Inside Housing’s anonymous columnist is a senior housing officer  

Cathy: champion scrounger

As I age, aside from growing grumpier, I am increasingly incredulous at the simplistic solutions touted by politicians and pundits to complex social problems.

To judge from most of our media - both print and broadcast - we are a nation of scroungers; lazy, feckless idlers out for something for nothing. No, I’m not talking about bankers. I mean people who get assistance from the state. Any reality TV show producer will tell you that. And producers are clever folk, or so they tend to believe.

Occasionally though, the real world can be glimpsed behind the media curtain. In January, Inside Housing ran an online story reporting the findings of a survey by the Methodist Church that a hundred people a day with mental health problems are getting their benefits sanctioned by the Department for Work and Pensions.

Housing professionals were shocked but not surprised, while media pundits with heads stuck fast in the ideological sand were full of spurious justifications. Meanwhile, the politicians, who have the power to sort this problem out, carried on oblivious.

It left me wondering how it is possible, in our society at this time, to get the message to the public that some people really are suffering? No TV producer in Britain today would be able to sell the idea of Cathy Come Home to a commissioning editor. Cathy Champion Scrounger would do the trick, though

Broken system

In my own small way, I try to shed a little light by telling friends and acquaintances the real-life stories of people who have fallen foul of the system.

Like Jenny, second-generation British but with a Polish name, whose income support was stopped because some bureaucrat thought that they’d better do some extra checks given that she had a foreign surname.

They sent her a letter, but Jenny is a vulnerable young woman who fears authority and is borderline learning disabled. The letter sat in her flat unopened until the day she turned up in tears to tell our support workers that her benefits had been cut off. Guilty until proven innocent.

And, of course, because she had lost her income support, someone in my own council decided that she must be working again and therefore not entitled to housing benefit.

It all took weeks to fix and now Jenny has arrears that she was neither responsible for, nor has any chance of paying off. Meanwhile, the benefits machine churns inexorably on, blindly crushing other Jennys unlucky enough to get in its way.

Then there are those fitness for work tests. ATOS took a lot of the blame as the organisation seemingly switching off benefit entitlements on a whim. But the reality is that whatever company assesses claimants, they will have targets to meet and they will employ people without scruples to do the government’s dirty work.

Take Susie, a 23-year-old with autism and schizophrenia. She has the bad luck to sound articulate and presents as if she is in control of her life, though any of her support workers would tell you she is an accident waiting to happen.

She is in expensive, supported accommodation and was gradually learning the skills necessary to live independently, though she will never be fit for work.

However, that wasn’t the view of the employability assessors. Susie was told she would have to come off benefits and get a job. Potentially, her pricey supported accommodation would have to go, as well.

Unsurprisingly, the pressure tipped her over the edge. She spent six months as an in-patient in a local psychiatric hospital and is now permanently on medication. She isn’t half the person she used to be. All the effort put in by the support workers is like a sandcastle on the beach: washed away by a crashing wave.

Complex problem

It isn’t only people with mental health issues or learning disabilities who are at risk; the system will crush anyone who doesn’t understand its labyrinthine complexities. How many young people, first time on the dole, are aware of how easy it is to be sanctioned?

I know plenty who struggle to manage their chaotic lives and have become victims of this heartless process.

You could say, ‘Well that’ll learn ‘em.’ In some cases, you might even be right. But it isn’t just the lack of sympathy for those with mental health problems that concerns me. It is that, for a significant number of fit people, we are actually creating psychological problems.

A ‘serves them right’ attitude underpins this. These are the hallmarks of a society without pity and without understanding. Our society. Has this state-sponsored cruelty brought down the benefits bill? Not so far as I am aware.

What it has done is spread fear and misery. I believe our social security system alienates people and I suspect it encourages crime, too. No doubt academic research is going on into the impact of these benighted policies already.

The results of that research will of course be ignored by politicians more interested in playing to populist prejudices whipped up by the media.  Meanwhile, housing officers, support staff, social workers and policemen will have to handle the fallout. We try to pick up the pieces, negotiate with the bureaucrats and put lives back on track.

What frustrates me most though, and makes this tetchy old housing officer much more than merely grumpy, is that there appears to be nothing any of us can do about it.

(I copied it to save people registering )