With no funding and only a few placards, a group of sick, disabled, and unemployed campaigners is about to take on a giant government department – and with it, perhaps the austerity era’s most underhand cut yet. You can find Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group (KUWG) in north-west London, but theirs is a story that could easily be repeated anywhere, from Derby to Glasgow to Bristol. In four months’ time, Kilburn’s jobcentre is due to shut its doors as part of a nationwide overhaul by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

While telling struggling families that finding work is the solution to their problems, the Conservatives are about to trigger a mass exodus of jobcentres from the high street. In October, the government confirmed plans to close a total of 87 jobcentres across the UK over the next seven months. Fifteen shut their doors in August and September. Five will close in Glasgow alone. By this time next year, more than one in 10 jobcentres around the UK will have been axed.

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For a Conservative minister in Westminster, that may seem barely an inconvenience. But anyone who has ever had a spell of bad luck with employment knows that having to find bus fare to get to the jobcentre can lead to anxiety and skipping meals.

I speak to CJ, one of the founding members of KUWG, five days ahead of their planned demonstration outside the DWP headquarters, in central London. The 58-year-old is on out-of-work sickness benefits himself – he’s currently on the waiting list for a spinal operation – but when he was well enough to look for work, Kilburn was his local jobcentre.

CJ knows first hand that when you’re on a subsistence income or battling health problems, having to get yourself across the city to sign on or do a job search is, in his words, just an extra burden: “the people who are on the dole have got enough problems.”

Not only is Kilburn’s jobcentre due to close in the next few months, but so is the neighbouring one in Neasden. This will mean Kilburn residents will be expected to transfer to Wembley – almost 10 miles away – and others to Kentish Town. The DWP tells me that if a person would like to use a jobcentre other than these two “they can request to do so”, and that it expects jobseekers to travel up to 90 minutes when looking for work.

“Say you had to get to the jobcentre at 9.30am. How much will that cost on a bus? Or if you can’t walk well?” CJ asks. “I don’t know how you do it.”

The DWP says “vulnerable people” will continue to receive home visits and postal claims “where it is appropriate to do so” but anyone who’s ever set foot in a jobcentre knows sickness rarely gets an exemption. CJ keeps coming back to the thought of these residents being sent miles to another jobcentre. “These are people on painkillers. Walking around on crutches. Or who are confused with brain fog or who have depression,” he says. “It’s disgusting.”

Quick guide What is universal credit and what are the problems? Show Hide What is universal credit? Universal credit (UC) is the supposed flagship reform of the benefits system, rolling together six benefits into one, online-only system. The theoretical aim, for which there was general support across the political spectrum, was to simplify the system and increase the incentives for people to move off benefits into work. About 2 million people are currently in receipt of UC. More than 6 million will be on the benefit by the time it is fully rolled out. How long has it been around? The project was legislated for in 2011 under the auspices of its most vocal champion, Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith. The plan was to roll it out by 2017. However, a series of management failures, expensive IT blunders and design faults mean it is now seven years behind schedule, and rollout will not be complete until 2024. The government admitted that the delay was caused in part by claimants being too scared to sign up to the new benefit. What is the biggest problem? The original design set out a minimum 42-day wait for a first payment to claimants when they moved to UC (in practice this is often up to 60 days). After sustained pressure, the government announced in the autumn 2017 budget that the wait would be reduced to 35 days from February 2018. This will partially mitigate the impact on many claimants of having no income for six weeks. The wait has led to rent arrears and evictions, hunger (food banks in UC areas report notable increases in referrals), use of expensive credit and mental distress. Ministers have expanded the availability of hardship loans (now repayable over a year) to help new claimants while they wait for payment. Housing benefit will now continue for an extra two weeks after the start of a UC claim. However, critics say the five-week wait is still too long and want it reduced to two or three weeks. Are there other problems? Plenty. Multibillion-pound cuts to work allowances imposed by the former chancellor George Osborne mean UC is far less generous than originally envisaged. According to the Resolution Foundation thinktank, about 2.5m low-income working households will be more than £1,000 a year worse off when they move to UC, reducing work incentives.

Landlords are worried that the level of rent arrears accrued by tenants on UC could lead to a rise in evictions. It's also not very user-friendly: claimants complain the system is complex, unreliable and difficult to manage, particularly if you have no internet access.

And there is concern that UC cannot deliver key promises: a critical study found it does not deliver savings, cannot prove it gets more people into work, and has plunged vulnerable claimants into hardship.

Indeed, think too long about the rationale of shutting jobcentres down at a time of economic uncertainty and austerity, and you could be convinced there was an element of sadism to all this. Successive Conservative governments bring in tighter rules that require benefits claimants to increasingly attend a jobcentre – from low-wage, universal credit workers forced to look for more hours to jobseekers told to sign in daily – and then cut the number of jobcentres they can get to. As CJ puts it to me: “You’ll turn up late or not be able to get there [because they’ve shut your local jobcentre] and then you’ll get sanctioned.”

Ask the DWP and it states that some smaller jobcentres will merge with larger ones, while others will be “co-located” – essentially slotted into an existing council building or local library (if indeed, the local library hasn’t also been closed). This is a billion-pound cut draped in the language of “efficiency”: the jobcentre closures will see the government slice £140m a year from the DWP budget over the next decade.

In more than one way, KUWG is a snapshot of why this “cost-saving” policy matters. The group was formed in 2009, at the height of the recession: a temporary local safety net to help jobseekers at a time the welfare state was still intact. Eight years later, they are serving the community at the sharp end of austerity measures; from helping disabled people fill in the lengthy forms for out-of-work sickness benefits to physically attending jobcentre meetings with jobseekers who are afraid they will get their income stopped (“It’s a case of ‘What do you need to help you not get sanctioned?’” CJ explains).

KUWG say they are routinely contacted by people who have been kicked off sickness benefits and sent to the jobcentre despite having a doctor’s note – or to put it another way, who have already been victim of another DWP “efficiency saving”. Then imagine how much harder it gets to navigate that system when your town centre doesn’t even have a jobcentre adviser for you to talk to.

The trend, as these jobcentre closures take hold nationwide, is to increasingly shift welfare support from face-to face human contact to a computer screen. Universal credit applications – famed for its frantic helplines – are designed to be made online but in reality, this means the very people most in need of social security will be least likely to access it. Around one in 10 UK adults have never used the internet, according to the latest figures by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). That rises to two in 10 for disabled adults.

Over the last five years, towns and cities across Britain have watched their local welfare advice and legal centres shut their doors as government funding was gutted. Now, local jobcentres are being lined up as the next to go.

The slogan for KUWG’s demo on Monday – “Hands off our jobcentre” – may be about one centre but really, it’s a rallying cry for communities everywhere. As CJ puts it to me: “We know this is happening over the country. We want to be a lightning rod.”

• Frances Ryan writes the Guardian’s Hardworking Britain series