"The Decision" - part 1, The Elms

Do you ever get the feeling that you are living in a parallel universe?

The story so far - I returned to my house in Lincolnshire in March 2020 after a period when I had been unwell (with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and depression) and had been staying with a friend in London. Amongst the pile of post which I had not been able to face and open until then, I found letters dated October 2019 from the DwP notifying me that I had been fined ￡50 for failure to declare earnings and another dated December 2019 advising me of an overpayment of ￡1106.94.

There was also a copy of a letter dated February 2020 to my pension (SIPP) company which was a Direct Earnings Attachment (DEA) seeking to recover ￡1156.94 from my "net pay". I had no idea that I was "employed" by my pension company !!!?? I never heard from my SIPP provider about this DwP request. Perhaps they just binned it?

I had no idea what on earth DwP were on about and my past experience of getting DwP to explain their reasoning for benefit decisions did not fill me with confidence, so I had the bright idea of submitting a Subject Access Request under GDPR/Data Protection Act 2018 to get a copy of my file. Whilst waiting for that to arrive I got a nice letter from the Debt Management Centre in Trafford dated 13 April 2020 advising me that the deductions under the DEA would cease, but rather ominously ending with "if you fail to contact us about repayment and you are not in receipt of benefit we may move to the next stage of our process which will be to ask a debt colleciton agency to collect this money on our behalf."

What, I wondered, was happening on planet DwP? Back in the real world, I was doing my best to apply for jobs, signing on for Universal Credit and filling in the many questions on the online form that I had been unable to face in January 2019 when the DwP decided that their instruction to do a JSA rapid reclaim (what a misnomer!!) was wrong and that I would have to start over and do a UC application and ask for it to be backdated to October 2018 (but that is a story for another time).

In the meantime, I contacted Debt Management to get them to stop collection activity and then JSA benefit decisions and asked for a reconsideration of the November 2019 decision, saying that, if there was a receipt of money, then it could only have been an ad-hoc withdrawal from my pension and these should be treated as capital.

So what did the Subject Access Request reveal when it arrived? Buried at about page 160 was a copy of the reasons for the decision that I had failed to declare earnings whilst I was in receipt of benefit. Apparently I had been working for somewhere called "The Elms" from Mar 2016 and had received a payment of ￡1346.32 on 28 June 2018. Well, this was news to me! I had never heard of The Elms and had certainly never worked for them or received any money from them. I also checked my bank statements and there was no receipt of this value of money in June 2018 or at any other time. So how had the DwP managed to decide I had been working for The Elms? Seems that a compliance intervention had attached this earnings data to my DwP benefit file and a decision maker had decided (without checking with me) that I had failed to declare this money. The DwP claim to have checked with The Elms and The Elms had confirmed that I had been working and received this money.

When I pointed out that this information regarding The Elms was not in my Subject Access Request response the DwP claimed to have destroyed the evidence in accordance with their data retention policies. Hhhmmm! Convenient, eh?

Whilst this was all going on the DwP was still trying to collect the penalty and overpayment from me - so in August 2020 they deducted ￡50 from my monthly UC payment. Penalty paid. Thank you Mr Bell. I was livid! Seems that I had managed to get a revised decision on 11 August 2020 which resulted in the cancellation of the penalty and overpayement but there were no staff available to enter this in to the debt management system, so debt management collected the penalty from my benefit. I called and called and called until they found some staff, entered the revised decision and instructed debt management to cease collection activity and repay to me the ￡50 they had taken.

Whilst they had revised the original wrong decision, the revised DwP decision still insisted that I had received payment of ￡1346.32 when I had NOT received this fictitious amount. I asked for a statement of reasons for that decision:

I submitted yet another Mandatory Reconsideration Request on 27 August 2020, both by telephoning and dictating my request over the phone to the JSA contact point and also by putting it in my UC journal and asking my UC workcoach to send it over to the JSA team. Although the two teams are apparently in the same office they work completely separately - my issue was with a Jobseekers decision (although it was my UC benefit that was having deductions made from it) and I had to report it by telephone to the JSA helpline. First question asked by the JSA helpline, are you in receipt of UC? If so, do not phone this helpline but contact your UC coach using your journal! Took me a couple of times around this loop to realise that I needed to just ignore this instruction and persevere; insist that even though I was on UC that I needed to speak to the JSA helpline and get a JSA decision.

Result - request for mandatory reconsideration ignored.

Put in a formal complaint in August 2020 and my Xmas present from the DwP this year - a response to my detailed complaint. I will leave it to you to spot the errors ...

The reference to me finding employment on 12 October 2018 is particularly galling. What actually happened was that I was in receipt of Job Seekers Allowance at that time. In accordance with the regulations I notified DwP that I was going abroad on Saturday 13 October 2018 to Geneva to visit the area on the mountainside in the Jura Valley where the ashes of my former partner and mother of our son had been scattered the year before. The first anniversary of her death was on 15 October 2018, and my son had only told me earlier that year about sitting at her hospital bedside and holding his mother's hand as she took her last breath. Even though we had separated many years before when my son was about 10 years old, we had continued to work together to bring him up, and I wanted to pay my respects to a remarkable woman, who was taken too soon. Having spent the anniversary of her death visiting the area in the Valserine Valley north of Geneva where she lived her last years (and where I had lived only 50km away so as to be able to share in bringing up our son), and spent several hours with her, still grieving partner, I flew back the next day and signed on again at the local Job Centre. JSA Plus rapid reclaim, they said.

Well, there was nothing rapid about it at all. I had been progressing with a New Enterprise Allowance application and had already had several meetings with the NEA advisor and was developing the business plan, cashflow and other material that was required before your NEA grant was approved. When I moved back to Lincolnshire I tried to get this NEA application transferred but it was farcical. The advisor in London had resigned and left and did not seem to have passed the file over to anybody. In any event there was a different provider of NEA services in Lincolnshire and it seemed that I would have to start all over again with a new NEA company and a new advisor but Grantham Job Centre did not seem to know what to do.

I continued with my voluntary work in London and continued to develop my plans whilst waiting to see if I could get my benefit restored after my 3 days out of the country. I was in London when on 24 October 2018 at 8pm I got a text from the DwP requiring me to attend at Sleaford Job Centre the next morning at 11 a.m. Now I live mid-way between Grantham and Sleaford - about 7 miles away from each, but I had never been to Sleaford Job Centre. Nonetheless I caught a train from London the next morning to arrive at Sleaford Job Centre in time for the appointment.

The work coach was very pleasant but asked, "why are you here? Your Job Centre is Grantham. You should go over to Grantham." And how am I going to get there? I asked. I was in London when I got this text, so I jumped on a train here. I do not have a working car at the moment, so have to use public transport. Is there a bus from here to Grantham? (Answer to that is No - not really - not unless you book CallConnect about 48 hours in advance). I do not have the money for a taxi - UC does not stretch to ￡20 taxi fares. So the work coach took pity on me and decided to go ahead with the appointment - and to be honest, she was so much better than Grantham. She even spoke to someone in the company that provided the NEA advisors for Lincolnshire and got them to promise to contact me (they never did, of course - but at least she spoke to them!).

Anyway, back to the complaint response - it turns out that, when I got back from Geneva and "reported in", my file was marked, in error - claim closed - working. This is because the "claim closed - gone abroad" tick box is close to the "working" tick box, I am told. I have lost count of the number of telephone calls I had to make to get this simple mistake corrected and to get my claim re-opened. Well, actually it looks as though I was never successful in that because the complaint response says that my file is still marked "claim closed - working". No, I never did ever get the DwP to reopen my JSA claim.

After providing lots of information to JSA benefit decision makers that they already had from the previous claim which was closed on 12 October 2018, it took them until January 2019 to eventually tell me that they were wrong to advise me to do a JSA rapid (what a laugh!!) reclaim and that I needed to make a Universal Credit claim instead. My Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit claims had been terminated when the DwP marked my file - working - and I never managed to get the local Council to restore those either.

So in January 2019, after having worked hard over the last year to get my mental health to the state where I thought I could restart work, I found myself in lots of money trouble, with bills mounting up, falling behind with payments and with absolutely no money coming in as all benefits had been stopped since October 2018. My mental health took a nosedive and I abandoned plans to start up in self-employment. Well done, DwP!

So here I was, over a year later. I had recovered sufficiently to be able to deal with the paperwork and memory recall needed to make some ad-hoc withdrawals from my SIPP and so was starting to lift out of the pit of depression that I had sunk into. Instead of destabilising my mood, the DwP letters just made me laugh and angry by turns. Ah ha! You are not going to do this to me again - I will fight your bureaucratic, inefficient, totally useless computer system if it is the last thing I do. I tacked the Universal Credit online application form and was awarded UC. I restarted my Open University law degree course. I started applying for jobs. I think I made 14 applications in all over a 7 month period. Creating a custom CV for each and a covering letter for each.

In September 2020 I interviewed for a new job and started in November 2020. And since I am now no longer dependent on the largesse of the DwP and their inefficient blundering processes and procedures, I can laugh at the complete joke of a complaint response that poor Mr Johnstone has produced. Not his fault I guess that the DwP is not fit for purpose.

And "The Elms"? I wonder where and who you are? And was the person who worked for you from March 2018 until June 2018 and whom you paid ￡1346.32 on 28 June 2018 the person I suspect that it was?

You see - I am not the only Peter Bell - actually Peter Charles Bell, born in Liverpool on a certain day in April 1956. There are two of us - same name; same date of birth; same city of birth. And I think that, from time to time, that might cause some confusion with government systems which appear to have been built to assume that full name, dob and place of birth is a unique identifier, when clearly it is not. So DwP, although I no longer need your largesse to survive, I am not going to give up until I find out why you think I worked at "The Elms" and why you fined me ￡50 and deducted that from my UC benefit and almost set the debt collectors on me for ￡1,156-94 when I had done absolutely nothing wrong. And I will keep going until I find out why and get an apology from you.

I was well enough to deal with this s**t (sorry - my mother taught me not to swear) but what if I had not been well enough? What if your demanding, threatening letters had been the last straw, when I was at my lowest?

So it is off now to the Independent Case Examiner . I feel another Subject Access Request coming on and I shall be looking out for the Mandatory Reconsideration request response, and you will, no doubt, get a request for a Statement of Reasons. And that is just for starters - until you eventually tell me the truth and apologise. Happy New Year DwP - I am looking forward to the New Year.

2021 - the year of the DwP! Welcome to my universe. Truth and honesty rules.