themselves in adverse circumstances.  One day it could your your house burning, your child's school with no books, or your health that needs  professional attention.  

For the last 7 years I’ve been a welfare adviser for Citizens Advice Bureau (CAB) a job I’ve always enjoyed. For the last 3 of those years, I’ve worked in one of the most deprived areas of Scotland, Clydebank in West Dunbartonshire and so that area has been my adopted community. But recently, I decided to quit because I found my clients’ experiences of the UK’s benefit system were impacting severely not just on their health and wellbeing but on my own, and as far as I could tell, things were about to get a whole lot worse and I could see no way that Scotland could alter that prognosis.   

During my time at CAB, David Cameron was Prime Minister and his whole political team were at pains to tell the country that we were all living in a ‘something for nothing’ (SfN) society. The same mantra was repeated over and over again throughout his five year term, so that even the opposition, in the form of Johann Lamont declared that: 

“Scotland cannot continue to be the only SfN country in the world”. 

Getting something for nothing usually means obtaining it fraudulently or in exchange for no personal input, no effort and at no detriment to yourself. In the local vernacular it’s to be a scrounger, a skiver or work-shy. But this SfN phrase was born of conservative ideology and allowed to morph into a national philosophy as its passed through the hands of mainstream media outlets, those loyal and willing midwives of the British state.  So, just in case we don’t know who these scroungers are, we get TV programmes and newspaper stories devoted to them. They’re the ones who live in social housing, have lots of kids, never worked a day in their lives, and those who lead the life of Riley, all they have to do is to hold their hand out for free money. 

But hearing this kind of talk from politicians and the media didn’t quite reconcile with the testimonies I heard from my CAB clients about their ‘benefits’ and the hoops they had to jump through to get them and that bothered me. So, today I’d like to turn this SfN phrase into a question. Before doing so, I’d like to adjust your perspective by describing the other side of it, the side I’ve become familiar with, the one the caused me to quit my job, and that side is the first hand experiences of my clients.

First, the UK Treasury estimates that the amount they lost last year due to benefit fraud was around £1.4 billion with hundreds of employees directed to hound the perpetrators. Whereas, the amount the lost due to tax evasion was estimated around £6 billion with a handful of employees devoted to recuperating this bigger financial loss. There are of course people who do try to take advantage of the social security system, and there always will be, (eg I'm sure a few of my clients now and again had  additional sources of income), but compared to other financial loses, benefit fraud is minimal.  

Last year our local CAB produced a report on how welfare sanctions were impacting the people of Clydebank. We found that out of the hundreds of clients sanctioned by the Job Centre and left with no financial means of support, not one of these people was sanctioned for refusing a job. So, labelling all claimants as work-shy is untrue. Plus, in all my time at CAB I never once encountered a client who would prefer a lifetime of pleading for benefits if they had an alternative. 

In December last year, the DWP published figures that showed the number of appeals challenging decisions about a person’s fitness to work had dropped by 50%. I can say that even for experienced welfare advisors, these appeals are complicated and demeaning processes, so it was no surprise to me that so many of the vulnerable people who came to CAB felt they would rather give up and rely on friends and family to feed and house them (with the high risk of starvation and homelessness) as they plod through these soul-destroying appeals. 

Last month, the government’s own Work and Pensions Select Committee announced that 40 people had committed suicide because of problems with welfare payments in the last few years - I suspect the actual figure is much higher.  The reason for my thinking is that the first time a client told me they were going home to think of ways to kill themselves, I was shocked.  By the time I left the job, such comments had become commonplace.

The ‘something’ in the ‘something for nothing’ that Jobseekers get is around £70 a week and for those too sick to work, their benefit is slightly more than £100, so not a lot to live on. But, to get these amounts let’s consider the ‘nothing’ they’re said to do, in order to get it. 

Any kind of benefit requires a substantial amount of form-filling. And claimants from areas of high deprivation usually have low level literacy skills. That means completing official documents can be a daunting task, and when your livelihood depends on getting them right, your anxiety levels get ratcheted up to nerve-wracking. Then when you’ve made your best effort, handed the forms in personally, only to be told a week later that your claim has been ‘lost’’ - and often more than once, that’s when your already fragile mental health can take a further knock and you can fall into a state of despair and depression or frustration and anger (for which you will get an immediate sanction imposed). But, apparently this is ‘nothing’. 

When you have no computer or broadband and minimal computing skills, yet you’re obliged to go online every day to look for work, and a lot of the local library computers are ‘not working’, what then? And, when you do get online but you’re not sure about what you’re doing and there’s no one around to help, but you have a deadline to meet or a sanction is waiting - again, this plays havoc with already poor mental health. But that too is nothing. 

When you have to walk all the way to the nearest food bank and all they have left is a large potato, and you’re too embarrassed to refuse it, but you know you’ve got no means of cooking this because you’ve got no money for the expensive pre-payment meter. So, you thank them and take the potato and go hungry again, getting desperate thinking what you or your kids are going to eat. 

When you’re an older widower who’s still got a foreign accent from your former country and the young people at the Job Centre are raising their voice to you while you’re trying to explain you were given an appointment for this time, you’re even holding up the card their co-worker gave you, but they’re not looking at it, they’re just shouting at you that you need to leave there, now. This scene is taking place in full view of everyone yet no one intervenes, and you’re fighting to hold back tears, tears of fear and shame at what you (a former decorated Maths teacher) have been reduced to, but so what, that’s nothing. 

The DWP often use the graphic of the Social Model of Health that shows the main determinants for living a healthy life. One of the primary aspects of this is the socio-economic environment of the individual. So one has to wonder whether these socio-economic benefit-seeking experiences my clients endure improve or reduce their chance of good health. 

To be awarded sick or disability benefits means running a different gauntlet where the destination that awaits also holds misery and anguish, it’s just the route that changes.  Like the middle-aged man on disability who needs to go to hospital for kidney dialysis 3 times a week, yet the assessment panel have found him ‘fit for work’ which makes him start to panic so that as well as his physical disability, he now can’t sleep for worrying about how his dwindling finances will allow him to travel to the Job Centre. His cash allowance for that week has been used up, and he has no other means of support and can’t get anybody on the phone that will talk to him to relieve a bit of his distress.

And the woman in her early 60s, who has multiple health conditions and has long since been crippled with arthritis in her hands and feet, so that she can only walk with the help of two sticks and lives in chronic pain. She’s gone through the embarrassment of having her personal and private health conditions exposed to a panel of non-medical strangers and for non-medical purposes, and at the end they’ve awarded her zero points, so she’s now expected to look for work or lose her benefits, and to say she’s terrified, is an accurate description, so day and night she's now obsessed with thoughts of how to end her life and escape. 

Politicians tell us all these experiences are nothing. Well, maybe they’re nothing to those who have fat salaries to shield them from the harsher realities of life, but I know they’re not nothing to the people of Clydebank who come looking for help. 

For that community to be entitled to a slice of the welfare cake, the ‘something for nothing’ their accused of gobbling up, whether it’s a food handout, a hardship payment, or the bare minimum of funds to survive, they have to be prepared to be humiliated, punished, bullied, lied to, shamed, complete endless complicated forms, use phone lines that are always engaged while dreading their phone minutes will run out, and be prepared to hear the media refer to them as scroungers and worse. And they have to do all this without ever committing even the smallest of errors, or their welfare lifeline will be severed at once. So they live in perpetual fear of starvation or destitution. Many have even given their lives while engaging in an endurance test to get the merest crumbs of welfare support in what we call our civilised society. 

So my question to you today is - is this ‘nothing’? 

June Maxwell

May, 2015