There are volunteers that perform this function. However, the hostility of the bureaucracy today is not an accident. It's a matter of policy. The intent is to make people go away without paying them money. The people responsible blind themselves to the fact that some of these people "go away" because they have died.

> some of these people "go away" because they have died

For anyone thinking this is hyperbole, one recent case[1] was of an anorexic woman found dead in her freezing cold flat because she couldn't afford to run the heating. She had been sanctioned for missing a jobseekers meeting due to being in ICU.

1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anorexic-woma...

When you combine stories like this along with the massively convoluted legal system and incredibly dense surveillance penetrating everything all the time, it makes me terrified to even visit the place. When traveling to Europe I route around instead of doing stopovers in UK.

Angry and disgusted at my own country.

Yes.

OP talks about independent medical assessments.

Imagine you're signed off work because of heart problems. You're invited to a medical assessment, and you have a heart attack during the assessment. The medical assessor calls an ambo, and the paramedics take you to hospital to treat your ongoing heart attack.

We might think this is clear evidence the person actually is ill and wasn't faking.

The DWP sees this - failure to complete the assessment - as a sanctionable failing.

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm13...

> Debbie Abrahams: [...]

> Again, I support the principle of a sanctions regime. If somebody consistently fails to turn up for work experience or a Work programme scheme, sanctions should be applied. However, I believe that sanctions are being applied indiscriminately. For example, one of my constituents was a beneficiary of employment and support allowance after they had retired on grounds of ill health as a result of a heart problem. He was required to attend a work capability assessment with Atos. During

> 19 Mar 2013 : Column 840

> the assessment, he was told that he was having a heart attack and the nurse said that she had to stop the assessment. He got a letter a couple of weeks later saying that he had withdrawn from the assessment and, as such, was being sanctioned. That beggars belief. I have other examples, as I am sure do colleagues.

That's awful, adding insult to injury: 'fuck you for being poor while having a heart attack.'

I've been told by someone who knows the process that it's the same reason why applications for Permanent Residence in UK are held up for the maximum allowed time and then rejected for applicants from certain countries - they are accepted on appeal, but the sheer annoyance of the process turns people away which is what they are aiming for.

It's not just Permanent Residence applications. Something similar happened to my wife with a Tourist Visa application.

I'm a UK citizen, my wife is not, nor is she an EU citizen. At the time, she was studying for a Masters level degree in an EU country, with a Student Visa for that country. Not ideal for married life, but she wanted the degree and we made it work (spent loads on airfares).

During the summer holiday, we decided she should visit me in the UK. We applied for a Tourist Visa, which seemed to make sense as she was only coming for a few weeks. There was no need to apply for a Spousal Visa.

Despite the fact she had multiple UK Tourist Visas and a UK Student Visa approved in the past, this one was rejected. No specific reason.

There was a written appeals process. We appealed. The Home Office had months to submit their case. Nothing happened.

Next, there is a court appeals process. We applied for a date, one was set several months in the future. Obviously only I could attend. Eleven months after the original Tourist Visa application we had our day in court. The Home Office didn't even bother to show up. The judge heard my side of the story, reviewed the supporting documentation and the Visa was granted.

We were never given any official reason for the rejected initial application or the Home Office's refusal to engage in the appeals process. As you said, I think they were just going for sheer annoyance, hoping we'd give up.

Lost a lot of faith in the UK after that. We now live together in Europe and of course Brexit is doing its best to screw that up too.

Oh yes - it's the "hostile environment" policy.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/nov/28/hostile-envi...

A happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for politicians who want to show they are vanguards of small government or better saving/spending.

Good welfare programs are targets.

Therefore they will only be mediocre programs, even if you could have a good program.

Any good program will survive only as long as its not a target.

And the other side of the coin: a happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for both dishonest individuals and parasitic "entrepreneurs". That's the primary reason welfare programs get so complicated very quickly - because the first to get to unconstrained free money are not those who that money was intended for; the first ones are the greedy bastards.

Combined with what you wrote, that's why I stopped believing there can be an efficient welfare program in our current system of things; we can at best try to minimize the total waste of bureaucracy and people cheating the system.

Actually that’s assumed in my depiction of such a system.

There is always going to be slacking/welfare advantage - that’s a given for me.

It’s sort of a system weakness. The side point is how much of this dead weight loss is there vs how much actual good is done.

In general there’s a lot of good that’s done in comparison to the good.

The point I’m making is hat politicians will always point to the dead weight loss because it has massive PR/optical appeal.

“Observe there the knave!”

It’s a matter of a systemic loss to one system, being an outsize gain to another program.

The trick is to avoid letting politicians get to a stage where such imagery has optical value.

This means a society which usually has enough for most people, no manipulation of relations to paint one group or the other as villains and a generally efficient enough govt that people don’t stop to say “this needs to end”.

It's true that some will cheat the system, and that has a cost. But there is also a cost associated with people going hungry, or being made homeless, or even dying due to their circumstances.

While the cost to those people may be infinite, the cost to everyone else may be less than the cost of doing something effective to help them. If you reduce things to economics you may not like the answers you get. Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death.

> Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death.

Does it? I thought it increased the costs due to lung cancer treatments.

Certainly the direct costs are huge, probably in the tens of billions of dollars or pounds per year. But it's quite possible that the shortened lifespan saves even more money by lowering spending on the chronic diseases of late life, etc.

<blockquote>However, smokers die some 10 years earlier than nonsmokers, according to the CDC, and those premature deaths provide a savings to Medicare, Social Security, private pensions and other programs.

Vanderbilt University economist Kip Viscusi studied the net costs of smoking-related spending and savings and found that for every pack of cigarettes smoked, the country reaps a net cost savings of 32 cents.</blockquote>

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2009-04-smokers-society-money...

Maybe you should change your earlier statement to "smoking reduces public costs" or something else a little more inclusive. While there is good evidence smoking reduces costs when savings on retirement programs are considered it's less clear that it reduces health expenditures specifically.

Most people will get cancer or some terminal illness that requires expensive treatment eventually. And if they don't then they will live long enough to require assistive living which is also very expensive. Lung cancer is particularly aggressive and trends to kill people right before retirement age so the argument has been made that smoking reduces overall costs because you don't have to spend money on as many retired people who otherwise would need assistance.

That's the reason why I have my doubts about UBI. If it shows to work there will be people calling for cuts.

Yes. and arguments that UBI is too high, “see I can’t get any workers.”

> 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.

> 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.

In England a "Decision Maker" looks at the details of your case, and applies all the relevant acts, statutes, statutory instruments, and case law you your case.

This person is an expert, employed by the Department for Work and Pensions and all they do is this.

If you think they've got something wrong you can ask for a mandatory reconsideration: they'll have another look. If you still think they're wrong you can go to lower tribunal. A panel looks at the decision. And if they're wrong you can go to upper tribunal.

Here's what a tribunal judge has to say aboutj DWP: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-...

Note that they are fobidden by law from awarding costs. Number 10 here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

The figures for PIP are particularly bad: https://twitter.com/CommonsWorkPen/status/942773136390590465

If you want to look at the book of rules to see how bizarre it is, it's available online. Have a think about how many pages you're expecting, then have a count of the page numbers. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-gu...

I almost assumed there must be such people employed but then concluded there cannot be because of the problems mentioned in the article. I'm happy to hear this is how it has been planned and very unhappy to hear that the theory is apparently not working in practice, maybe because of sheer incompetence from (at least) DWP's part.

Social workers do this very thing, at least in the U.S. Unfortunately it's a poorly paid role that requires a lot of educational investment and is excruciatingly difficult and depressing. So to continue your encapsulation metaphor, imagine designing that but only being allowed the crappiest, most underpowered server to run that service on, and it is rebooted at random intervals for good measure. Source: I know someone getting their Masters in Social Work.

Maybe their purpose isn't too be efficient. If everyone automatically got all the benefits they were entitled to it works surely be a lot more expensive.

Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate, with more gates people won't be able to pass through, and an entire bureaucracy to administrate that — conveniently drawing even more resources from actually fulfilling the system's avowed purpose, ending with a system which keeps costing more and delivering less.

As long as you can provide a steady stream of anecdotes and scapegoats it'll go fine.

This can in turn justify cutting the system because it doesn't pull its weight[0], and the people who hate social support systems can pat themselves on the back over a job well done.

[0] not all at once of course, you by start cutting ancillary services like legal aid[1] in order to feed the ever-increasing gate-keeping machinery you keep adding to

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts...

> Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate

Not sure if that's a lie. In my experience, a big chunk of the general population is selfish enough that they'll abuse any system if they can get away with it. In a way, it's tragedy of the commons all over again - those people, confronted, will tell you, "I'm just a single man, just a drop in a bucket". They conveniently forget that there are 20 million other people in the country thinking the same thing.

In this automatic-benefits-allocating world, there would also be no more fraudulent claiming of money not entitled to! It should overall result in a net saving, I believe...

That's at least part of the theory behind basic income concepts: there's no fraud since everybody gets it, and you can get rid of the organisations in charge of validating & allocating.

Benefit fraud in the UK is estimated at around 1-2% of the total - a small enough amount that it shouldn't be the focus of policy instead of the 98-99% of genuine cases.

> That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you.

Or, we can stop assuming government's efficiency and create an UBI. Because there will never be a dedicated social worker caring about your side - even if it was viable, voters would never allow that.

At the moment, voters are even less likely to back an UBI.

Yes, but once created, UBI is more stable than expecting every public servant to keep a single goalset focused on poor people.