Here’s yet another post about the crappy callousness with which the DWP treats people it finds fit for work and throws off disability benefits…

We’ve heard plenty of stories like the one below in the past few years and I imagine we’ll be hearing more of them as more and more people on the Employment and Support Allowance disability benefit are forced to look for work. At jobcentres recently, I’ve found more people who were either on ESA and recently found fit for work, or who are in the ESA work-related activity group (the group for sick or disabled claimants who are thought capable of some type of work in future and of attending work-related activities*) and being forced to attend the jobcentre for work activities, even when their jobcentre advisers happily concede that those work activities won’t lead to jobs. These few people don’t make a trend, of course, but I’m inclined to think they suggest a direction of travel – a DWP crackdown on people in the ESA work-related activity group and ESA in general. As you’ll know, George Osborne targeted new claimants to that work related activity group in his July 8 budget, so ESA is certainly in his sights. I already know people in the ESA Support Group who have received letters telling them to attend work-focused interviews (the ESA support group is for sick or disabled people who are supposed to be excused from work and work-related activities). I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again and why not: I think the government’s ultimate plan is to eliminate disability benefits, as well as the idea that some people just can’t work.

Anyway, I do sometimes wonder what the fallout from a crackdown on sick and disabled claimants in the ESA WRAG group will be… I can say this for sure: the DWP continues to remove benefits from people who have mental health conditions in a particularly shitty and cold-blooded way.

Take this latest example. At one of the Northwest London jobcentres a couple of weeks ago, I spent time talking to an older woman I call Mary in this post (this woman did say I could use her real name, but I decided not to at the last minute here, because I’m getting more and more nervous about DWP vindictiveness to claimants). Mary was not in a very good way. Mary said that she had long-term mental health problems and had receiving ESA because of this. She’d been on the benefit for about six years. Mary said that she had been in the ESA work-related activity group until very recently. A few days before we met outside the jobcentre, she’d received the letter which you can see below – the letter which told her that she was no longer entitled to Employment and Support Allowance. She’d been found fit for work after a June work capability assessment. Her last ESA payment had been made on 2 July – just a couple of days before we met. She was obviously very concerned about that money ending – as anyone would be – and had no idea what to do next.

“They didn’t give me nothing [at the work capability assessment] – zero points. I got my letter, but I’m doing this with mental health problems. I can’t read and write very well.” As you can see below, the letter that Mary just received from the DWP told her that she’d get no more money from early July and that she’d better pull finger and start looking for a job: “you should start looking for a job straightaway.” If she couldn’t get a job straightaway (and it seemed unlikely that she would at that very moment, given her age and history) the letter gave a number to call to make a jobcentre appointment. That was the end of that. Other than those mostly useless pointers, all this letter offered was a few of the DWP’s now-unavoidable odes to the joys and supremacy of work: “we know that most people are better off in work,” and blah blah blah. These letters are as sanctimonious as they are unhelpful. There’s a repulsive smugness about the DWP when it pulls the rug on people in these situations.

Which is the thing. I’m not talking about Mary in particular here, or her history. I don’t know enough about her history to go into it. I’m talking about the system Mary is stuck in, the way this bureaucracy behaves towards people who use it and the assumptions it makes about those people. I’m talking about a system which removes people’s small incomes at the stroke of a pen, and the amazing callousness that the DWP shows when it throws people with mental health problems off ESA. There’s no “We Get That Mental Health Conditions Are A Real Thing” going on in this letter, or even “We Get That Stopping Your Income Might Devastate You.” The assumption in this letter is that people who are found fit for work have been taking the piss and that everyone who is found fit for work is robust enough to deal with a major blow like a sudden and total loss of income. This, presumably, is how the DWP continues to “fix” people with mental health conditions and indeed to “fix” anyone who claims a disability benefit. Forget about eligibility for a minute, or whether or not people are “deserving,” so-called (nobody’s deserving as far as this government is concerned, so that conversation is barely worth faffing around with). The point is that this is how people are handled when decisions to stop their income are made.

Sightings of letters like this one and of people in Mary’s situation reeling around outside jobcentres are among the reasons why I await the outcome of Mike Sivier’s request for benefit deaths statistics with interest. There’s absolutely no concession in the above text-heavy letter to the fact that the sudden stop of ESA might have a very bad effect on someone with mental health problems, or that such a letter might make those problems worse. There’s certainly nothing at the front of the letter about help to sign on for jobseekers’ allowance for some income in the first instance, or help to navigate the difficult path to jobseekers’ allowance, or how someone who once claimed ESA might deal with JSA’s difficult, demanding and punitive jobsearch regimes (I don’t count the provision of the Jobcentre Plus phone number on page 2, or the warbling on about Work Coach help at a jobcentre as immediate and intensive support). For her part, Mary was going to try and appeal the fit-for-work decision: “I’m on medication,” she said. “I’m going to my doctor now to get the letters.” I gave her my number and have her address: hopefully, we can catch up and find out how things went. Suffice to say for now that I expect to see more and more people clutching these letters outside jobcentres as Osborne and the boys target ESA – and the people who collect it – for destruction. Cute, innit.

*Update Monday 20 July: sentence with * changed from “thought fit for some type of work” to “thought capable of some kind of work in future” as original could be interpreted as “fit for work” as in a WCA decision to end an ESA claim altogether. Also added “and of attending work-related activities” inside the bracket, as agree with commentator below that the work-related activities requirement for WRAG should be made clear as part of that sentence. Good ESA WRAG definition here.