This is England 2024
I wish I had more time to tell the stories of my clients. The very human stories of relationship breakdowns, domestic abuse, health crisis, loss of employment, dashed hopes, disappointments and…hernias. The media is saturated with Tory talking heads bemoaning the fact that there are ‘too many’ people who are too sick or too disabled to work, and actually, they should be ‘put’ to work somehow, no matter what their condition, because serving the economy is apparently more important than anything else.
So I thought I would write about someone who absolutely hates being on sickness benefits, is desperate to return to work and has almost lost all hope of ever doing so. Like so many, he doesn’t fit their narrative. He doesn’t live a life of Riley. He hasn’t got the ‘latest mobile phone’ and he doesn’t have 10 holidays a year. But he is incapacitated, in pain and, now, heavily in debt.
Indebtedness can be thrust upon us by some misfortune or it may begin as a wormhole which imperceptibly widens its circumference until it is a sinkhole, and then we may be falling down it and realising, with horror, that it’s much deeper than we feared. It happens.
I spoke to JD (a man whose particular misfortune was a hernia) at length last week. It’s been a long and painful journey for him and we are a year on from my other article on here: Don’t Get a Hernia. As if on a train journey with unfeasibly long tunnels, JD sits in the dark, seeing no light; waits as the train makes unscheduled stops in barren places with no stations, waits for signals to change, wondering which track the train will take next.
It took a long time to reach Diagnosis, and an even longer time to arrive at Surgery. He then stopped unexpectedly at Post-Operative Complications and all the while, battled repeatedly with the Department for Work and Pensions, in order to claim the most meagre of subsistence benefits.
It took 3 attempts to get Support for Mortgage Interest, (thanks to DWP incompetence), the interest-bearing secured loan that has been paying a quarter of his monthly mortgage payment for the past 15 months. It took 2 attempts to get Personal Independence Payments, one attempt resulting in a failed appeal before finally having his significant daily living and mobility problems deemed worthy of a paltry amount of financial aid. He bought much-needed new underwear to celebrate that win (yes, he overshares, but I’ve been on this journey with him for a while now).
And now he is trying for a second time to get formal recognition for having Limited Capability for Work Related Activity. I say ‘formal’ because the people he interacts with at the Job Centre know full well he can’t work. They tell him they will leave him alone, won’t force training or job-hunting on him because it’s obvious he can’t do these things yet. But the decision-makers refuse it time and again – and it matters, it’s an extra £400 per month which would pay his mortgage.
Having been rejected (again) he must now begin that woefully familiar process of requesting a mandatory reconsideration. On and on it goes and the train pulls off again.
If this fails, then it may go to appeal and this adds 1000s of miles of tracks to his journey. Who even knows when an appeal would be heard? And then if the appeal fails, we will have reached the end of the track.
JD absolutely does NOT want to be ‘on benefits’. He hates every minute of it. He wants his life back. He wants to earn his own money by his own graft and he wants to enjoy his time outside of work with friends like he used to.
But he is in constant pain, sometimes nagging, sometimes agonising. He finally began the much anticipated steroid injections in February. It was great to begin with and he was so thrilled that he immediately overexerted himself in the garden to test out his capacity for going back to groundwork.
Then the effects of the steroid subsided and the agony came back with a vengeance. He ‘eats the pills’ and feels depressed. He had all his hopes pinned on the steroid unlocking the station named ‘Normal Life’. It’s devastating when this doesn’t happen.
And this is where we were last week. He feels like giving up. What’s the point? He’s on new anti-depressants, more painkillers, can’t go out, can’t see people. What life is this?
Dear Johnned and Not-Rights
Meanwhile, he tells me that the Penny Pantry has ‘dear Johnned’ him. He was sick of it though. Sick of queuing for hours – not easy with the pain – and then having to choose between foods that were sometimes out of date. Yes, it was cheap and yes, he tells me he was grateful, but he’s so sick of being grateful for the crumbs. He didn’t turn up for a couple of weeks and they rescinded his membership; many more are on the waiting list.
He feels as though he’s been dumped off the train in no-man’s land and I’m trying my best to persuade him that he’s still going from here to there, and ‘there’ might be better than ‘here’.
He feels surrounded by ne’er-do-wells and ‘not-rights’ as he calls them. People from the past who offer easy money for little effort, but he would need to let go of any attachment to the law, and this isn’t the destination he wants to be at either. Who would?
He’s looked for work too. He can’t go back to groundwork because it’s too arduous for a man in chronic pain. He can’t drive, and can’t afford to learn how to drive, so driving jobs are out. He considered working as a security guard, but he needs a licence for that and, honestly, how will he manage all day on his feet when…pain? Government support to get back into work sounds good, but in practice, it’s not there for people like JD.
The GP is referring him back to the NHS for mental health services. It’s not just the physical limits, it’s the mental anguish too. He rattles around in his house, with too much time to think and when he turns on the TV, he sees Mel Stride cheerfully announcing to Laura Keunsberg, that he’s clamping down on those people who are merely skiving off work to enjoy a life on benefits, having secured a pass from their GP because they ‘feel a bit bluesy’, or he might see Jeremy Vine debating with rent-a-gobs about whether or not sick people deserve even a threadbare safety net. Who are these people and what do they know about the reality?
He worries endlessly about the mortgage. The company, Whistletree, are being incredibly, unexpectedly understanding. As long as there are still a couple of stations left on the journey which leave open the prospect of JD one day being able to pay his mortgage, then they seem to be willing to keep on holding off legal action.
But JD is well aware that the arrears are now over £8000 and this is where I normally come in with a plan. But I don’t have one. If, and it’s a big if, he can get the LCFWRA element of Universal Credit, then he can at least stop the arrears increasing. If not, he fears that he will lose the house and have no equity with which to start again. Not even a deposit for a rental.
So just to reiterate to Messers Hunt, Stride, Vine, Sunak, et al – this is not the life you think it is. There is no safety net, there is only a trap. If you want to work but are too sick to do so then you are lost, abandoned, forgotten. No-one would choose this. Please save your scorn for those who blow obscene amounts of tax payer money to take (for example) helicopter trips in place of 2 or 3 stops on the Clapham omnibus while trashing every single public service we – the people – depend on.
JD gave me permission to write this. He wants people to know about what he’s going through because he genuinely wants help. I’m just a debt adviser, my toolbox is limited and I’ve become nothing more than a go-between translating the words on all of JD’s expletive-heavy postcards from the train to Nowhere to the mortgage company, hoping to buy him a bit more time so, if nothing else, he can remain safe in his home.
I wonder how many more people are in this situation? From what I see, the mental toll is even greater than the physical. The extinguishing of hope is brutal. It doesn’t help that the main political parties appear to be so down on those who have suffered with a life event that leaves them dangling off a precipice. This is not the time for berating, it’s the time for reaching out with a hand to pull them to safety.
It’s also the time to invest in mental health services, and to link them in with other support, be it debt advice, welfare rights, housing advice or whatever might be needed.
To be clear, no-one wants to live a shit life. And ‘shit-life syndrome’ – as I recently saw someone label it – destroys people. We have an epidemic of shit-life syndrome happening now. England 2024.
