Universal credit & domestic abuse

[QuarksandLeptons]

Good article in the Financial Times

www.ft.com/content/aaaaf2fa-4c63-11e8-8a8e-22951a2d8493

Brief summary:
10% of the households receiving the benefit are couples. The new system puts it all into one account which means that in the event of it going into the account of a controlling & abusive partner, the abusive partners can end up not sharing the money, leaving women and children vulnerable. There are cases documented of women and children going hungry and not having money for nappies or sanitary items.
Worse, women & children end up being forced to stay in dangerous circumstances because they don’t have the money to leave.

How can changes like these be made to the system without thinking through the real life consequences to huge numbers of women & children? Surely, this would have been flagged up if relevant women’s groups had been asked to comment on proposed changes

I love how they tell us to get jobs...no jobs out there and how do they expect a mum with a young child/children to go back to work on min wage and afford child care? It’s patronising to people. It’s easy for them that has good paying jobs to tell others to work like slaves on basic wages.
If jobs were readily available then people wouldn’t rely on a few days dried food from a food bank.

Yes. The rot started when Income Support went. Let's not forget New Labour also introduced the hideous WCA for disabled and ill people. New Labour were as wedded to the neoliberal adult worker model of social security as the Tories were.

I think we can safely say that Labour would never have been as vicious as the Tories have been since 2010 - but the fact remains that New Labour pretty much created the architecture that allowed the Tories to be this vicious.

I really very strongly believe it deserves much deeper thought than just ‘Everyone should work in a job’...

For a start - what job? What are you doing with your time when you are not in waged work? Is it even overall offering financial benefit on an individual/societal level? What social costs does working have in terms of the individual/society? Etc etc etc

We can’t just say all waged work is always beneficial for all people all the time and everyone being in jobs solves all problems for all individuals and society. We can’t blame unemployment for all of everything that is wrong with individuals and society and this is all intimately tied to the fact that the work women are expected to do is neither paid nor valued because having had this ‘work solves everything’ approach for decades we know that what it means for women is actually ‘you have to keep doing everything you always did for your own family and your community but you also have to work or you aren’t a person.... and yes, any job....’

Well, I suppose now with UC it has become ‘no, not any job, it must be the kind of job we specify; good wages/longer hours’ the above was more new labour

The only reason New labour would not have taken it to this level is because they wouldn’t have liked what it said about them to be this harsh.

They totally agreed with the ideology. This is in part why we have this divide in the party now, the utter betrayal of adopting that ideology and the small comfort ‘they would never have been as bad as the tories’ brings for labour’s traditional supporters.

It’s also really fucking stupid to make your niche in the political spectrum ‘not as bad as those other guys’ and why politics is in such a mess now IMO. When that happens everything is done relative to what the others are doing and ultimately the effect is people move more towards the ones who own the narrative.

Smeaton - I can’t quite remember but I think the 16 hours would have been enough to satisfy new labour and you wouldn’t be required to be searching for job #2.

But it makes me so the whole thing.... it’s so demeaning...

I think under new labour you would have been able to specify that you wanted certain types of work only (within reason)

'No one is making men take any further responsibilities for their children though. The efforts made by CMEC to get maintenance from my ex are so laughable - if he owed the same amount in court fines you can bet they'd be sorting it asap.'

This ^^.

Also re what benandhollysmum said;

I love how they tell us to get jobs...no jobs out there and how do they expect a mum with a young child/children to go back to work on min wage and afford child care? It’s patronising to people. It’s easy for them that has good paying jobs to tell others to work like slaves on basic wages.
If jobs were readily available then people wouldn’t rely on a few days dried food from a food bank.

Again this is about ‘what kind of job?’ For a great many the job is not just min wage but 0 hours or temporary work. For many even if it is a permanent job the insecurity of the general lives of the people subject to this means that in a year they will have been in and out of work a number of times, every time accumulating debt because of shifting between systems. This leads to having to leave your rented house due to arrears and accumulating more debts because of moving costs.

And then your kids start acting up because you've had to move three times and they're on their third primary school and third time of making new friends...

... and then, and then, and then. It goes on forever.

I think the idea of individual choice being a big factor in this is misdirection... I can see why it feels this way for many.

I can see why it would particularly feel this way for a man caught in it.

For most women caught in it their individual choices throughout their lives have always been between a man or this system even if they have been higher earners in their careers because of the vulnerability to exploitation that biology brings.

They have may never have had a chance to choose whether they become stay at home parents, everything has been set up to make that the default set up.

I don’t think, even for those who did choose to be at home with children and then were abandoned by the other parent, they should even consider their individual choices as relevant to this outcome. That choice is about taking on the childcare not being dependent on welfare.

These choices about welfare were made about them by other people. They are ideological, they are not necessary and they are designed to be punitive to those who are not able to meet the ideals of those making the decisions.

It should not be in one of the richest countries in the world that families are made destitute because one parent abandons their partner and children. This should not ever happen.

And yes, that means dependence on the state to provide security but the state really needs to stop pretending that it has no interest in this. It is entirely uncontroversial to say that the state has responsibility to it’s citizens. They simply cannot pretend that they don’t and it is all about individual choices and private family life.

The modern state has a choice between paying to support the citizens or paying (almost always vastly more) to fix the messes created by penury across the whole lives of the children who have grown up in it.

I've misremembered then. I was actually working in a jobcentre when the Tories got in and for some reason I'd misremembered it as being in the pipeline beforehand (the irony! They made me redundant when I'd worked there just over two years, then refused to pay me redundancy pay as ' We are The Crown so we don't have to follow the usual employment laws' - Still never paid me even when a Judicial Review found them to be in the wrong).

Now I think about it, it was the whole 'Work Program' and working with 'Problem Families' thing that I was thinking of. Apologies.

What the media say/do should not determine public policy... this is largely a Blair thing...

Roomba - that’s, again, appalling about the redundancy pay.... especially if you look at what happened with all the higher status redundancies in other services (like my mum in the NHS) where they got redundancy pay AND hired into the new job in the restructuring...

JR is a ridiculous thing too. It has no weight at all in law. It’s basically an expensive way to prove a principle and nothing else.

My mum was a director of public health, she got made redundant and immediately hired into an equivalent role BTW.

I'm a single parent on Income Support at the moment. My daughter is 3.5 at the moment. When she is 5 I will move on to UC. I'm terrified.
I'd love to work when she's at school, but I know the Jobcentre will want me to work any time between 8am and midnight.

Indeed. I heard DWP colleagues who had been there decades talking about long ago, when getting some benefits was dependent on getting a visit from 'the man' who would examine your home for extraneous items and deny money based on this. So, your errant husband has legally 'abandoned' you, there's three of you - you own four dining chairs - you won't get the full amount of supplementary benefit until you've sold that chair. An extreme example from long ago, but it feels like this is what we're heading back towards! That or workhouses.

And most of society is perfectly happy with that as they are force fed the crap about Sky telly, flatscreen TVs, fancy trainers, scroungers, blah blah. TV shows about tenants in debt, bailiffs, saints or scroungers - all to convince us that it is 100% the poor's fault for choosing to be in this situation.

Working Class people have known this for a very long time. It's starting to bite the middle classes more now though. Hell, I'm probably what most people would call middle class, well educated, always worked full time and paid taxes until I suddenly had two kids (one with SEN) to bring up single handed, which coincided with being made redundant. They didn't give me any MAT pay either btw, as I gave birth 4 weeks after leaving - again, taken them to court, found in my favour, they've paid me nothing! Another government department wouldn't pay me any benefits as I 'should be getting maternity pay' - this delayed me leaving my abusive ex by 9 months as I would have had nothing to live on at all.

I know all the right 'lingo' and what phrases to use when dealing with various departments. I'm able to express myself clearly and point out when things have been miscalculated. But I've still found myself shafted by the fact that there was no miscalculation, they just weren't going to help me and weren't legally obliged to.

I've spoken to a few MC acquaintances who have found themselves dealing with UC now after changes of circs, also self employed people who've never had any issues before but are now finding themselves in this Orwellian nightmare and absolutely raging about it. In a sick way, I look forward to everyone being moved on UC purely because so many will be utterly outraged at what is now expected of them that I can't see it being maintained as it is at present. Maybe that's too optimistic...

An extreme example from long ago, but it feels like this is what we're heading back towards! That or workhouses.

It does. The Work Programme has always reminded me of making the "undeserving poor" pick oakum. There is something extremely Victorian moralist about it.

Yy Roomba

Smeaton - This whole ‘individual choice’ thing is gaslighting but it is written into all the policy and research.

If you read the calculations re UC and ‘benefits to the exchequer’ to anyone who is living with this system it is glaringly obvious that this is all about an obsession with ‘nudge theory’ (as with Blair and the third way).

In order to measure the net benefit you have to severely restrict the terms of reference to strictly ‘how much the govt gets in tax/pays in benefits’ and assume that the changes will not result in knock on effects.

It has not looked in any depth at how the knock on effects of the policy may push the costs of other things up - crime, housing, social care, public health, education etc etc etc.... But we know UC increases the burden on the NHS, social care, education etc etc

You just can’t make policy in that way... it is idiotic to have done such an unbelievably simplistic analysis, suspiciously so in fact...

I think the tories (and new labour) are perfectly prepared to pay more for less just to suit their Victorian ideology.

Yup. I have no doubt I'm seen as one of the feckless who deserves all they get. Depressing.