The failings of the UK welfare system — before and during COVID-19
Plans to cut Universal Credit is not simply a political decision. For many who depend on it and other benefits, it’s the difference between life and death.
The failings of the UK welfare system have become painfully apparent. In recent weeks, the harrowing story of Philippa Day gained traction — though not enough — following her death aged 27. Day left what is believed to be a suicide note in which she criticised the government’s handling of her personal independent payment (PIP). The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) rescinded Day’s disability benefits in January of 2019. The months that followed were distressing for her, with errors at the DWP such as — according to Disability News Service — “[appearing] to have lost her claim form, and then to confirm that decision, as well as the length of time it took to reinstate her benefits, and deal with a new claim.”
This came out in an inquest into Day’s death. It has been established that both DWP and Capita — the firm running the assessment centre where Day was told to go to discuss her claim for disability benefits — were aware of her struggles with mental health issues including agoraphobia and that she would be unable to cope attending the in-person assessment at the centre. Gordon Clow, the assistant coroner for Nottingham and Nottinghamshire, said that it appeared that Day’s risk of taking her own life “increased markedly” because of flaws in PIP. He identified “nine different mistakes.” As noted by Disability News Services
“The coroner told Hopkins [referring to Alice Hopkins, DWP’s head of regional PIP service centres] that the errors in the system “caused somebody fully entitled to benefits to lose it” when “she should have been receiving them all the way along”, leading to “significant distress… problems in the family relationship, her sense of self, her role as a mother.”
The tragic story of Philippa Day is not the sole example of someone failed by the broken welfare system in the UK. Far from it. In November of 2017, James Moore of The Independent published an article seeking to dispel the myth that “there’s no real poverty in the UK” — an argument he said “you regularly see this sort of argument doing the rounds in Conservative circles.”
Moore rebutted with a simple fact: “poverty kills. And it kills here just as it does in…less apparently wealthy parts of the world. We do have a welfare state in this country, but the Conservative Party’s beloved austerity has chipped away at it over the course of seven years, to the detriment of the old, the disabled, the infirm and the poor….by 2020 the “mortality gap” — one of those bland terms that are frequently used to describe brutal truths — could have hit 200,000, even with the extra funding that has recently been allocated to social care.”
We are in 2021. And despite a vicious pandemic and its aftershock, there was a call to cut additional funding granted earlier in the pandemic to vulnerable families through Universal Credit — people hard-hit by a once-in-a-lifetime crisis struggling to feed themselves and their families. 278 Members of Parliament (MPs) voted in favour of a motion calling for the proposed cut. Nobody objected. All but six Conservative Party MPs abstained at the direction of their party leader and Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
2019 witnessed the emergence of a virulent plague. But there are other virulent plagues such as the callous indifference to human life and suffering that has engendered over the course of successive governments a state of affairs where some people in one of the world’s ostensibly wealthiest nations struggle to eat.
This plague is so virulent that it has not only spread throughout our corridors of power, but our communities. The concept of the ‘benefit scrounger’ is at almost deity-like levels of omnipresence. Perhaps there are some who try to game the system. Perhaps there are some who receive support from welfare who perhaps do not need and/or deserve it. Undoubtedly there are people who are frustrated by the management of our welfare system — but are they frustrated for the right reasons?
The conversation about whether or not someone is deserving of support from the state, at the time we are in, is not the conversation we need to have right now. The focus needs to be on the vulnerable. The focus, if anything, should always be on the vulnerable. As part of that, the focus needs to be on officials’ mismanagement and neglect, on errors they make that can result in people starving and cost them their lives.
“By the end of the week, when the food shopping has dwindled away, it’s a case of having a complete mismatch of dinners, and sometimes my husband and I don’t eat,” 28-year-old Emma told The Independent amidst the debate over cutting Universal Credit in early 2021 — at a time when a virus is raging and the economic and public health damage to communities and individuals is staggering and harrowing in equal measure.
“There’s nothing worse than the kids being hungry, on top of everything else,” Emma said. “There have been nights where it’s a case of we’ve got one egg left — let’s halve it.”
Universal Credit, like PIP, seems to be beset by errors. “When my partner went on maternity leave, we signed up for Universal Credit,” John (name changed) told me. “Everything was fine, got paid monthly, I was in university so was getting my Student Finance — she continued to get her Maternity Pay until the January.
“Skip forward to April 2020 and they send me a letter telling me they’ve overpaid me by £6000 and that I now need to pay it back. Turns out, they changed their rules in April and that my student finance (which they knew of and had all of the documents around) now needed to be back calculated into what they paid us.”
The way Universal Credit pays out can be both help and hindrance. “It definitely helped me because, you know, I was receiving Universal Credit and almost receiving 250 pounds a month,” Chris (named changed) told me. Chris found himself homeless at a young age and relied on Universal Credit for his needs. However, he added,” I don’t think it really helped me meet my needs, because giving £250 to a person who’s in a hostel on a monthly basis is not great. I mean, if they gave it to me on a weekly basis, then maybe you know it would be a lot better in terms of my ability to budget.”
When he managed to move into his own flat, Universal Credit failed to provide him with essential appliances like a fridge, cooker, and washing machine. “Having to go through the summer without being able to have a cold drink or months without a proper cooked meal was damaging,” Chris said. “Some days I just wouldn’t even eat.”
The need for welfare such as Universal Credit is up during the pandemic. In the northeast alone, more than 112,000 require Universal Credit payments the Chronicle reports. But with the proposed cuts going ahead at the time of writing, the impact for families and individuals reliant on these cases is potentially “devastating” in the words of Citizens Advice Newcastle. A £20 cut sounds slight — but as the Chronicle notes, “for households in the North-East, the loss of £20 a week is equivalent to three days’ worth of food or six and a half days of gas and electricity.”
What is clear is that the welfare system in the UK is broken and has been for some time. Rethinking the welfare system and ensuring it properly meets people’s needs — from providing food vouchers as Chris suggested to me to administrative reforms to make sure what John endured — ought to be the priority. The myth of the benefits ‘scrounger’ is seemingly everywhere. Instead, we should be talking about the reality of the incompetent, at times callous, government.
