If you have cause to read the UK Government website ‘nidirect’, you find a very encouraging statement:
‘The benefits system provides practical help and financial support if you are unemployed and looking for work. It also provides you with additional income when your earnings are low, if you are bringing up children, are retired, care for someone, are ill or have a disability.’
If you have seen the film I, Daniel Blake, you may have come away with a slightly different viewpoint. It is the Cathy Come Home of the 21st century and I for one would hope that it has a similar effect in changing government policies and public attitudes.
In April, our Justice and Peace group at St Margaret’s, Lochgilphead, in Argyll, invited our MP, Brendan O’Hara, to discuss how the benefits system disadvantages people living in rural areas, exacerbating poverty. Our research confirmed that too many members of our community suffer increased levels of stress and anxiety in their efforts to meet the criteria demanded by the system. Failure to meet those criteria frequently leads to individuals and families without food and living with the threat of homelessness. They become rural Daniel Blakes.
We know that it is hard enough wherever you live to be unemployed or on a low wage, but it really does get worse when there isn’t a bus to get you to the appointment on which hangs you being awarded benefits or being sanctioned instead. For the uninitiated, being sanctioned means your benefits are stopped – possibly for three weeks, possibly for more than a year.
Let me give you an example. A disabled man living outside a Mid Argyll village, two miles from a bus stop, was sanctioned because he couldn’t get to the Job Centre. By the time he was contacted, he hadn’t eaten for three days. The quickest ‘official’ food parcel, funded by the local social work department, couldn’t be delivered to him for six days. The local MS centre delivered food to him, adding fresh food items to the parcel.
That isn’t why the MS Centre exists – it’s there to care for people with multiple sclerosis and other auto-immune conditions. But it is in the local caring ‘charity’ loop and so heard about the situation and acted. It can’t act every time there’s such a crisis.
The Trussell Trust provided 145,865 3-day emergency food supplies in Scotland in 2016-17. Our nearest food banks are in Oban (a 74-mile round trip) and Campbeltown (a 100-mile round trip). Public transport is thin on the ground and costs money. The food parcels don’t contain any fresh food and people can’t afford the electricity costs to cook, so pot noodles and tinned creamed rice become staples. The idea of making your own nourishing soup is nothing more than a modern fairy story.
A local charity, MO-MA (Moving On Mid Argyll), which provides basic household and personal essentials for individuals and families moving into a new home after a crisis, now finds that they have to add food parcels to the package.
People have to go through hoops to get their benefits. Employment Support Allowance interviews may take place in Oban but PIP interviews may be carried out in Glasgow – a 190 mile round journey on buses that don’t always fit with appointment times. People already stressed and anxious become suicidal faced with these obstacles.
Our faith seeks to promote integral human development. Pope Francis has initiated a new dicastery with responsibilities that include ‘…those in need, the sick, the excluded and marginalized, the imprisoned and the unemployed’. Our Justice and Peace group now hopes to work with the Citizens’ Advice Bureau and even more closely with our friends at MO-MA. And we’re hoping to make our voices heard at Westminster, whatever the election result.