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.

Southend on Sea, the over winter refuge and the refugee.

A massive Hiatus.

I beg your pardon.

Yooerd.

So, I had to decamp from Stogursey in Somerset two weeks ago tomorrow. I am staying with very good friends, in their newly extended house in Southend-on-Sea. I am rooming, in what should be their snug. So, from the town with the world’s shortest pier to the town with the world’s longest pier. There is a poetic asymmetry to that situation I have always loved. Remembering of course that before `we’ went travelling in 2013, we lived at my brother's place in the very same Southend-on-Sea, just a mile or two from this location (brother is still there).

It is not an ideal situation, though my friends wouldn’t have it any other way. What comes next is going to sound ungrateful at first glance but will be mitigated a line or two further on. As a famous author friend of mine told me earlier this year. Writing, any writing is like clay, you can add, subtract, and mould as you go. You edit as you write and reread and write again (in paragraph writing terms this is paragraph six).

Slightly grim bit (Grim is short for Graeme, not Graeme is grim, Grim’s Reality is the reality of Graeme known as The Grim … it is about time I cleared that up). Adjectives you could describe my current existence as, and also the previous few weeks since I was unceremoniously asked to leave my own home by someone, I invested all my trust in for thirteen years: wretched, sorry, woeful, humiliating, painful, shameful. There may be more, but I do not want to dig too deep lest I upset my fragile sanity. This piece didn’t start where it ends.

The simple fact of the matter is, that all those adjectives live between my ears.

The reality is my friends are proper cool, the house has loads of room, I have my own space in it (all be it I have to move my bed out the way each day if I am to use it to sit in the snug and give my hosts some space for family time without Uncle Grim, cluttering up the place). It is no sacrifice or stress at all to uplift a foam mattress topped with a Duvaly, it is just a matter of being organised.

In this space, I can recover my fragile sanity noted above. It is fair to say that if you are going to bare your soul and share this experience for public consumption, then you really need to be mindful of not putting a gloss on it, and pretend you are living your best life ever … as people try to do on social media.

This is not a great experience. But believe me, it could be so much worse. Fragile sanity and an example of how fucked up things can get with the smallest of upsets follows.

This morning I awoke to go swimming. I have found a pool. I do not like it much even though I have paid for a month’s membership and have been twice. There are two things that fall out from this at a minimum. One, you cannot force yourself to feel like you are in control by going swimming and pretending that you are back on the horse. Two, the slightest upset throws number one into stark relief. What happened? My car made a funny noise as I pulled away from the kerb. I drove three-quarters of the way to the pool. The car was making an odd noise and it seemed worse when steering. Of course, this meant that any moment the car was going to fail, and I would be stuck miles from home with no chance of rescue because I had to cancel my AA cover because I simply can’t afford it. It is a risk; I have been a member of the AA for years. But when money is short you have to take more risks whether you like it or not. The mind races to the most disastrous potential outcome and your confidence and composure collapse in a festering heap. I was emotionally ruined before 07.30am, I felt exhausted, tearful, fearful and somewhere deep down a voice said `just fucking end it all.’ Bear in mind it was a noise that manifested for a few moments pulling away from a kerb and then going round three roundabouts.

Maybe you are reading this and thinking `for fucks sake man, that’s a bit of an over-reaction.', You might be thinking `wanker, eleven hours later you are writing about it. You’re an attention-seeking twat. Fuck off.’

I would counter that writing about it eleven hours later says I have thought about it all day and tried to understand it. I have listened to its words, I’ve thought about the motivation, the desire to make the nightmare of underlying uncertainty just `FUCK OFF!’ with all haste. The simple fact is, that voice is the voice of desperation and fear. I am going to say now, that I am still reading -very slowly- Jordan Petersons 12 rules for life. I understand that voice thanks to reading the book. Anger he says is the reaction to fear. Fear in this instance is the fear of the unknown (uncertainty), the unknown in this instance is the future. As someone pointed out quite wisely (not Jordan Peterson), suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem. The `end it all’ voice is the voice of abject terror, not fear. It is a strange voice, it is probably in all of us, and maybe we all hear it once in a while. When we are in highly stressful situations, you may hear it a lot. Lately, I’ve heard it a lot. Fortunately, Jordan Peterson and just about everyone you or I know will tell you variously that `ending it all’ isn’t the answer. You will tear their lives apart you will leave all the people you left behind wondering what else they could have done to help you over the hump. Is that their selfishness, that they don’t want to feel all the emotions the suicidal person is feeling at the moment they did whatever they did to end their pain? Possibly, probably, but it is also your friends and family saying in a round-about way that `suicide is a long-term solution to a short-term problem.’

I often say to people who are going through a morass of shit in their lives that `there is always light at the end of the tunnel.’ I caveat the former with: `sometimes the tunnel is long or has curves, so the light may not be immediately apparent.’

Back to the latest triggering event. Let us cut a long story short. The power steering fluid was low. Before I left Somerset, I checked all the fluids, the tyres, and cleaned the windscreen … I even found one of the internal headlamp bulb covers was off and refitted it. I didn’t check the steering fluid. I have owned a lot of cars. I have never once ever checked the power steering fluid; it is just one of those things that is checked at service time by others. My mind in its race to find the worst outcome had immediately found a reason to look for a bill of thousands of pounds, the car being off the road and me not being able to fix it due to a lack of funds. This of course means that I cannot now not drive back to Somerset next week to move my furniture and items out of the house and put them into long-term storage next weekend. I have found a storage unit, and my mother bless her cotton socks has paid for six months. I lose this week no matter what because I can’t exfil back to the west country to `do the do’ and get some bodies to help me at short notice. However, I have booked the space and one can only hope 50sqr feet is enough with clever stacking.

This little upset brought things to a head. I realised that I probably need to park swimming for a while. I don’t feel comfortable at the pool. It is a bit dirty, a bit disorganised and I am not in the clique. The lane etiquette is stated on the boards at the end of the pool, but the people that swim ignore them, and the disinterested staff don’t enforce the etiquette. Therefore, the best thing for me to do in the short term is not give myself more stress by doing something I really like to do, in an environment where I don’t like to do it (it also saves me £27 I can ill afford). After all, I am living on charity and Universal Credit. It doesn’t sit well on my conscience, spending the state's money on what is clearly a luxury, even though it is good for me.

I am in a form of up in the air limbo. Trying to normalise things by force of will is expensive and counterproductive. I realise, reluctantly that just butting heads with reality is just making my mind race in directions it doesn’t need to go. This is probably the case with trying to expedite my return to the west country. I want to be there, but to be there I need a job. That’s a hard sell to employers when you are two-hundred miles away and don’t have anywhere to live of your own; trying to blag around it would be a nightmare. So, you have to be honest with potential employers, and say you are looking to relocate back to the place that has been your home for seven years, that you were forced to leave six weeks ago, and then abandon the county completely two weeks ago. Employers aren’t looking for re-locators, they are looking for people who can turn up on Monday ready to go, and are not in deep shit, homeless and currently prone to absolute panic at the merest hint of upset. So, that is clearly not me right now. However, I am not a usual man, I would live in a B&B until I found a flat to rent. However, sell that idea to an employer.

Now re-read all the above, and then re-read it again, and again and again. That perpetual loop is where the demons live. Knowing the demons live there, stepping back and watching the loop, loop may save your life, for the future the loop doesn’t see. It won’t be easy, you need your friends, you may need the Samaritans, you may have to go to your GP tearful snotty and raggedly crying, but if you do, you will step out of the loop of despair, step off the road to nowhere, you will find just enough perspective to save your friends and family the horror of not knowing what they couldn’t do to save you from yourself and your cohort of self-destructive demons.

https://www.samaritans.org/

This has been an uncomfortable write. The recent focus on everyone’s mental health doesn’t make it any easier to write and especially when the notion of mental health has, in my opinion, been trivialised by people who are actually saying `It’s so unfair’ (unfair being the restrictions created by the pandemic). Life is unfair, the universe does not give two hoots about you or the fact that you exist. Your friends and family do. Your mental health is not trivial. Not being able to go to the pub for a bit, is trivial. It is not trivial if your livelihood and your family’s welfare depends on your pub opening. Know the difference, don’t trivialise mental health.

Final note, hopefully, whomsoever may drift by this blog by any means, will find that they are not alone and do have a future. Remember, sometimes the tunnel is long and has curves. Sometimes you just need to check your steering fluid reservoir and find it’s dry … which may also be a metaphor.

Southend on Sea, my overwinter location.

Staying with good friends over winter, in Southend On Sea.

From the town with the shortest pier in the world, to the town with the longest pier in the world. There is a beautiful asymmetry to this situation.

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.

Everyone is a Miracle

A huffpost article on the odds of being born. 

From the article (there is quite a bit of preamble but just look at the numbers below):

So now we must account for those 150,000 generations by raising 400 quadrillion to the 150,000 power:

[4x10] ≈ 10

That's a ten followed by 2,640,000 zeroes, which would fill 11 volumes the size of my book. Multiplying it all together for the sake of completeness (Step 1 x Step 2 x Step 3 x Step 4):

Are You a Miracle? On the Probability of being born.