Rite of Spring
Hearing Vivaldi creates a Pavlovian stress response in me, now. The extended trilling violin glissando makes my muscles tense, and the now familiar sharp pain in my temples start every time it cycles around again. This version has been so worn down, so overplayed, the feeling it conjures is about as far from Springtime as you can get. There are no rising larks or hosts of daffodils in my mind, no gambolling lambs. This is much more Hitchcock’s Birds and Silence of the Lambs. It’s the same two minutes of high pitched, violently stabbing violins, and the same ominous message, no matter which department you ring.
Still, it fits the mood created by the message “We will treat your personal information with care. We may use it for any of our purposes…”
Any of our purposes? Any? Well, that’s reassuring. I’m sure that covers the DWP for data protection, in that I feel my data is now entirely unprotected. You’d hope that would mean that different government departments would at least be able to share your information between themselves, so it wasn’t up to you personally to keep informing all of them in turn each time one tiny detail of your life changed.
Please feel free to join me in laughing as hollowly as suits your personal experience.
After all, that is supposed to be the Grand Purpose of Universal Credit – that it’s Universal; one overarching payment from one department, replacing all those complicated other benefits. But it just seems to mean that no one has any idea what’s going on, with some benefits clinging on for grim death in some areas, but not others, and no rhyme or reason when or where this happens. It seems be an exercise in cunningly paying people less whilst amalgamating their benefits, or even stopping their payments altogether, since this is all a good excuse for a sneaky reassessment. And of course there’s lots of lovely extra administration to take up time and cost everyone money, and you don’t have to pay people’s benefits whilst their claims are being examined, even if it should eventually turn out they were actually entitled to them all along.
“Instead, administrative staff who have targets to meet for disallowing claims, send out letters saying “I have decided you don’t have any mental health conditions/physical disabilities/missing limbs/etc that affect your day to day living.” Even though you may have provided evidence to the contrary. “
The number of claims that go to appeal and are then proved to be correct is rising. The time spent on administering the process of looking into them, even just on staff looking into the process, sending out letters, and manning the phone lines, is enormous. And it’s a two part process for PIP claims. First there’s a Mandatory Reconsideration phase which currently takes at least six weeks because of the volume of claims being reconsidered. Then, if that is rejected, as it so often automatically is, you can go on to making an appeal. The appeal process involves even more administration and cost, with some cases even ending up in court.
72% of appeals are won by the claimant. That means this whole process was unnecessary 72% of the time. 7 out of 10 people are being wrongly told they are no longer entitled to PIP. ESA appeals are at the same percentage and DLA aren’t far behind at 65%. Universal Credit is still pulling its weight at 53%, which is still the majority of cases – and these are the cases that people are able to pursue this far. And all of this is costing the taxpayer money – much more than simply paying people the money they were entitled to in the first place – and that has often been withheld from them for months, if not years – and absorbing the much lower percentage that might be lost to false claims.
And that figure could be reduced, and the process streamlined overall, if at any point claimants details were checked with the health care professionals or documentation they provide. But that simply doesn’t happen. Instead, administrative staff who have targets to meet for disallowing claims, send out letters saying “I have decided you don’t have any mental health conditions/physical disabilities/missing limbs/etc that affect your day to day living.” Even though you may have provided evidence to the contrary. At appeal, things will undoubtedly come down on your side, but it could easily take six months for that to happen, and who knows if you have the finances, never mind the mental resilience to keep going to the end of that process. Looking at your diagnosis, you almost certainly don’t, and there’s always Vivaldi to stop you phoning up to check what’s happening in the meantime…
“ I was so Vivaldi’d up I couldn’t remember what I was meant to be asking by the time a human voice answered the phone.”
Why yes, I HAVE been on hold all afternoon until the lines closed at 6pm…
But I did get through to Universal Credit. That only took an hour. I was so Vivaldi’d up I couldn’t remember what I was meant to be asking by the time a human voice answered the phone. I just couldn’t get my words out at all. I suppose they must get that a lot, though. Once I could speak, it was a revelation.
“Oh yes. That will be with you by this evening.”
Really? I had to get her to check it twice.
“That’s just unexpectedly efficient…” I said, eventually, completely confused. I wish I’d not been so thrown that I could have asked when it would have been paid if I hadn’t managed to get through. So, they pay you immediately if you ask, but only when you ask, it seems.
But we will have some money.
We can put petrol in the car and buy a big bag of dog food, and more cat litter. We can replace the broken clippers, so we can both have haircuts again, and get some more hair dye. We can pick up both of our new glasses, that aren’t either held together with duct tape, or constantly falling off our face. We will get some £1 daffs from Tesco, and some nice biscuits.
We will do what we did when we got our first Universal Credit payment, as well, and get something for our local food bank. Because, you never know when you might need it, after all.
We might even get a take away. I think we should do that, too. It’s been a while. And it’s good to do something nice, once in a while, if you can,
