DWP Outsourced Jobfinder services (PS: My complaint has been upheld).

Having had to deal with the DWP extensively this year due to an injury. I can say without fear of contradiction that they are a mismanaged shower with entire systems duplicated in several places. Outsourced services to independent contracting companies, with variations in those same outsourced services from region to region (Web portals, interpretations of the scheme and its implementation, methodology and management). There is a common schema they must have tendered to, but clearly, the government doesn't own the implementation process.

This means, that if you have been dropped into the Southwest silo (as I was initially), then move back to Essex. Because the outsourced agency is different for that region, you have to start all over again "Yeah we'll scrub all that and put you into our scheme." those words that order. However, at the same time, the previous outsourced unit (Serco for our purposes) isn't informed of the change (and even if they have been informed, they still carry through the process because it is in their interests for billing purposes and KPI's).

On from this, those same services just aggregate results from across the web, so as you move through lists of say, available jobs, they become less relevant (they are just an extra layer of links to elsewhere). A fair number of the people that work within these schemes have been recruited this year and last year, by the government's contractors to assist in alleviating the fallout from the pandemic (massaging the unemployment figures and are temporary in nature). More often than not, if you have had a relatively varied and successful career, you find yourself teaching the teachers, who are from the conversations I've had, people who have had one job in one place for their entire careers. They have been rushed through training and just parrot stuff from a script, before sending you a link to review their performance. Boxes ticked, responsibilities absolved, KPI's met ... moving swiftly on.

I concede that the government couldn't predict the pandemic or its fallout. But I can say that the mitigation efforts are a total clusterfuck. And of course, it's the governments favourite outsource companies carving up the pie, G4S, Serco etc. Underlying this is the DWP itself, who now after eight months and an official complaint acknowledge that I have been subject to no less than five points of official maladministration, and thirteen points of order, including, poor service, misinformation, or just wrong information.

And let's not get into how much of our money is spunked on letters, duplicates of the same letters to ensure they cover their arses, and lowest cost time of day SMS messaging and multiple thereof.

And finally, having acknowledged that the DWP have screwed up right royally, the complaint is too complex for the people in the complaints department to deal with, so now the onus is back on the end-user, Me, to escalate it to the next level. Yet again, box ticked, responsibility absolved, moving swiftly on. It truly beggars’ belief how shit the civil service is. I had a bit of a clue from working for them as a third-party contractor, but once you are in the thick of it as a user, it is mind-bendingly bad.

Government Bureaucracy, how it trips itself up.

Today I had to go to a Job Centre in Southend on Sea, to have an initial meeting with a Work-Coach. I have had to move back this way for a few months to overwinter … domestic separation is frankly a nuisance (to put it mildly). 

Why is a visit to a Job Centre worthy of a blog? Easy to answer. As per a post from a few weeks ago, Airing your personal disaster laundry in public. I have discovered that I was set on (in my opinion) the wrong road when I was pushed in the direction of Employment Support Allowance. 

How did I deduce this? Again, Easy. My newly assigned Work-Coach in Southend on Sea asked me about the pre-existing health condition (back injury, current but mending, with an over-arching long-term limitation), and said that I needed to register with a local GP and provide Fmed3 certificates until such time as I feel fit for work if that is appropriate. 

She told me that if I need to take the “Health Journey” within the Universal Credit system I will have to go through the process of having … wait for it … A Work Capability Assessment, within the Universal Credit system.

So, I was right. I am right. I was injured I needed space to recover. There is an existing system in place to account for the process. Job Seekers Allowance using FMed3 forms (Fit Notes to you and I), and if you have run out of national Insurance credits for the purposes of Job Seekers Allowance you fall into the Universal Credit remit. If you are sick while on either Job Seekers Allowance or Universal Credit, all you need to do is provide Fmed3 forms (Fit Notes to you and I) until you are well enough to work again, and or it is decided that you can’t work anymore. In my humble opinion, I am now fit for work and looking for a part-time role to carry me through the winter until I can Exfil back to the West Country.

What shouldn’t have happened? Easy to answer again. I shouldn’t have been moved from a Job Seekers Allowance to Employment Support Allowance. I should have been told to provide FMed3 forms (Fit Notes to you and I) within the Job Seekers Allowance process and or Universal Credit process until such time as I was fit for work.  And not be put into a stream for people who may have “perpetual” Limited Capability for Work. A private letter costing £30 would have been useful in bridging the gap and certifying from a medical perspective, that I can’t do manual work long-term because I only have two working lumbar disks and they are as Isildur would say “Precious to me”.

Let’s briefly talk about the qualifying criteria for Employment Support Allowance. Well actually let’s just post a link to the form, then you can read it through and see exactly how stringent the criteria are to qualify as having limited Capability to Work. And bear in mind I know a guy who manages a massive garden centre from the confines of a motorised wheelchair (quadriplegic). His neck was broken at the age of twenty-one (passenger in a car that crashed). I tore some soft tissue in the lumbar slipping on ice, I may have ricked the cage at my lowest fusion site but I still haven’t seen an orthopaedic specialist or had any form of scan.

ESA Limited capability for work form

ESA50-capability-for-work-questionnaire.pdf

Then let’s look at the equivalent Universal Credit, Limited capability for work form

UC50-interactive.pdf 

Apart from the form's internal number and layout (Four page overall difference, down to line spacing as far as I can tell) … spot the material difference. I am not going to investigate further than this. I am going to ask what’s the point? What is the point of having two separate streams of assessment with the same stringent criteria to measure limited capability for work?

I have an official complaint in progress. I am told there will be a response to me by the 27th of October 21.

Things I already know.

Job Centres don’t record calls. They can’t necessarily see everything from every other silo and vice versa. 

Job Centre and call centre operatives working from home don’t record calls. No one takes notes verbatim; they write what they think they heard not what was said (if at all). It could be that the notes just say the time and date of the call and nothing more.

Call centre staff in call centres do record calls. No one takes notes verbatim; they write what they think they heard not what was said (if at all). It could be that the notes just say the time and date of the call and nothing more.

Someone from Newport tried to swerve the complaint and say that it was invalid. They hadn’t actually read it, they just tried to dismiss it. I had to insist it was moved forward.

The paperwork for the work capability assessment did go missing. This I already thought I knew. However, it had been dismissed, by a Job Centre manager in Bridgwater … turns out she was wrong.

Where do our taxes go? Where is the value add in all this? Why are there these ridiculous silos? How is Universal Credit, universal, when it is nested in with all these other duplicate systems? Why is there Job Seekers Allowance, New Style Job Seekers Allowance, Employment Support Allowance, New Style Employment Support Allowance? And a plethora of others.

I’ll just say, right here that the answer to all of this idiocy is UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME. Just think about the savings.

Having worked all my life mostly in commercial areas. I struggle with government systems, I struggle with bureaucracy, I struggle with petty bureaucracy, I struggle with the mess, the convolutions, the silos, duplication, the misinformation caused by the complexity that serves no purpose, except it seems to bamboozle the public create a smokescreen for people to hide behind and as I said elsewhere, allow people to avoid all responsibility, through judicious buck-passing.

This isn’t the government of the day's fault, or the previous governments or indeed successive governments over decades. This shit is the fault of the civil service, it’s willfully and woefully inefficient because it provides security of tenure by dint of opacity.

This Means War (on the DWP).

I have fallen through every crack in every system and hit every branch of the incompetence tree on the way through. I will post a copy of the letter I have written to my MP, The DWP minister, The Health Secretary, and the housing minister, describing the events of the last eight months, in a subsequent post. I wasn't going to, but I don't really have a choice now.

I stand here today in a state of disbelief at how catastrophically badly run our civil service systems are run. How convoluted, complex and short-sighted they are. How narrow the bandings are? How inflexible they are. How little, people from department to department ... desk to desk, seem to know about the systems they administer. The absolute absence of integrity or taking of responsibility for errors and omissions and the subsequent catastrophic results for external parties (me).

You speak to people, and all have their own view, or interpretation and there is no consistency. And if you hit a habitual gatekeeper or petty bureaucrat, by crikey are you going to struggle. Never mind "Computer says NO", find someone who just wants to do the minimum and bounce out calls for the flimsiest reasons but hit their KPI for answering a phone, and then hides behind "it's not in my remit." "That's a different section." "no one is available." etc etc

You are told things that are entirely contradictory, by people in the same place/department or organisation on the same day. People who are blithering on, from their stock set of responses, without looking further than the end of their noses. To then be forced to; only to find that now their noses are going rubbed in it because they weren't willing to look when first asked. Once this is done, all you can hear is the sound of back-pedalling and excuses.

Systems shut you down with no chance of appeal and no room to move, and the people that manage these systems apparently have no control over them (there is the "the computer says No." aspect, in addition to intractable people). There is a deliberate and conscious effort and cultural imperative to; Back-cover, deny, and clear evidence of failure ... bad luck I keep every email.

I count myself fortunate, that I have a certain intellect, and have kept notes for eight months, because, had I not; then I have not the first clue what I would do. 

As I have said in the letter that I will publish on my blog. It is easy to see why people (I am positive I am by no means alone) when confronted with such overwhelming crass stupidity, end up committing suicide. And I don't say that lightly or for dramatic effect, feels or likes. Lesser minds, less well organised, who may have blindly trusted a system to find themselves where I am today, could easily crumble, and I get it 100%. The mind truly boggles. 

To suggest that it's all just an aspect of the pandemic, and therefore no one is to blame, denies utterly the structural failings of pre-existing systems, and the government's inability to get its people working from home while imposing that condition on millions of people and companies UK wide. I am not going to be collateral damage. I am going to be dishing it out.

I am going to be creating some very big waves going forward.