Read on Twitter
a short thread about the Department for Work and Pensions, who have either delayed my ESA payment, or stopped those payments -- i don& #39;t yet know. really it is about *how* they have done it:
a reminder -- wikipedia: & #39;[ESA] is a United Kingdom welfare payment for adults younger than the State Pension age who are having difficulty finding work because of their long-term medical condition or a disability. It is a basic income-replacement benefit paid in lieu of wages.& #39;
-- it& #39;s what we have to live on, basically. Sep 15 I got this text message: & #39;We need your student loan information to check your ESA payment is right. We& #39;ve sent you a letter and an envelope to send this to us. It could delay your payment if we don& #39;t receive this.& #39;
I& #39;m not going to disclose my conditions, but one of my mental health problems is severe anxiety -- which, by the way, has significantly worsened *as a direct result of dealing with the DWP*. I am not the only person who has panic attacks lasting hours when DWP envelopes arrive.
Their post usually arrives with no warning. So was this text a courtesy warning? Of course not, it& #39;s a redoubling of the overarching threat: we might stop your money. The DWP use slow, second class post. Until that letter arrived, my anxiety would be (and was) through the roof.
That letter didn& #39;t arrive. I kept hoping/worrying that it would. And today, this morning, when my ESA should have arrived in my bank account, it did not. They texted me on Sep 15 to threaten me that this & #39;could& #39; happen, but they did not text me to tell me that it *was* happening
I don& #39;t yet know whether the DWP have written in the post to tell me they are delaying (or stopping) ESA payments. Even if they have, that letter has arrived only *after* they have delayed (or stopped) those payments. A reminder: this money is ALL I have to live on. What do i do?
the answer to that is, I ring them up. I will do that as soon as I have done this thread. On average on 2019 I& #39;d say you would be on hold for >50 minutes before talking to anyone, probably worse since Covid but I don& #39;t know -- you learn to avoid coming into contact with them
briefly interrupting this thread to re-post this link (and i hate doing this, but, i& #39;m fucked) honestly this couldn& #39;t have come at a worse time, and if you are able to help, at all -- https://twitter.com/HINIONGE/status/1306948341813608448">https://twitter.com/HINIONGE/...
they know that ESA is all I have to live on. You *can* do up to £140 of & #39;Permitted Work& #39; per week, but every extra penny you earn has to be accounted for and okayed by the DWP by filling in a PW1 Permitted Work form (this form is, obviously, unfit for lots of casual work)
If you get something wrong regarding Permitted Work, you are required -- this happened to me in 2018 -- to physically attend a meeting at the JobCentre, and copy out, by hand, a declaration that you won& #39;t do it again. (You& #39;ve to go to their office and write lines, basically)
(unless you are lucky, it is likely you will have to use a proportion of your ESA to pay your rent, which Housing Benefit doesn& #39;t cover.) Permitted Work: if you were on ESA and got a job paying exactly £140.00/wk extra, your income would triple. Any more and your ESA is reduced
(in May 2018 I did a 10-minute poetry reading. Unbelievably, I was offered £200 for it. The ESA had scared me, by then, so i filled in a PW1 form (!)... they kept saying & #39;no& #39;. It was August *2019* and in total *over eight hours* on the phone to them, before I cld safely invoice.)
This time last year, when I started an MA, the DWP had a strange way of dealing with it. Instead of saying -- okay, we& #39;ll need some information (more of your student loan counts as & #39;income& #39; than you actually get to keep, btw)
here is their Nov 2019 letter:
& #39;We have looked at your claim again following a recent change.
We cannot pay you ESA from 19 November 2019.
You are not getting any more income-related ESA.
[...]
We have used the tax years ending April 2014 and 2015 to assess your claim.& #39;
& #39;We have looked at your claim again following a recent change.
We cannot pay you ESA from 19 November 2019.
You are not getting any more income-related ESA.
[...]
We have used the tax years ending April 2014 and 2015 to assess your claim.& #39;
now, I& #39;m sure an expert somewhere can tease that apart. Did they stop my claim because of this unspecified & #39;recent change& #39;, or was it because of my National Insurance contributions *five years ago*? I never found out. That was a terrifying, VERY frugal couple of winter months
when eventually they reinstated my claim (it *seemed* like the glitch was to do with my student loan, but they never clarified) there was no mechanism to ask for backdated payments. If there was it would have required such hellish admin I& #39;d not have been well enough to attempt it
that& #39;s plenty, isn& #39;t it. Anyway: I& #39;m now going to spend hours on the phone, effectively begging the DWP, who have stopped my ESA payments, because I haven& #39;t returned a form that never arrived, with *less warning than they gave me than the warning that they were posting me a form*
