Recently, I lost my job. No, don't worry, it's fine. Well, no, it's not fine, but I don't want you to get distracted. This isn't the point of my story, it's a just a relevant detail. The point is that when you are out of work in the UK you are able to register for ‘Jobseeker's Allowance' which is a (fairly miserly) benefit you can claim to support you while you look for work. This, needless to say, is all the more vital if you are the only wage-earner in your household. My wife is able to claim ‘Employment Support Allowance' for someone who is not fit for full time work. But she is only able to claim it if I am doing less than 24 hours work a week. I was doing 25 hours' work a week. Then I was down to 20, so she claimed ESA. Then I lost my job altogether. Then it got complicated.

For a start, R registers for ESA, which she does via a long and slightly tortuous phone call which, of course, involves waiting on hold for about a week. A couple of days later my hours are reduced from not very much to nothing and I claim JSA. This I can do online, which is a lot easier and, as a result, quicker and less painful. A couple of days later I receive a text telling me when my appointment is. I can't go, I subsequently explain to a woman on the phone. R has an important appointment and I have to be there. The woman is very helpful and explains that if I can't make the appointment it will affect the time I can claim JSA from. Lovely. I can make it any other time that day but, no, it has to be the following day.

The day comes, and we do the signing on and it turns out we needn't have bothered because since R is already in the process of claiming ESA I will be attached to her claim and need not make a claim of my own. But this, ludicrously, isn't the problem. R was not keen on ESA because she'd recently seen on the news that there was a massive backlog processing all the ESA paperwork and that it was going to take new claimants as much as 8 months to get sorted out. She'd seen the assertion that our Government didn't want any sort of benefits for the disabled and that they had been forced to create ESA by the EU. Apparently ESA had been deliberately created in order to fail. I don't know if any of this is true, but it would have been hard enough to persuade her that it wasn't even if I hadn't just read a lengthy article about the megalomaniacal grandiose follies of the minister in charge¹. But the fact is that none of these things were the straw that broke the camel's back. The final straw was ATOS.

ATOS are a private company (always good news) under contract to the Government to assess the fitness for work of benefit claimants. Over the last few years they have acquired a terrible reputation for deeming the most completely disabled of people capable of full time labour. My wife repeated to me accounts of a paraplegic man who had been deemed fit to work, and a blind lady who had been told she would be fine as long as she had a guide. On top of that they had already once signed R fit for full time work. Her doctor will currently allow her to work no more than eight hours a week, despite her protests that she wants to work full time. Now here you have a person with very low self-esteem, a fatalistic outlook and, from experience, no faith that the system that is supposed to look after her will actually look after her. It will take a deal of persuading to ensure she attends the appointment. I imagine there are those – probably many – who, without someone to talk them into ploughing on, simply give up the face of a test in the certain knowledge that yet another medical will be conducted by a company evidently inclined to lean towards judging ill people to be fine.

Vulnerable people need to have confidence in the system that is in place to care for them, or they will not use it. This puts an extra burden of survival on them and, by extension, a greater burden of care on the people who are caring for them. Without state support these people will often be family and friends, who also have, or should have, jobs of their own. Condemning millions of disabled people to life without work or support means you are not only penalising them for something wrong which is not their doing, but also penalising those who care for them, for something very right that is entirely their doing. If that is the way you want to run a country, have the decency to put it on your manifesto

If you would like to, for any reason, please drop in and say hello at Carers of H2G2.

benjaminpmoore

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