Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group — the Kwug Blog: benefit sanctions deaths

Showing posts with label benefit sanctions deaths. Show all posts

Thursday, 17 November 2016

Update on David Clapson, sanctioned to death

Guest blog post by Gill Thompson, sister of the late David Clapson. (David Clapson died after being found 'fit for work' and then sanctioned for inability to stick to a 'Claimant Commitment' that was not fit for humanity.)

David Clapson when he was a serving soldier

Update on David Clapson: sanctioned to death?

Hi,

As many of you know, I have been campaigning for a long time to try and achieve an investigation into the link between the benefit sanction imposed on my brother and his death. I believe that having had his benefits stopped due to a sanction, he was unable to afford to buy food and electricity to refrigerate his insulin, which in turn left him unable to manage his diabetes.

Unfortunately despite the best efforts of my lawyers, the Coroner has refused to open an investigation as he considers there is no evidence that the benefit sanction played any role in my brother’s death. I am now preparing to ask the High Court to consider my brother’s case and am raising money to cover legal fees, including court fees and experts fees.

In order to do this, I need to raise a minimum of £10,000 and I would appreciate any help you can give. You can pledge your support here – https://www.crowdjustice.org/case/david-clapson/

Please share the link on social media and email it to 3 people who you think would be interested to help me spread the word. Please also make a pledge of £35 or whatever you can afford to the new case. Either of these things will really help me to take this case to the High Court.

I am very grateful for your support of my campaign so far. This is not just about my brother. I want a Coroner to look at the DWP guidance on people living with Diabetes and how the sanction regime is applied to people with long term health conditions.

The UN has raised concerns about the extent to which the UK government has made use of sanctions in relation to benefits and the absence of due process and access to justice for those affected by the use of sanctions. I hope you can continue to support me in my fight to ensure David’s death is properly investigated and action taken to prevent future deaths of vulnerable people

Thanks so much for your ongoing support,

Gill Thompson

Tuesday, 8 November 2016

No more deaths from benefit cuts – Gill Thompson launches legal case for brother David Clapson

Guest blog post from WinVisible (Women with visible and invisible disabilities)

PRESS RELEASE . . . PRESS RELEASE . . . PRESS RELEASE . . .

No more deaths from benefit cuts – Gill Thompson launches legal case

for brother David Clapson

No more deaths from benefit cuts — Gill thompson launches legal case for brother David Clapson

Gill Thompson’s legal case for her brother David, who was diabetic and died in 2013 after his Jobseekers Allowance was sanctioned, has just been launched. Gill's legal team wrote to the Hertfordshire Coroner setting out why there should be an investigation, including of breach of the right to life and of DWP procedure sanctioning claimants (see Leigh Day press release). David’s death was put down to “natural causes” and there was no inquest. Public support through CrowdJustice fundraising has enabled this challenge.

In October, at the people’s premiere of Ken Loach’s film “I, Daniel Blake” in Leicester Square, Gill joined other campaigners at an invited vigil against deaths from benefit cuts, on the red carpet. Nichole Drury, another bereaved relative, spoke about her mother Moira Drury, who had a head injury from domestic violence, and developed cancer. Moira was too ill to attend the benefit exam but her reasons were not accepted and she was cut off. The stress of being without benefit for months, then a Council Tax demand for nearly £2,000 resulting from loss of benefit, hastened her death. The banner of names of people who died from benefit cuts and sanctions was read out by Maggie Zolobajluk. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, longtime opponents of the Work Capability Assessment, gave their support at the vigil and spoke to people individually.

Corbyn highlighted David’s plight in Parliament at Prime Minister’s Questions, telling Theresa May and ministers to go and see “I, Daniel Blake”.

Black Triangle welcomes Gill’s challenge, relevant to the refusal to hold an inquest into the death of Alan McArdle, who died of a heart attack in 2015 within an hour of being read a letter threatening to stop his Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). Maximus had reported him to the DWP for missing back-to-work appointments, insisting on sanction when someone called to let them know he was in hospital.

Many claimants say WinVisible’s Benefit self-help rights sheet has helped them, including against sanctions. We won exemption from the face-to-face Work Capability Assessment (WCA) exam for many vulnerable women, and helped restore benefit to disabled women cut off for “failure to attend”.

Despite words that people on ESA Support Group rate with chronic conditions will no longer be retested, on 1 November the government launched a “Work, health and disability: improving lives” green paper at disability charity Scope, which includes the proposal to make everyone subject to sanctions, including sick and disabled people in the Support Group who are currently protected. Disabled campaigners are determined to fight this new attack on claimants, and recently protested against national Mind, confronting CEO Paul Farmer against Mind sending their policy officer Tom Pollard to work for the DWP – tied to lucrative DWP contracts for the “work cure” for people with mental distress.

Opposition inside Parliament is also growing. MPs opposed to the ESA cut due in April 2017, are calling for a debate, including Green, Labour, SNP and Tory MPs, such as Stephen McPartland, MP for Stevenage where David Clapson lived. McPartland’s correspondence with the DWP at Gill’s request, where the DWP replied they knew David was insulin-dependent, forms part of the legal challenge.

More info: Gill Thompson gill.a4u@outlook.com WinVisible win@winvisible.org 020 7482 2496

Saturday, 5 November 2016

Disability News Service uploads, 3 November 2016

Sunday, 10 July 2016

Kwug delegate's report on having attended Boycott Workfare Welfare Action Gathering in Manchester on Saturday 9 July 2016

The actual programme for the day differed in some ways from the programme content outlined at the Boycott Workfare website on 29 June yet was still well worth attending, especially as travel expenses were repaid with no trouble or embarrassment.(1)

Hosts Boycott Workfare and Unite Community Manchester are dedicated to equipping benefit claimants and our allies with what we require — especially in terms of knowing our rights and treating us as human beings. That is very unlike the 'corporate culture' of the Department for Work & Pensions, its jobcentres and its contractors and subcontractors. The over-riding ethos of 'austerity' Government is apparently dedicated to so disappointing people that the reactions from the vulnerable people to, say, not having their travel expenses paid and barring 'claimants' from using jobcentre toilets, are likely to warrant their being sanctioned, etc. (Note: to the DWP we are 'claimants' to be intimidated, harassed and bullied, not 'customers' to be wooed.)

My main unique-to-the-day memories from attending Boycott Workfare Welfare Action Gathering 2016 include:

The contrast between my feeling ridiculed for my health-condition-induced dress code by passers-by as I was leaving Manchester Piccadilly Station to walk to the venue, compared to the sense of being a welcome addition to the crew while accompanying Gill Thompson and Maggie Zolobajluk plus benefit sanctions death banner (2) and Manchester local Debbie upstairs in the same building to see Andy Burnham MP who just happened to be in the building as the Gathering was coming to a close, and later walking with Gill, Maggie and Maggie's mobile art installation-style 'Cuts Kill' placard — complete with 'bloodied' cleaver — through the campness of Manchester's Gay Village where we engaged with caring locals as we were en route to Piccadilly Station on our homeward bound run
An 'intelligence gathering' insight revelation that the DWP has devised a way of minimising staff solidarity possibilities in the face of the jobcentre staff being mandated to sanction colleagues for not doing enough to find sufficient extra paid work to top up inadequate DWP incomes: The DWP is separating the staff member's workplace from their Universal Credit registration place. That is like what Stanley Milgram's Experiment reveals about directors of torture prioritising 'obedience to [external] authority over personal conscience'.(3)
"In your campaigning, you are not 'working' or 'volunteering', you are engaging in political activism and freedom of association"
A new breed of DWP worker is dubbed the 'work roach' or 'workroach'
When the jobcentre calls in the police to remove activists, activists can get onto the local press to alert them to what is happening
Each jobcentre has its own 'corporate culture'
If you leaflet someone who refuses your leaflet and they then say to you on exiting the jobcentre, "I've just been sanctioned," offer to accompany them back into the building for better treatment
Scottish Unemployed Workers Network managed to pressure local key decision makers into declaring Dundee a 'no workfare city' and thus Keep Volunteering Voluntary
Andy Burnham MP said that he knew of benefit sanctions death names that could be added to Maggie and Gill's banner — "constituents whose cases I've been working on" — and said emphatically that he did not think Universal Credit to be a good idea: "I've seen the mess it has made of people's lives in Wigan where it was trialled."
The purpose of Universal Credit is not to redeem the welfare state but to destroy it
Targeting jobcentres with highest sanctions rates, and getting the local press on board, can help to reduce the amount of sanctioning they do
I am now better able to put faces and voices to names

I also collected documents that I will pass on to other Kwug members, particularly our caseworkers.

Link addresses

Saturday, 25 June 2016

Taxpayers Against Poverty asks Bishops, Councils and Company bosses to get their heads round the depths of poverty in the UK

From the Revd Paul Nicolson of Taxpayers Against Poverty

A TAP letter was published in The Guardian on Thursday 16th June.

They added the helpful headline.

"Councils or company bosses have a duty of stewardship". (1)

In the photo with the letter I was at a demonstration for people whose relatives had died or committed suicide after their benefits were stopped by a benefit sanction. I said this prayer at the demonstration, which was written for them. (2)

The first paragraph draws on the work of Psychologists Against Austerity (https://psychagainstausterity.wordpress.com/) who have listened to low income people sanctioned and in debt. (3)

The following TAP letter was published by The Church Times on Friday 24th June.

The Church Times added the headline.

Flaws in Bishops’ analysis of the welfare state

Sir, — By adding a sixth giant, “isolation” (News, 10 June) to Beveridge’s “five giant evils” of want, disease, squalor, ignorance, and idleness, in their report Thinking Afresh about Welfare, the Bishops have gone a very long way towards describing the dilemmas of poverty in the UK faced by politicians and the electorate, but never reached its depths.

They rightly set a goal of “enhancing the well-being of the whole nation”, but I searched in vain for a description of the impact of debt on mental health reported to governments of all hues by the Royal College of Psychiatrists (4) and the Government Office for Science, (5) and of the creation of debts by welfare reform; and of the lifetime behavioural problems of too many low-birth-weight babies born to impoverished mothers who cannot afford a healthy diet, before and while they are pregant, described by the Institute for Brain Chemistry and Human Nutrition; (6) of the 17-year and increasing gap in life expectancy between some rich and poor areas; (7) for an understanding of the socially divisive and growing inequality of wealth accumulated over the past 30 years by land-owning home-owners, corporations, large builders, and landlords, including the Churches, while the landless tenants, with diminishing security of tenure, have rent and council-tax arrears enforced against their low benefit incomes because of cuts in their housing and council-tax benefits.

Perhaps the most serious omission is the failure to mention the deliberate reduction of access to justice by pricing it out of the reach of the poorest citizens and reducing legal aid. The administration of welfare involves millions of decisions to be made by national and local government officials every week. Parliament has passed an immense amount of welfare legislation, the just interpretation of whose practice inevitably requires the courts.

Benefit sanctions, which stop benefit incomes for one month, three months, or three years, are cruel and disproportionate punishments. They create hunger and crippling debts, which pile up during the sanction and have to be paid off over even more months when it ends. The Bishops suggest: “Our approach to sanctions should focus on how they are administered whilst supporting the principled option of using sanctions where they are demonstrably effective in changing irresponsible behaviour.”

No punishment should be left to Jobcentre administrators. They should be proportionate to income and handed down by the magistrates after due process, including independent representation.

PAUL NICOLSON

Taxpayers Against Poverty

93 Campbell Road

London N17 0BF

from the Reverend Paul Nicolson

Taxpayers Against Poverty

No citizen without an affordable home and an

adequate income in work or unemployment.

93 Campbell Road, Tottenham, London N17 0BF, 0208 3765455, 07961 177889,

https://www.facebook.com/Taxpayers-Against-Poverty-299911526728884/

https://twitter.com/taxpayers_a_p www.taxpayersagainstpoverty.org.uk,

www.z2k.org, www.prohousingalliance.com

Link addresses in printable form for archiving

Benefits sanctioned? Take mass action!

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Contact us:

Facebook: Kilburn Unemployed Workers Group

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KUWG1

Telephone: 07724 843 973

Meetings: 3pm - 5:30pm
Thursdays, Kingsgate Community Centre
107 Kingsgate Road, London, NW6 2JH

Meeting structure

Helping you feel at home: We meet weekly in the Small Hall at KingsgateCC and start gathering from 3pm, attempting to start the meetings at about 3:15pm and definitely before 3:30pm.

Bring and share refreshments are included. We are not like the 'No eating or drinking on the premises' jobcentre.

The formal meetings start with firstname and what benefit we are on or a one-liner about what brings us to KUWG. (Pensioners and other allies welcome.)

We then ask for casework from those present, arrange who will help with what case, and go onto discussing campaigning leafleting and such outreach activities. We also arrange who will do the chairing or facilitating and note-taking for the following week. Rotating these roles helps minimise the risk of being dominated by one person and helps us build our skills as we share the workload.

Meetings actually finish at about 5:20pm to allow for putting tables and chairs back and leaving the kitchen facilities ready for the next group.

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