Shame

You're a woman of 62 who has worked all her life as a cleaner, but a painful knee caused by osteoporous recently forced you to give up your job. You live alone in a 2-bedroom flat. When you can't work and have no other form of income you go on benefits. They are not generous, but they keep you going: Jobseeker's Allowance, Housing Benefit, and Council Tax reduction. Every week you take your "Actively looking for work" booklet, duly completed to show that you have read the ads in the local paper and outside the newsagent, and applied for some work that you might be capable of knee notwithstanding, to the Jobcentre. It is checked, approved and initialled by your "work coach", euphemism for employee. But one day a different person checks it and declares it to be inadequately completed, showing you are not seriously looking for work at all. You are likely to be sanctioned for this, and sure enough two days later you receive a letter telling you you will lose £10 a week for three weeks, a sort of punishment for being naughty. Like detention,or writing lines. This might not be the end of the world except that your housing benefit will also be stopped, and your council tax reduction. Your only recourse to justice is an appeals process which can take 28 days to complete. In the meantime you will have to borrow money to pay your weekly rent. And the Inland Revenue are chasing you for bedroom tax. "I'm 62," you sob, powerless and frustrated by your inability to manage your life." "But I can't even retire for another 3 years." So you take yourself off to the free advice agency in town where a comfortably-placed advisor listens in horror to your story. You're not a scrounger, but you're in the system now, subject to regular humiliation. She does what she can, this well-fed woman, she calls the right people and puts the case for her client. But the system works slowly, and due process has to happen. She offers to help you every step of the way, and you are grateful. You go home, distressed and worried, and the easy-living woman takes herself off to the privacy of the loo for a while and tries to prepare herself for the next one.