Strike Three?

Where to begin: it's amazing how nothing happening can produce such tension and thought.

So yesterday I was supposed to have a home visit from the WCA people - supposed to, guess what didn't happen.

This would have been their third attempt after initially telling me -at the assessment centre - I needed to be seen by a doctor because I presented with eyesight issues. No one showed up. It was only after I rang them I learned the assessor had called it a day for 'personal reasons'. In other words, we ain't telling you shit. That they knew this and hadn't bothered to let me know says it all really.

Imagine treating people like that. Imagine dealing with people with conditions severe or less so; people that suffer anxiety, stress, etc, and this is the best you can manage. Is that not unacceptable? It should be!

So let's unpack this. First some context: my first go was Autumn of 2017 Despite a summons, the assessment was cancelled on the spot; because I had reported eyesight issues a doctor was required. Of course there wasn't one available and nobody had bothered to read the case notes. I then asked for a home visit and mentioned that this would need to be carefully arranged due to my living arrangements.

I was summoned back just before Christmas. I just assumed they'd ignored my home visit request, but in fact I wasn't booked in at all: I was on the list for a home visit. Only no one saw fit to actually inform me. Dealing with the assessment centre is stressful. Not least of all because everyone else present is a mirror reflecting your own stress, while tinpot Hitlers press home minute issues. One poor guy was threatened with being sent back because he'd said the wrong thing in respect of being made to wait. And wait you will. Even the security guard ended up taking his side. Persuading the receptionist, a veritable human emotional Medusa, was like pulling teeth it seemed.

This is no place for the infirm.

So I've been waiting, suffering traumatic post stress disorder invoked by the sound of a letterbox. What could be more absurd? No idea when or where I'd be seen except a fortnight prior to the appointment. That's the notice you're given of an impending assessment at a time of their choosing. The appointments are block booked a month or so at a time (or so I was told). You are not a part of that process and yet you are the focus. We have no say in our fate today.

I got a phone call at 9-30am from the assessor asking if I'd like to be seen an hour early because her first appointment had already finished. I said no because I only had the house to myself from 11. She agreed and said she'd see me then. I then spend the entire morning stressing like a beast, climbing the wall and staring out the window like a caged animal or a kid on Christmas eve. This isn't a good place to be. In these situations your own home becomes a different place. It was only at 2pm that I rang them and discovered what I mentioned above.

I find myself sceptical about that phone call. Again, I don't know what happened, but had she seen me at 10am - as she requested - it's very possible that appointment would have had to be abandoned for the same reasons. What a mess. It's entirely possible of course her phone call was genuine, but my mind is racing and I'm joining the dots!

I mentioned above that I needed to be seen by a doctor. On the letter it tells me the name of the person that's coming to visit me. There is no prefix to that indicating a title of any kind. Now again this may be my racing mind, but I checked online to see if that person was registered as either a doctor or an optician (you can actually do this). I'm not going to mention her name here but it's not an uncommon name. I got zero results. I know the search facility works because I double checked using other names. Now this is hardly conclusive but I'm not convinced this person actually meets their own criteria for this process! I suppose there's little I can do about this.

So I'm having a conversation with their office about all this. Naturally this is an officious conversation; you can sense the attitude of the staffperson. They imperceptibly bristle when you raise a problem. You can hear it in the tone when they inform me that they can't inform me of what exactly has happened - not even in general or vague terms (if possible). They offer a perfunctory bureaucratic not-sorry apology. It's officious it isn't informative and it certainly isn't caring.

My only option is for them to rebook the appointment; to them I'm just a piece of dry cleaning. I have no more emotions than a dirty piece of formal attire. I'm a wedding gown with spilt wine. I'm not a human being repeatedly undergoing a situation I find very stressful. Let me also be clear: there are people far worse off than I that, in a similar situation (and there will be people in similar situations), will just shatter. The booking process is similarly mechanical: they seem to 'block book'. Staffperson tells me that all their 'doctors' are booked until April, so I don't anticipate (probably a mistake) hearing until the start of next month. But who knows? It's back to dreading the sound of the letterbox.

I tried explaining just how stressful this is and, in a supreme example of aforementioned superciliousness (beat that dictionary corner!), am asked: "so you want us to close your case and refer it back to the DWP?".

That is passive aggressive and disingenuous. They know exactly what happens them and I try to prise an admission of that from them. Of course their reply is equally non-committal: "it's up to the DWP what happens, we don't know". Yeah you do: if a claim gets referred back it will certainly be closed - who knows what reasons they will give the DWP for their actions? I tell the staffperson that three attempts is too stressful I can't deal with another (I doubt it'll be a year before they write back!), but that falls on deaf ears. What would the DWP make of that reason? What can they?

And that is the problem. What can they do? It's a machine. It cannot understand human capacity or feeling. That you find it stressful is totally irrelevant. You either go through it or you close your claim - thereby tacitly admitting you are work-capable anyway (proving the point in their eyes). This system does not work because it cannot work. It is inimical to the problems it's designed to highlight. In fact so far gone is this broken system that to even describe it thus is to imply it can be fixed - it can't. It must, immediately, be completely and utterly scrapped. Dropped like a hot plate.

Also, don't forget these assessments are carried out on the public purse. We already know that the cost is more than the savings in terms of means testing people's benefits. But the reality is that a large corporate entity receives hundreds of millions. A portion of that, called profit, is immediately trousered, beyond the minimum they are prepared to spend to run the scheme.

This is a perfect example of capitalism's failings: in order to maintain their bottom line, they will only invest the minimum they feel necessary to provide this service. I don't even know if they pay the assessor's mileage for home visits! It's a giant corporate scam, and the worst part is that the staff, all of whom will have some connection with the medical sector perhaps in a previous life, could be working for the NHS. They could actually be doing some good, but instead they are economically persuaded away. That is outrageous; it's gutting the health service to fund ideological means testing.

This post is already long enough, more on this as my mindpsace congeals into something resembling coherency.