The Public and Commercial Services union has confirmed that the DWP two-day strike is to go ahead on 17 and 18 March as the Department has not improved its below inflation pay offer.

Further information is available here -

http://www.pcs.org.uk/templates/internal.asp?nodeid=908355

Amazing.. Do they deserve a pay increase..?

Love this what Ariadne2 said:

DWP makes mistakes; HMRC makes cockups; but for a real, out-and-out buggerup, you need a local authority benefits department!

One LA's HB department's (who shall remain nameless) standard letter when someone has lodged a valid appeal runs something like this.

Thank you for your appeal. We have looked again at the decision again but are unable to change it................................You have 1 month from the date of this letter to lodge an appeal against this decision.

Bloody priceless!

Yes of course they deserve a pay rise.

One of the reasons why claimants and us get such a rubbish service from them is that they are paid so badly that it's hard for DWP to attract and retain competent staff, especially at the more junior levels.

That said, I doubt that extra pay would solve the attitudinal issues which lie behind some of the poor service.

Tue 18-Mar-08 11:37 AM by SandraC

As an ex DWP employee of course i agree with a pay rise.
As Neil has rightly pointed out, they are unable to retain staff as they are constantly looking to get out & find something better paid (I am a prime example). Training is abissmal & unable to do any refresher training as you are far too busy to be released from your day to day duties. Morale is an all time low as more job cuts are announced & doing the work that 2 or 3 people done a few years before. These are the reasons that so many mistakes are made or they don't know what they are talking about. I got out to a better paid, less stressful job & find speaking to the DWP really frustating, but until you've been there .....well thats my rant for the day !!!!

Hate to admit it but feel I have to agree with Neil and Sandra.

But I'd have a caveat in any pay agreement that if they don't improve after a rise they have to sit in with me for at least a month while I see clients.

Ditto Neil and Sandra; I am also ex DWP. In a similar comment to that above; the welfare rights community should be strongly backing the PCS and the DWP staff;....and although it would be interesting for their staff to sit with welfare rights workers, I can guarantee it would be even more illuminating the other way round!

Ditto Steve, Neil and Sandra! Personally I feel this 'them and us' tradition with its petty points-scoring has gone on long enough. There are a lot of committed people left who are merely trying to do a job in increasingly difficult circumstances and I agree that understanding each others roles better would reap huge rewards. I get so angry by what amount to uninformed barbs for the sake of it. I actually recently witnessed a WR worker who looked forward to the forthcoming redundancies at Edinburgh DBC 'so they would see what it's like'. Despicable coming from someone who's meant to have a social conscience.

I fully support all workers in their fight for decent pay and conditions irrespective of their employers and the WR adviser you refer to should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.

I fully take your point about petty point scoring but we should not lose sight of the wider issue. The main problem that advisers have is not with individual benefit officers (although I’ll come back to that) but with the benefit system itself which many find too restrictive, unfair and, in many a claimant’s eyes, daunting and humiliating.

There are far too many stupid initiatives from politicians and senior civil servants and far too little imagination, knowledge and flexibility from senior managers. One of the impacts is that benefit officers are poorly paid and badly trained, have to work with crap IT systems in a target driven environment where staff morale is all but on the floor. It is hardly surprising that given such a state of affairs the standard of service our clients receive is diminished. That suits no one. I, personally, have good relationships with a handful of DWP workers who share my concerns but are wary of voicing them (the level of knowledge of call centre staff being one criticism).

Other impacts have been voiced on this site many times. Recently there has been an insistence in some parts of the country on reps having to sign GL24’s. Other noticeable occurrences are refusing to refund recovered overpayments, which have been found unrecoverable by a tribunal and, most notoriously, the refusal to hand out claim forms.

I don’t blame administrative officers and executive officers working at the coalface for this. It is not their fault if they have been told that they must follow some newly issued, legally dodgy guidance.

However, I do draw the line at officers who are deliberately unhelpful, rude and obtuse. I have recently come across the case of a grown middle-aged man reducing a homeless, teenage girl to tears by his treatment of her and his unlawful insistence on her providing an address before paying her JSA. Then there is the issue of the really awful bad advice, which if given by a WR adviser would result in swift retraining (I had a 17 year old client who was told by a jobcentre official that he had to be 18 to claim a crisis loan).

And, to be even handed, there are some WR advisers who bring the profession into disrepute. Giving bad advice is an obvious one. I’ve forgotten the amount of times clients have told me that adviser X (and this does not apply to any of my colleagues by the way) in relation to completing a DLA form, told them to fill the form in on how they are on their worst day, rather than how the person is most of the time (for the mob) or how they are throughout a period (for the care).

And there are some advisers who do collude with claimants, I’m sure, or those whose dislike of the system blinds them to what is actually in the best interests of their clients, or who like to be bloody minded for bloody minded sake.

This suits no one either. Benefit officers and WR advisers have a duty to work together in a spirit of co-operation and openness to get the best lawful outcome for claimants, to make sure that they are given proper information in an accessible form and are given every assistance to make claiming benefits as easy as possible in a way that suits the claimant and not in a way which best suits the DWP. Similarly, WR advisers have a duty to behave ethically and to put their client’s interests first, to be helpful to the authorities rather than an unnecessary hindrance and to behave with politeness and professionalism at all times.

But, having said all that, as has been highlighted before, welfare rights is not neutral. Our first loyalty is to our clients and the day we lose sight of that is the day to move over and make way for someone else. The benefits system, whether we like it or not is part of the political superstructure and, in the final analysis, loaded with political and class nuances which all of us have sincerely held (if different) views about.

Workers of the world unite.

Well said Nevip!

I can't get The Peoples' Flag out of my head now and I'll be driving everyone mad with it

The working class can kiss my arse
I've got the foreman's job at last.

Thu 10-Apr-08 04:28 PM by suelees

LOL - bet the young 'uns out there won't know the original or the amended version

That little refrain was going round my head on the way to work this morning for some strange reason.

Well said Paul et al

A good post Paul, I'll add my name to it as well.

I think it's also worth pointing out, and Neil briefly mentioned it earlier, the negative attitude towards claimants that pervades everything to do with the benefits system.

At a job interview I was asked "If I could change one thing about the benefits system, what would it be?" I said that I would change the undelying attitude of suspicion towards claimants. This attitude is one of thievery, discrimination and stereotyping (CSA take note).

I think it pervades the entire welfare system from the top down and is perpetuated by Government, the media, the general public (who know only what they're told) and some individuals within the administering bodies. In my view, it is particularly prevalent in local authority benefit departments and the child support agency.

Unfortunately, these things build up over a long period of time and become inherent in the system. They are virtually impossible to remove and like an insipidly-invasive virus they take over everything. This attitude has a tremendously bad impact on the developement of policy, the cost of administration and, more importantly, the lives of the people whose circumstances mean they are forced to seek help and assistance to surive. The pages of these forums are littered with examples of how ordinary peoples lives have been ruined by the benefits system (homelessness, destitution, mental ill-health, poverty, etc, etc) that is supposed to provide support in times of need. The pages of other web forums contain many examples of such attitudes from those administering benefit claims.

On the other hand, with a few exceptions perhaps, advisers tend to approach client's welfare issues in a much more positive light, which I think is why we are generally far more successful at gaining the respect of our clients than the governement departments. We are professional, knowledgeable and caring, but at the same time, we acknowledge our clients responsibilities and the limitations of the legislation.

In another topic, I mentioned that we shouldn't be policing the system and it was suggested that if the sytem worked properly none of us would have jobs. Well, I've always said that the ultimate aim of our jobs should be redundancy. There should be no need for what we do, for it should be done at source. With the money saved from a positive and non-detrimental approach to benefits administration, so much more could be done for the people in this once-great country.

Before I became an adviser I was uneducated and uninformed with no interest or understanding of policy and politics. My understanding is still limited - but I find that very frightening because in the process of becoming informed, I have often been appalled and distressed by what I have seen and come to know.

All I can say now, is roll-on humanity's evolution!

Well I totally disagree with the view that a negative attive pervades every level of the benefits system for reasons given previously. In my view problems exist because of policy-makers applying unworkable policies. This makes implementation at street-level extremely difficult but hands are essentially tied by that stage. Despite this there are still many competent and committed people left in the system who work hard to apply 'workarounds' to help implement guidance and assist claimants.
What I feel people lose sight of is that the very nature of our work dictates that we only ever see the worst case scenario. Clients aren't going to come in and tell us when things go without a hitch so we never see the cases which do go right first time. I am by no means saying that the system is perfect - obviously it isn't-but in the interests of fairness, there has to be balance. I am very lucky to have experienced both sides which maintains my objectivity.

I would just like to add that, as another ex-DHSS'er, I share the views espoused above that we in the welfare rights community (if there is such a thing?) should be supportive of colleagues working in a rapidly shrinking, and constantly evolving, Governmental department. Massive and ongoing job cuts with DWP affect us all, the civil servants, the claimants, and the welfare rights workers and others who have to try to assist vulnerable individuals with mapping their way through a torturously difficult system.

There is good and bad practice on all sides as well (as Paul so rightly notes above), but that shouldn't shield us from the fundamental shift that is currently taking place in the way that payments of public money (eg taxes) are no longer directly funding public services, but are increasingly being used instead to pay the private sector to provide public services. Given that private companies first duty is towards generating profit for the shareholders, I feel this has potentially significant impacts on the people we work with who require assistance, or more lately, who are required to engage with that assistance, at threat of financial sanctions.

How can Government expect DWP to continue producing a good service when many senior experienced staff have been moved on, staff turn-over is enormous, morale is low, terms and conditions and training are poor (iirc, at least 25% of DWP staff are entitled to benefits and TCs themselves), and the system they are required to administer is becoming ever more complex. I have had some very good relationships with DWP staff at liaison meetings and the like in the past and hope to be able to continue to do so in the future.