How this would have looked in the US.<p>* Relationship with girlfriend breaks up and you move in with parents.<p>* Parents medical bills eat up everything they have and more when they pass away their creditors swoop in to take anything that's left.<p>* You are kindly told you will be moved to the street so you get a job. Your part time job pays enough for you to crash on a couch or at best maybe rent a room somewhere if your lucky.<p>* When you get attacked you have no insurance so you now owe $5000 which you have no way to pay and a prescription for opoids.<p>* You apply for disability but get denied. No help is forthcoming. You quickly lose your place to live about 3 days after the rent is due. Nobody cares why you can't pay. Your address is now the street corner where you stick your pile of dirty blankets.<p>* Due to your financial situation and eviction you will never be able to rent anything without substantial money up front and nobody wants to hire you.<p>* After the initial perscription(s) of opoids wear off you now have pain AND an addiction unlikely to be satisfied legally. You turn to panhandling and use the money to buy heroin.<p>* You get a dose that happened to be cut with something far too strong and nobody realizes your dead until someone complains about the smell.
I know most people here are fairly well-paid, intelligent and many are well-adjusted and stable. But it'd be mistake to assume this happens to other people. Sometimes a series of unfortunate events (lost job, lost child, lost marriage) trigger a series of events, helped by alcohol and poor-decision making and resulting in homelessness and poverty.<p>When I lived in Oxford I came across a book put together of mini-interviews of the homeless there - their stories. It really surprised me how many of the biographies started off with a well-paid professional job with a happy family and spiralled out of control.
It's a tragedy that the country of Nye Bevan and Clement Attlee has come to this.<p>I'm reminded of a quote that I think I first read in "Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class" (NB strongly recommended):<p><i>"There’s been class warfare for the last 20 years, and my class has won"</i><p>Warren Buffet<p>Edit: I'm in the middle of reading "Citizen Clem" and what an extraordinarily capable chap Attlee was. Here's a good article on him in (of all places) the Daily Mail:<p><a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3174009/DOMINIC-SANDBROOK-Labour-s-greatest-leader-teach-squabbling-pygmies.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-3174009/DOMINIC-SA...</a><p>Edit2: Even Thatcher was a fan of Attlee: <i>"Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show."</i>
> Mullings, your legal advisor, tells you it might not feel like it, but you're one of the lucky ones. At least because this was a housing case you had legal representation. If you hadn't, you would have been steamrollered.<p>Primarily as a result of cuts to the legal aid system[1]. Design a benefits system that's incredibly complex and all too easy to fall foul of, and then deny any kind of legal assistance in the inevitable appeal. I hope Iain Duncan Smith and his colleagues are one day able to reflect on what they've created.<p><a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts-benefits-cases-state-help-dla-esa-ministry-justice-disability-living-allowance-a8028936.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts...</a>
Given the bureaucratic complexity of welfare and social support in most countries there might be a solution to a problem nobody wants to see.<p>Welfare support has long time ago reached the level where it's difficult if not impossible for a normal, working, and still mentally capable person to understand everything and their caveats — not to mention someone who has first had hard luck, is then subsequently out of energy, and is finally subjected to the experience of being a cog in the very machine that is the bureaucracy.<p>From programmer's point of view the obvious solution is encapsulation.<p>Let's keep the private parts to the implementation and only offer a reasonable public interface. That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you.<p>An outsider can't be expected to chug along with the ever-mutating directives, laws, guidances, and rules that are part of the bureaucracy's own operation and related legislation. Let the bureau have people who take human descriptions of one's life and work out the best plan out of available benefits. The insiders have the knowledge of what works together and how to make the system work.<p>This would also be more efficient: failed applications, missing actions, mismatched assumptions, eviction orders, court cases, etc do all cost the bureau some time and money already in the current system. If there was an inside person who could rule out the impossible branches right away and check eligibility on the applicant's first or second visit, everyone would save time.
Ignoring the obvious welfare complaint, which I incidentally agree with, it paints a pretty good picture of all the health and social problems leading up to this situation for a lot of people. It also shows how the health of the previous generation can cause havoc on the current generation, a problem which I'm dealing with now.<p>If we improve physical and mental health over the next couple of generations I think there will be a massive shift away from this failure mode. The problem is that those services are being cut as is the education that supports them. So we're screwed.<p>Also a 4 year cycle on government before someone comes and erases progress or long term goals instantly and just burns a mountain of cash doesn't work either.
First bit of literature I have read in second person for quite some time. I actually really liked it as a refreshing change to the usual format. I feel like it lends itself to a deeper connection with the subject (in this case Tony).
I lived in London for several years.<p>I've met people that were very open about scamming the system.<p>I once knew a person, that went to London 17 years ago from another Country. He managed to get a not fit for work benefit and housing. His later then 'wife', they never got married but have a child together and live together, got some illness. Never met her, he was saying that was a genuine illness and not like his and she can't work.<p>So that person that I mentioned above, owned a car and a motorbike. Not sure if those items were under his name or not. He also worked at a car mechanic shop for money under the table.<p>In the 4 years I knew him, he was never caught, nor anyone went to his supposed house to check if he is there or what he is doing.<p>That guy was literally skimming the system for money without any control. At some point he and his 'wife' found out about another scam that they could run, if she gets evicted by her landlord (both of them were getting housing benefits, but they were presenting that they were staying at 2 different properties while he was staying at her house) she could somehow get a free house. So they decided to bring a dog home so that the landlord sends them out. They got send out.
She was put into a b&b with her daughter for a few months, while he was staying at the other house the benefits was paying for and then I've no idea if the scam worked or not.<p>To be very and completely honest, I did look into how I can report that guy, just because I didn't find it fair, that I am paying taxes and there are people like this person on the article that really need the money, and you get those people that just scam the system.
All I got from googling how to report someone, was that the reporting system sucks so much that the HMRC won't really do much about it.<p>That sort story is just there to show you whats wrong with the system in general.
Well, in the US you'd have already lost everything and been homeless just for the medical bills of your mother, let alone your father later, and you after that.
Here's the book of rules used to make decisions.<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-guide-staff-guide" rel="nofollow">https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-gu...</a><p>Have a look around it. Especially, have a look at the page counts.
Reminded me of Daniel Blake <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/" rel="nofollow">http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5168192/</a>
Government everywhere has a massive usability problem. Ignore the policies themselves, ignore the values they represent, the relationship between citizen and government should be easy and coherent. The solution here is, actually, better software.<p>It's the difference between the law and the way it is enforced. If surveillance capitalism has taught us anything, it's that people will put up with almost any policy as long as it's easy. We should use this knowledge to build interfaces to government programs. Indeed, I foresee a time when one's smartphone keeps all your data, and a "government program" is literally a program that runs on your phone and lets you know, proactively, if you are eligible, and enrollment is one click away. We can and should incrementally approach this goal in all our work.
So you read this story. It's entirely written in the second person. You get annoyed by that, because the story isn't really about you, it's about someone else. You keep reading anyway. You are appalled by the complexity of the social safety net and all of the needless bureaucracy, and how this makes people including you more vulnerable if something goes wrong.
All very lamentable but you read it and get a sense of someone who is largely passive and to whom life happens. Where's the sense of ownership and shaping your own destiny?