The BBC is screening a new documentary series next week on Universal Credit. Titled ‘Universal Credit: Inside the Welfare State’, the first installment is on BBC 2, on Tuesday 4th February at 9.00 pm. The blurb for it in the Radio Times runs
In-depth look at the Department of Work and Pensions, Jobcentres and claimants, during the implementation of the biggest change to the benefits system in a generation. This edition focuses of Peckham Jobcentre in south London. Rachel left a 27-year caareer in the NHS to care for her elderly parents. She’s been struggling to pay her rent and bills while paying back an advance she took out while waiting for her first Universal Credit payment. Jobcentre staff member Karen works tirelessly to support claimants but is frustrated that she has to supplement her low earnings with a second job. (p. 86).
An additional piece about the show by David Butcher a few pages earlier, on page 84, also says
There’s a key scene in this first episode of a series about benefits, where the civil servant in charge of Universal Credit, Neil Couling, shows us a whiteboard in the Department for Work and Pensions called the “motherboard”. Among the grids and numbers is a piece of paper stuck on that says, “Pay claimants the right amount of money and on time”. It seems a modest aim but, as Couling tells us, “It has defeated the benefits system for the last 35 years.”
The series helps us understand why. Its strength is that we meet not just those at the top of the benefits bureaucracy but those at the bottom – officials at a Jobcentre in Peckham, south London, known as “work coaches”, and their claimants or “customers”. In their sometimes testy encounters we see how Jobcentres have become a one-stop shop, helping claimants with food bank vouchers, housing and childcare. As unemployed labourer Declan says, unhappily, “It’s like they’ve got a hold of your life.”
I think this programme has been expected. If I recall correctly, there has been some discussion whether it would accurately reflect conditions in the DWP and the misery and despair Universal Credit has inflicted on claimaints. There were fears that it would follow the path set by a similar documentary a few years ago. This was also made with the help of the DWP, but presented a very sanitised view of the Department as government-sanctioned propaganda.
It’s to be hopedthat this will be different from the previous series, and from the ‘poverty porn’ produced by Mentorn Television like ‘Benefits Street’. But considering the massive bias on the BBC news desk against the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, and its general bias towards supporting austerity and the Conservatives, that may be too much to expect.
Tags: Austerity, BBC, BBC 2, Benefits Street, Bias, Carers, Conservatives, David Butcher, DWP, Food Banks, Housing, Jeremy Corbyn, Jobcentres, Labour Party, London, Metorn Television, Neil Couling, Radio Times, Universal Credit
Beastrabban\'s Weblog 
January 28, 2020 at 12:44 pm |
Reblogged this on Tory Britain!.
May 30, 2023 at 5:10 pm |
Unbelievably, Tories and Policy Thinktanks have met to celebrate the success of Universal Credit:
https://policyinpractice.co.uk/cross-party-event-to-mark-10-years-of-universal-credit-at-the-house-of-lords/
An abhorrent system that forces (often elderly) people into working two or even three part-time jobs to make up their hours, and which swindles claimants out of the first 5 weeks of Benefit entitlement instead of being payable from day one, instead covered by a repayable loan, thereby forcing already poor people into debt right from the start. Poor and vulnerable people are forced into utter destitution by Benefit Sanctions, applied for failure to comply with ludicrous conditions such as the totally unreasonable 35 hours jobsearch rule. Sanctions have been found to be ineffective at helping into work, counterproductive and harmful, according to the DWPs own official report that concurred with existing academic research. In short Universal Credit, rather than being something to celebrate, is a spiteful punitive system dreamt up by out of touch millionaires with an ego complex, it is an act of Class War against the Working Class and the poor. And as if all of that wasn’t bad enough these disgusting antisocial Psychopaths were also celebrating one particular aspect of Tory Welfare reforms that forces the sick to look for work.