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Charlotte Hughes and others outside the jobcentre in Ashton-under-Lyne
Outside the jobcentre in Ashton-under-Lyne. Photograph: Frances Ryan
Outside the jobcentre in Ashton-under-Lyne. Photograph: Frances Ryan

Every week Charlotte sees desperation at first hand – outside the job centre

This article is more than 7 years old
Frances Ryan

Her group have been helping jobseekers exposed to the vagaries of Britain’s benefit system. She says people feel like criminals in a culture of fear

It will be two years this summer since Charlotte Hughes and her group of activists in Ashton-under-Lyne, Greater Manchester, first gathered outside the local jobcentre to try to address some of the damage they believe it’s causing.

Hughes’s heavily pregnant daughter, then 19, had just been hit with a three-year benefit sanction. Her offence, Hughes says, was telling a workfare interviewer that she was pregnant, which meant she couldn’t take part in the unpaid labour needed to keep her benefits. “She was crying afterwards,” Hughes tells me. “She had to come back and live with me – she had no electric, gas, or food.”

Hughes made a decision there and then to get justice for – in her words – the “sitting ducks” exposed to Britain’s benefit system: jobseekers, low-waged workers, and claimants struggling with disability or mental health problems. On a Thursday morning in August 2014, the 44-year-old stood outside Ashton-under-Lyne’s jobcentre for two hours with a few friends: offering words of support to people going through the doors, pointing out local services, and handing out information leaflets on benefit rights (correcting misinformation given by the jobcentre is key, Hughes says).

They have been there every week since. The size of the group fluctuates, from three to 30: it includes retired people, the self-employed and former benefit claimants who have seen the system first hand. The important thing, Hughes says, is that they’re a constant presence. “Welfare rights are overrun. Citizens Advice too. But we’re right outside. Every week. They know where to find us,” she says. “That space outside the jobcentre is a safe place. Because they’ve not got one inside.”

Ashton-under-Lyne has in some ways developed a reputation as the embodiment of the Department for Work and Pension’s (DWP) grim frontline. Last September, inside its jobcentre, a man doused himself in petrol and threatened to set himself on fire.

Hughes spoke to him only a week later. “It’s easy to judge and say he shouldn’t have done it, isn’t it? But people are desperate. He’d had enough.”

Desperation seems the only term to describe what Hughes and her group see: disabled and chronically ill people who have been found “fit for work”; single parents told to find a job; vulnerable jobseekers who have had their benefits stopped.

Hughes tells me of one man the group used to speak to regularly, after he’d been repeatedly sanctioned. “We hadn’t seen him for a few weeks. We saw his friend and we asked ‘where is he?’ His friend said: ‘He’s killed himself.’ That really stayed with us.”

What stands out about Ashton-under-Lyne is not that it’s unique – a rotten apple in an otherwise decent system – but that it’s one of the areas chosen as a test case for new DWP policies which, given enough time, spread to every other jobcentre across the country. As Hughes puts it: “Everything comes to us first.”

Three years ago, universal credit (UC) was trialled here. Then the troubled families programme.

Now, it’s in-work conditionality – where low paid workers, relying on UC to “top up” their wage, must search for more hours, higher pay or an extra job or have their benefit taken.

From the street outside the jobcentre, Hughes is seeing the reality of this government policy first hand. She tells me of one man on a zero-hours contract who claims UC “top-up” in order “to live”. He had his benefit sanctioned after he missed the jobcentre’s job search target by one hour.

“He was working nights, all hours. But they stopped his housing benefit,” Hughes says. “He’s lost his home. We gave him a coat in the end. I’ve never seen a man more broken.”

After two years of talking to people who are trying to hold on to their benefits, Hughes keeps coming back to one idea: nowadays, to need the jobcentre is “like you’re a criminal”.

The rules of the building support her point: no hot drinks, no mobiles, and if you’re 10 minutes early for an appointment, you’re sent to wait outside (“even when it’s freezing”, she adds). Two uniformed G4S security guards man the doors. “They’re there when people get sanctioned, in case they start crying or raising their voice,” Hughes explains. “We regularly see them escorting people from the building … It’s a culture of fear.”

Hughes tells me she’s witnessed a pregnant woman throw herself on the ground outside the jobcentre, distressed after a sanction. “‘I’ve got a baby to feed,’ she was saying. ‘How can I do it?’ It was just like my daughter.”

She pauses. “People don’t realise until it happens to them. This is really happening.”

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