To err is human...

... but if you do it on DWP forms, you can expect a fine.

A £50 fine, to be precise, although that's just a starting figure. It could be as much as £300.

Apparently the point of this fine is to get claimants to take "responsibility" for their claims, because "I have to fill in this form right or I won't have any money for rent, bills or food" doesn't have enough impact on your life to make you take it seriously. Or something.

Leaving aside the class war bit where a bunch of millionaires (who make plenty of "mistakes" in their own benefit claims and consider £50 to be the cost of lunch) are imposing these fines on DWP claimants who are, for obvious reasons, some of the poorest people in the country for whom £50 is two weeks' groceries or more...

I'm reasonably bright. Not exceptionally so, but I have my selection of higher-tier grade GCSEs including English and Maths, I've been able to read and write since before I started primary school, most of the jobs I've held have had some sort of administrative element. I should be as well-equipped as anyone to fill out those forms correctly, and I have a distinct advantage over many claimants who are less academically inclined.

And I have made errors on my claims.

The first one, was when I first got sick and lost my job. Let's set the scene. I'm in my early twenties. I'm sick, so sick I cannot work, and more or less confined to bed so that I can manage the big bursts of effort needed to go out (I haven't yet been taught about pacing). I don't yet know what's wrong with me, so I'm scared. I have no income and the Jobcentre have given me three forms. The biggest one is for Incapacity Benefit. The next biggest is for Housing and Council Tax Benefit. The smallest - which is still some thirty or forty pages - is for Income Support, which I am told is a "safety net" in case my Incapacity claim is rejected.

Bear in mind the reason for my claim was that I was too sick to work in my mostly office-based job. I had something symptomatically akin to 'flu. I was not in a top form-filling state.

I worked on the forms as best I could. By the time I got to the IS one, time was running out, but I did my best and felt quite proud of myself for finishing it all within the deadline.

My mistake? In the Pensions section. Having ticked that no, I was not in receipt of any pensions, I was told to go to the next section of the form. So I skipped over all the questions about what type of pension do you have to the next section of the form, About Other Benefits. What I missed, was that "War Pensions", although tacked onto the end of "Pensions", was in fact a section in its own right - a one-inch strip with the single question are you in receipt of a War Pension and Yes/No tickboxes. The form was sent back to me, red-penned and with a stern letter of admonishment.

I've also made errors on my DLA forms before now, again usually at the level of missing a tickbox, although thankfully I've always caught them before sending.

The BBC article says:

The proposals also reveal that the government assumes there will be very few appeals against these fines.

Well, yes. If my incorrectly completed form and nasty letter had also included a £50 fine, I certainly wouldn't have had it in me to argue the toss, because I was too sick to do so, and THAT was the reason why I was filling in the forms in the first place.

That's the thing about benefits. You claim them when your life gets to a desperate stage. You're sick, perhaps terminally so. Your spouse has emptied the joint account and run off with So-and-so from Marketing, leaving you with a broken heart, no money and two kids who want to know where Mummy/Daddy's gone. You've finally managed to get up the courage to get out of a violent and abusive relationship even though you took nothing with you other than the clothes you stand up in. At the very least, you've lost your job. You're stressed. You're upset. You're running around trying to improve your situation and get back something which is recognisable as Your Life, whether that means you're attending countless hospital appointments or applying for countless jobs, and on top of this, the Jobcentre have presented you with over a hundred pages of forms to fill in?

And while we're at it, let's not forget the cuts to legal aid and the closures of Citizens' Advice Bureau offices which will make it even harder for people to get help filling in forms or conducting appeals. Nice one, George. Withdraw the support, thereby increasing the rate of mistakes, then charge people for those mistakes on the basis that they'll be unable to argue. It would make a wonderful Dilbert cartoon, if only it weren't targeted at real and vulnerable people at their time of need.

Minor mistakes are inevitable when people in these circumstances are filling in these forms. Fining people who can't afford to pay but aren't in a position to defend themselves, is appalling.

(cross-posted at This Is My Blog)

Shop a Twit!

It feels like forever since I was last well enough to write here. Over the last few weeks I've had to put up with my dodgy stomach putting me through hell and preventing me from sleeping and a slight cold which has aggravated my always crap sinuses making sinus pressure pain and the migraines it triggers almost a daily occurrence (I tried to explain on my own blog how severe my sinus pain is).

I've been feeling rather guilty about it actually. WtB was, after all, my idea. I should be leading from the front and posting regularly. But how can I write intelligent, well researched posts about benefit reform when I can't even muster up the spoons to call back the Choose and Book people about my referral to the migraine clinic?

The one small contribution I have been able to make to WtB over the last few weeks is that I've been able to post links and other really short updates to the WtB Twitter account and the WtB Facebook page. Tweeting and Facebooking only takes a few seconds and doesn't require much brain function so it's something I can do using my iPod in bed, in the dark, when I'm too ill to be anywhere else.

Today Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire Nadine Dorries said on her blog about people who tweet a lot:

if it's someone you know is on benefits, contact the DWP.

That was 2 paragraphs after saying that people who tweet a lot should:

[get] a job which involves being sat at a key board because there's nothing much up with their fingers, brain or attention span!!

That's right; she'd like to see me reported to the DWP for having the audacity to write 140 characters from my bed when I'm too ill to get out of it.

Lots of disabled tweeters have hit back. @beccaviola Tweeted:

Thank you, Nadine Dorries. Obviously, being able to Tweet via assistive tech indicates that I am in fact not profoundly disabled after all.

Becca also points out that:

I tweet usually immobile from bed, using switches, inbetween nursing visits and personal care.

While Mind in Flux and Writer in a Wheelchair have both written passionate blog posts in response to Dorries.

While Dorries implies that we're scroungers if we're capable of using Twitter it's worth remembering that when it comes to scrounging: The pot probably shouldn't call the disabled kettle black.

Edit: She's written a follow up post!

She says:

If you Twitter all day, every day about claiming disability benefit in one tweet whist arranging a night out in the pub in the next. If you tweet about claiming six months rent from the social fund whilst tweeting how bad your hangover is and if you stride into political meetings and shout the odds with energy and enthusiasm with no sign of any physical disability and if you claim to work for the Labour party and write porn at the same time as claiming your disability benefit - then don't expect someone like me not to a) inform the authorities and b) tell you to get of your Twitter [sic] and get a job.

Or as @TaobhCle paraphrases:

you can't be disabled and express political views. 'Stfu and be glad for your benefits'

Edit #2: Blogger and tweeter Ms Humphrey Cushion has revealed that she is the Twitter user Dorries was referring to today.

‘It frightens me if, when I need support most, it’s whipped away’

Rosemary Bolinger, 53, had to take medical retirement from the NHS after having cerebral palsy diagnosed 14 years ago. A former nurse and hospital manager, she has some savings, a small occupational pension, and is entitled to incapacity benefit.
Her husband is a senior charge nurse — on about £30,000 a year — and they have a mortgage. She would probably lose all her incapacity benefit if it were means-tested. “It frightens me,” she said. “I would find it very distressing if having worked and pushed my body for years I found out that just when I needed the support most it was whipped away.”
She also has a wrist problem, making it difficult to do even desk work. “I don’t think I’ll have be able to work again,” she said. “I would love to be able to work a few hours a week, but I would never know when my body would be able to cope.
“I don’t know what I would do if I lost my IB. I am sure I would become totally isolated. We have a mortgage of £80,000 and I would not be eligible for any social services assistance or equipment, so I would have to pay for a cleaner and home help,” she said.
“I want to be as independent as I can but my health is dictating that I have to rely on benefits. You pay national insurance for years never expecting that you will have to claim benefit. But when you need it you expect it to be there.”

by Jill Sherman, The Times, Fri 10th Sept 2010

Q.61 Please tell us anything else you think we should know about your (DLA) claim

This is the actual answer provided on my current application for Disability Living Allowance for Q.61 Please tell us anything else you think we should know about your claim. This post should be read in conjunction with the part answer to Q.31 Do you need someone with you to guide or supervise you when walking outdoors in unfamiliar places in the blog Helping Hands, and the blog Page 18, Other Information IB50 form.

I was diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome in 2004 after many years of being fobbed off and dismissed by medical professionals. After so long living with increased disability without knowing the reasons why I was relieved just to get an answer. Perhaps naively I hoped that diagnosis would be the first step towards getting better and regaining the many things I'd lost, friends, relationships, career and family. 

Day to day my life just is what it is, constant pain, dislocating joints, medications, falls, choking, incontinence, mobility equipment and many other indignities are always there but things I deliberately choose not to consider. I make jokes out of difficult situations, give mumbled half answers when people ask how I am, or just insist I'm fine even when it is patently obvious to everyone that I am anything but. I do this because to focus on the difficult things would make me incredibly depressed and to be blunt, I have enough problems already. Depression would just tip me over the edge. So instead I slap a smile on my face, no matter how hard or horrible the day. I smile because otherwise I'd cry and that just gives me a headache. I choose to be happy by focusing on how fortunate I am to have a roof over my head, to be able to see the sun shine, and to live in a country which still, just about, believes that looking after those who are more vulnerable is a collective responsibility. 

Filling out these forms has been a depressing and traumatic process for me. What I expected to be a straightforward task of explaining my disability has actually been a complex and difficult confrontation of the issues I face but choose not to think about on a day to day basis. Not only does it hurt my hands, but it breaks my heart to type the words I avoid saying out loud. That for the past six years I have fought every day; to gain an understanding of my condition, to take the correct medications, to eat the right food, to do the endless, painful, frustrating and incredibly boring physiotherapy exercises, to accept having to use a wheelchair, to learn to accept that the physical pain which is my constant companion will never go away, and will instead be joined by the emotional pain of a million tiny losses. 

It has taken me weeks to fill out this form as every time I try to answer a question I give up. How can I explain what it's like to have forgotten how not being in pain feels? That even the smallest movement can cause one or more joints to dislocate. What it's like to try and do even the simplest tasks with joints that won't hold themselves together, let alone do anything of practical value. When I dislocate my knee just rolling over in bed it's easy to swear a bit and refuse to think about the white hot pain, or subsequent tears, or the shoulder that's dislocated trying to relocate the knee, but that filling that information out on a form defeats me. All those individual dislocations and consequent lost opportunities I ignore in favour of those created, but to see them in glaring detail, not just once but the 53 different ways required by an official form is too much for me to bear. 

Link round up

Some of these links range from a few weeks to a few months old. But I think they're important to post here to give a bit of background as to what's been going on in the War on Welfare Claimants thus far, which prompted us to create this blog.

In May this year BBC Scotland took a look at ESA and its failings. I think the most pertinent element of the piece is the hypocrisy in how Vicki Bell was "assessed" by ATOS. (Incurable Hippie posted a similar case on here yesterday.)

One of the readers of Iain Dale's Diary wrote to him and expressed their concerns about DLA reform. The point the reader emphasised was that they're more financially valuable to Osbourne claiming DLA than not. Of course, that's not true for all of us: Some of us, even on DLA, remain unable to work so offer no financial value to Osbourne despite being rich in human value. But it's excellent news that this reader convinced Iain Dale that we do have some value to society because his is a well respected voice in the Tory party. (This year's Pink List described him as "More influential outside politics than in.")

Anne Begg MP talked to Disability Now about the attack on DLA. Quite worryingly she seems to be under the impression that "The one benefit which we have in this country which actually operates on the social model of disability is DLA," which demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the social model. Yes the DLA assessment currently focusses on what you can and can't do, rather than on diagnosis alone, but that does not make it a social model assessment. It appears that Begg has misunderstood what the medical model actually means, and in turn assumes that the social model must be the opposite. This fab post by Lady Bracknell explains why the term "medical model" can be a bit of a misnomer and might shed some light on how Anne Begg got confused. Misunderstandings of a sociological construct aside, it's good to see that someone in parliament is fighting our corner.

Comment is Free on guardian.co.uk have been great ambassadors for our cause. Articles they've published recently on the subject of disability benefits includes: Disability allowance exists for a reason by Anne Wollenberg, Cutting disability benefits is not 'fair' by Jackie Ashley, Why should I again prove my disability to satisfy George Osborne? By Rhydian Fôn James, and Disabled people are not scroungers by Emmanuel Smith. Especially important is Anne Wollenberg's piece which explains that DLA is not an out-of-work benefit something our government keeps forgetting.

Having been called a scrounger by our press and politicians so many times I felt compelled to write a blog post explaining exactly why I get the benefits I do. It seems particularly relevant today seeing as how this morning I received a letter telling me I'm being summonsed to a Pathways to Work interview next week and if I don't show up my benefits will probably be stopped.

The ever fierce Disability Bitch accepted responsibility for the recession and has agreed to make some cuts to save the government some money.

Spoof news website Newsarse.com published a piece titled "Osborne to put coma patients to work as draft excluders". Sad thing is that given the current climate it wouldn't be too surprising to see that as a genuine headline on a real news site.

Bitch and Newsarse may be humorous sites but for my money, the funniest thing I've read since these attacks began was this piece quoting Yvette Cooper on the Tories' plans to cut DLA. Why is that so hilarious? Because the two-faced woman was a vociferous advocate of ESA, the problems with ESA having been established in my first link.