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Third
Party Rules Apply
I heard recently that hairdressing came third in a survey
on job satisfaction. “ In what
other job “ said the hairdresser interviewed...” can you completely turn
round someone’s confidence and self esteem in 40 minutes and see them
walk out with their head held high?”
I would like to say that that is the lot of the CAB
adviser..but sadly not usually so. It is wonderful when that happens, as
it sometimes does, but usually you can just point clients in a certain
direction, make them aware of their options and give them the information
and perhaps confidence they need
to take that important step towards resolving the problem that brought
them in.
However this is not always the case either...there are a few
people you cannot help at all ...sometimes because their options have run
out ( usually because they leave
it too long before they come to see us) but there is a whole category of
people that we cannot help because of what we call the “third party “ rules.
We cannot give advice to a third party , or discuss the issues of any
other family member/friend /associate of the client unless they present
themselves to us and give us their consent. Reasonable? Of course it is. I don’t want my
neighbour discussing my issues with a total stranger, however kind her
intentions may be.
But what of the bedridden? The depressed? Those with mental
health issues? It is one of the
saddest parts of the job when people come in to seek help for someone in
their family who is struggling perhaps with depression or other mental
health issues and won’t leave the house/the bedroom. They won’t sign on ,
seek help and so the family suffers...One single mother is about to lose her flat for rent
arrears because she cannot get
enough housing benefit to cover their rent. Her 20 year old son who is
living at home stays in his room playing computer games all day and he
won’t sign on and he has no money
. She works in a low paid
job and there is not enough money to go round. For benefit purposes unless he signs
on, he counts as a non dependent adult
and his mother ‘s housing
benefit is reduced. She is worried
about him and thinks he is suffering from depression. She has tried to
talk to him but he gets violent and she tries not to aggravate him as she
is afraid of him. There’s no new hairstyle that will resolve this one.
She does not want to report the violence of the son or take any action against him
...she doesn’t want the police or social services to get involved.
Another elderly couple come in.....a proud couple who find
it difficult to have to ask for help but are at their wit’s end. They
have a son in his forties who has withdrawn from society and they have
cared for him over the years but as they approach the end of their lives
they fear for him and want to help him sort out some sort of
income...perhaps get him on to benefits, get him into the system, get him
some help. Third Party Rules
apply. Regarding any unspecified health issues we suggest the couple
approach their GP.....they have ...Third Party Rules apply. The old GP
they had for years who knew the family has retired and they are now part
of a modern practice where “you never see the same doctor twice . That’s
if you can get an appointment and they won’t come to your house anymore.”
Yes, there are days when I yearn for the hairdresser’s lot.
My hairdresser informs me that I have missed the
point...that the hairdresser is simultaneously a stylist , a counsellor,
specialising in relationship breakdown and bereavement ,and ultimately
a self appointed diplomat. After
all , for once, third party rules do not apply.
This
Sceptred Isle.
I have decided that
one of the least pleasant parts of an adviser’s job is dealing with
clients who have had the bailiffs called in.
How can you begin to explain bailiffs to a refugee family for
whom a knock on the door in the early hours brings fears of unimaginable
terrors? One of many local families from Afghanistan who have
suffered torture, imprisonment and loss of family and friends, who had to
flee their home and country to save their lives was woken again recently
by a bailiff knocking at 5.30 am.
“Surely they can’t knock at that time?” the husband said
“I’m afraid they can if it is between sunrise and sunset.”
The wife speaks no English and has just given birth…one
afternoon she opened the door and in ignorance of the law let the bailiff
walk into her home. This allowed him to put a seizure notice on their
television set and a few other items. She was told that she had to pay £467
or he would return and take away the possessions. Her husband arrived
home and after exhausting all avenues (what was left in the bank, the
rent money, and what he could borrow off friends) cobbled together £380.
This was put straight into the bailiff’s pocket, he gave them a receipt
and he said he would return three days later for the balance of £87.
“He said that if we weren’t there he could come in and seize
the goods”
“Yes he can…..he can
break in and take the goods. “
“But I will call the police…he cannot just break into my
house”
“Yes he can…..I’m afraid the police would do nothing. The law
says he can”
“But this is England. Such things do not happen in England”
And the reason for this debt…an unpaid parking fine…the
clients had not been able to understand the letters and did not realize
how a £40 penalty charge could escalate into a £467 debt. The clients
borrowed more money and paid the balance.
And now a few` weeks later more bailiffs are knocking at the
door…this time for unpaid council tax on the first place they stayed when
they arrived in the UK because they did
not understand what they had to do or pay in this strange land
with a foreign language. They want to pay,,..,they have offered the other
council to pay a small amount each month but the council have told them
they have to negotiate with the bailiffs…ha….They came to CAB for help.
Have you ever tried to wrestle a bone out of a hungry
Rottweiler’s mouth? Yeah, well,
try and negotiate with a bailiff.
So the situation is now that the wife is terrified, she is
frightened in her own home , she will not open the door anymore…..to
anyone. The family have exhausted all possible sources where they might
have found money to pay off the next bailiff. The law says that a person
can be imprisoned for wilful non payment of council tax….but poverty is not a crime. If
such a case as this was taken to court, the court would surely look at
the client’s circumstances and accept the small monthly payment he has
suggested. But of course now the debt has risen again with several more
hundred pounds worth of bailiff’s fees and court costs added to it…
And do you wonder why they call it distress?
Blog no. 9
Alice Banned on Speed Dating
So there I
was, sitting across the table from punter number one….I’d been warned
that there was no time for the usual pleasantries, that body language is
worth a thousand words, that in the course of the first session before
the break I would meet 10 people and after the break another ten…it was
really important to keep notes else how could you remember which hunk was
which at the end of the evening?
Some
people were old hands at this, I admitted it was my first
time…remembering the golden rules…don’t get stuck on one topic for too
long, or bogged down in the detail, look upbeat, interested but never never appear desperate…oh and
never ask “what do you do for a living then?” It smacks of gold
digging…either that or you spend the whole time listening to the ins and
outs of the IT dept. The
literature read…
“We feel
that three minutes is too short a time with all the moving between tables
and the note taking. We strongly believe that four minutes is the right
amount of time to decide whether you're prepared to invest more time in
follow up emails and phone calls to land a real date with someone you
meet at one of our events. Four minutes per date also enables you to meet
15-20 dates in one night without getting completely worn out.”
I went
with Sue an old mate from college days…always up for a laugh.…our host
told us not to expect too much from the first time…..that for most people
it goes by in a whirl and they can hardly remember anything about who
they spoke to or who was who.
At the end
of evening we swapped notes…Sue’s were a jumbled mass of nice eyes,
carpenter, Mr Cool, no way, OMG, nauseous, tasty, possible, too loud, who
does he think he is? …..
Mine? Ha .
Mine read….. Male, 35 , British Citizen, separated, two kids, lives in a
grotty rented flat, pays maintenance to ex wife and mortgage on their
house, has kids alternate weekends and every Tuesday midweek, works a 38
hour week, has been employed for five years by same company but company just taken over and his job’s
changed and he’s thinking about leaving, he is not a member of a trade
union, his grandmother was born in Tobago, drives a Clio he has on a
finance agreement, final balance due in six months, ex wife kept the
Volvo, has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Leeds
Metropolitan, he got a 2-1, narrowly missing a first, his favourite meal
is Steak and Guinness pie, he has a mobile phone contract with Orange
which he took out in the store, his favourite book is Crime and
Punishment , he had tickets for the
Michael Jackson O2 concert, he has brown eyes, his blood pressure
is 120 over 80, he plays football in
a Sunday league team and trains every Monday and Thursday nights , he is a
Arsenal fan and is a silver member going to the lesser matches and all
the Carling Cup and very occasionally gets an away game, he went on holiday
to Turkey with his mates, where he lost his luggage on the way back and
he lives next door to the Johnson family.
Uh Oh… four minutes up….next please
I had 19
more entries on my card just like that one….and you’ll be really proud of
me, I never asked any of them what they did for a living…but the men
weren’t as circumspect ..they came straight out with it…what? Me? I’m a
Gateway Assessor!
Another
six minutes and I’d have made him an appointment with a family solicitor,
given him a hand out about Changes in Employment Contracts, Discrimination,
Unfair Dismissal and the number for ACAS, mentioning of course time
limits for ET claims, the phone number for Consumer Direct and a print
out on Travel Insurance, a print out on Disrepair in Rented
Accommodation, the number of the local Environmental Health Dept. and I’d
have typed it all up into Case….who’s next please?
Parts of this entry
are pure fiction ……….
Blog No. 8
What a debt we owe.
On holiday
last week with friends we were having a long pub chat when the subject
came up of people we admired….. people we had met in our lives who were
extra-ordinary people. Think about it for a while…seriously. You may have
been lucky and have teams of likely suspects…..but I struggled with the
notion for quite some time.
I was
never one of those lucky people to have had a mentor, or a teacher who
believed in them and inspired them to great heights. So I was, to be
frank, a bit stuck. In 2004 I had
nominated a stalwart of my tennis club as part of a national competition
by Samsung to find “Extraordinary Ordinary People in the world of Sport”
and deservedly my friend Dave, who has spent his life helping people get
into sport in Tottenham and Enfield won and got to carry the Olympic
Torch as it passed through London.
And as I
sat in the pub in Dorset on that rainy summer’s afternoon last week, it
was another David who came into my mind and this was David Hellings.
David was
a CAB volunteer at Hendon who died in 2006. He took on the debt cases and
did endless tedious detailed letter writing on behalf of his clients…a
service no longer fashionable or feasible in the “empowering clients”
environment we operate today…but fashion and feasibility never
impressed David. David was a man of principle….totally.
In the
Valediction he chose for his funeral , he gave one of his favourite
quotes “Freedom is also for bastards”. And it has stayed with me…David
did not take the popular route, he did not take the easy route, he did
what he believed was the right thing, not necessarily the kind thing, but
the right thing.
And it is
here that my two Davids merge….my tennis friend, like David, practises
democracy in his everyday life …I watched David Hellings at a staff
meeting argue passionately for an issue that would make his own life as a
adviser much more difficult ( I forget the details), just as I have seen
Dave hold up the Tennis AGM for hours to protect the rights of a (non
existent) group of members… we didn’t at the time have anyone in that
category but if we ever do they will owe their freedoms and rights to Dave.
To
adulterate a quote from David’s Valediction
“Even the
most unsatisfactory of individuals are still Tennis Club Members (God’s
children)”
David was
such a learned and a clever man. His Valediction ( I had to look that
word up in the dictionary ) is extraordinary, as indeed David was
extra-ordinary. What David never knew was how genuinely upset his clients
were, when in the next year or so after he died, they came back to CAB
and heard of his death…people who could barely speak English, people who had
learning difficulties, people who were just in a mess, people who were
helpless and hopeless, and in one case a most disagreeable client who
David had disliked and suspected of roguery…all of whom he had served to
the best of his abilities, which were immense.
Blog No. 7
Sacred Cows
Well first
it was the bankers, then the MPs, then the Chair of Poetry at Oxford and
finally we learnt in the papers last week that two CAB managers were
found guilty of stealing £575,000 from Ammanford CAB…..
What
astounded me about the story, as well as moral outrage, was the amount of
money that they had squirrelled away…£575,000…we got wildly excited in
Hendon when the organization managed to afford a paper towel dispenser
for the staff loo. What a red letter day that was. People mustered in the
corridor, conversed in the kitchen and we almost announced a day’s
holiday to celebrate.
But
necessity is the single parent of invention and all that and a friend of
mine who works in HR at a well known local council in North London (not
Barnet) explained how her council are introducing a new scheme of office
management called Hot Desking. .
.the definition being Hot Desking
(verb. "to hotdesk") is also known as location independent working, where workers do not have
their own desks, but are allocated work space according to their needs.
It can be refined to mean the sharing of a desk/seat/workstation
arrangement by more than one member of staff. This type of arrangement
enables employers with staff who
are frequently out of the office to make better use of the available
resources.
And I
thought it was just that we didn’t have enough space or desks! Oh ye of
little faith! If only I’d known we were in the vanguard of management
theory. Still, £575,000 could buy a lot of desks!
So next time
you are hot desking , hot computering or hot telephoning, just remember…
it’s dead cool.
Blog no. 6
Client Contact
At the BCAB AGM Liz Barclay from
You and Yours Radio 4 spoke about some of her experiences as a CAB
adviser and manager in East Anglia before she moved to the BBC.
Interestingly she pointed out that the forerunner of the BBC helplines (
“ If you have been disturbed by any
issues raised in this programme call our helpline on…”…)…were in fact
a load of CAB advisers who were brought in and were on call immediately
after one of the first consumer programmes called Sound Advice…later the
BBC employed its own people. Liz went on to talk about cases she had had
that she was unable to forget, including the farmer who brought in a bag
full of ferrets and sat it down on the chair next to her as she
interviewed him
It brought me on to thinking about
surprising clients and my favourite was a woman in her 30s with some
learning and literacy difficulties who asked me to help her complete a
form. I agreed as she was obviously in need of support and she promptly
produced a form from an Internet Dating Agency.
Advisernet was pretty inadequate
on that one and I must admit that some of the advice given by me (meet in
a public place, in daytime, make sure your family knows where you are,
keep your mobile phone with you) should have had my mother as the info. source!
Never make assumptions. My
smuggest moment as an adviser was when we spotted a blind man tapping his
way across the pavement outside the bureau to the door. Up jumped a
trainee “Please can I sit in this interview with you? I need to get a
disability interview for my RL 104” or whatever the latest training
requirement was…”Ah ha “ I said smugly with my experienced
adviser’s hat on “What makes you think it will be a disability
issue?” fully expecting an enquiry about DLA or the like….and it turned
out to be an enquiry about a contract dealing with satellite dishes that
the client was importing through Heathrow! Praise be to Sara (our
guidance tutor).
Another source of continuous
amazement to me is people’s age and I am constantly being surprised
..like last week when I thought a client came in with her teenage son and
he turned out to be her 59 year old spouse…he was wearing a hoodie and
looking bored so it wasn’t that preposterous!
Another great leveller is when you
are interviewing an “elderly” client and they turn out to be younger than
you….or a client I was sure was at least in her late 30s, maybe mid 40s
and she turned out to be not quite 24. It wasn’t difficult to see the
impact of the extraordinarily hard life this young woman struggles with.
And then of course there’s that
old favourite…as soon as a client says
“It’s just a quick question/a
small issue/I only want to ask one thing/it’ll only take a minute” you
know you’re in for at least a grievance letter/ET1/ a Pro Bono
referral/a multiple debt case…not
to mention the associated benefit checks , habitual residence checks etc.
Not to forget the client with the
carrier bag full of dog eared papers…. clutching it to their knee…you
ignore it and say “Tell me about it…in your own words….as it happened”
knowing all the time that sooner or later you are going to have to take a
deep breath and say…. “And did they write to you about this?”
EMPOWER EMPOWER EMPOWER….yeah
right.
A personal favourite was the
client to whom the ASS at the door dutifully explained that the session
was full. “I only want you to fill in this form” he said .The ASS
continued her polite explanation of why the client couldn’t be seen,..to
be interrupted by “ You could have done it by now whilst you’ve been
talking to me…get on with it”
But then there’s is the client who
tells you you are an angel, who asks God to bless you,, who sends a card,
a letter, who kisses you,* shakes your hand, sends chocolate, biscuits,
bakes a cake and a thousand other ways of saying thank you……and these are
sometimes the cases when you feel you haven’t been able to do much at
all.
Clients…what would we do without
them?
·
It happened
once…I wondered if I should have entered it as a client contact……..
·
oh yes and I was asked out by someone
once as well. We’ll have none of the “He must have left his dog outside”
jokes ,…. thank you!
Blog no. 5
Signs of the Times
This is just a reflection really
but it is something that slowly dawns on you as time passes….how our
clientele changes…..reflective presumably of government initiatives and
the economic situation. When I started advising, there were a lot of
clients who were asylum seekers, clients often from Somalia and this was
followed by an influx of clients from Afghanistan. A year or so ago I
would see lots of clients from Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and
other EU citizens exercising their rights to work in the UK. Recently it
is far less common to see any of these categories of clients. We still
have a wonderful ethnic mix in Barnet but another sign of the times is
that clients are increasingly coming in with redundancies. A few years ago we had innumerable
complaints about tax credits but these have lessened… perhaps as HMRC
have improved their services, or is this wishful thinking? Debt is a
constant factor and sadly now there is an increase in home
repossessions.
One of the perks of the job for me
has been meeting people from all over the world. I think fondly of the
young looking undersized 19 year old Latvian “boy” who was applying for
housing benefit…he wouldn’t get it as he didn’t have a job but still
wanted to make a claim….he was unlikely to get a job as he had spent two
short terms in prison, where he had found shelter warmth and food. He had
been living in a skip but had recently moved in to sleep on the floor of
a fellow Latvian’s room. He had the chance to rent a room of his own but
only if he could pay for it and hence his claim for housing benefit. One
of the questions on the form asked “What is the relationship with the
person with whom you are staying?” and he had written “Good”. So as not to belittle his attempt, I
added the word “friend” after it. Thinking of my own children, I asked
after his parents…he said they lived in Riga in an overcrowded flat with
his brothers and sisters. I asked if it would be a better option for him
to return home, if we could find him some way to finance his travel ? He
replied proudly “No it is not better in Latvia. Madam, I am a man. A man
does not go home to his parents.”
I don’t know how much our clients
learn from us but certainly we learn much from them.
Blog No. 4
Ignorance of the Law should have been
no excuse for Ivy.
People are often surprised to learn that the CAB is a
charity…..that over 20,000 people who work for CABs are volunteers…people
ask why we do it? The reasons are as diverse as the people
who volunteer I guess….but I can’t think of a better reason that this….
A friend had been working at her office in the city
and came home shocked and upset. The person who cleaned her office and
had done so for more years than my friend could remember had committed
suicide at the weekend. This person ( let’s call her Ivy) was kind,
thoughtful, scrupulously honest, took pride in her work and was very very
poor. She worked long hours but her rent took up nearly all of her
wages.
Ivy had entered the UK illegally 18 years ago. She
moved into a house and when the person on the tenancy agreement died Ivy was
so fearful of being made homeless and being deported that she kept quiet
and paid the rent each week. The rent was too expensive for her and took
all of her income but she could see no other option. She did not claim
any benefit and so paid maximum council tax and rent. Debts mounted. The
employees at the office , vaguely aware of her plight, used to give her
food….or at least when she would let them…”It’s left over from a
function….It will only get thrown away….” No doubt new employment
regulations were bearing down on her as well. Ivy was proud and
dignified. She didn’t want to take anything from anybody. In the end she
took her own life.
This story is so tragic. No-one can say that if Ivy
had sought our help things might have turned out differently but
there was so much a CAB could have helped her with…after 14 years in the
UK she could have applied for citizenship…she was a hard working honest
decent member of our society. She may have had to leave her house but her
actions were not criminal and she could have found somewhere cheaper to
rent. CAB would have helped her reschedule her debts. This may not have
been enough to save her but at least she would have known that she had
some options open to her,that in the end the law was on her side, that she
could have had a future.
Blog No. 3
Alice Banned…the blog of a CAB volunteer
I opened up the Outreach
this week, which is based in a community school. Right in the
middle of the first interview of the day, the school secretary knocked on
the door of the interview room and told me that the reporter from the
Local Paper had arrived. It was the first I had heard about it and being
somewhat isolated as the sole CAB adviser at the school, it raised
interesting possibilities…was I as a lowly volunteer* allowed to engage
with the press? I telephoned Tim aka Chief Exec aka God and he, being an
enlightened being, gave his blessing but “the reporter”
turned out to be a photographer.
Would that my daughter had
not two days earlier taken the only hair dryer in our house off to
uni…would that I had lingered a little longer in the wardrobe that
morning deciding what to wear…would that the school had mirrors in the
girls toilets……..…At the end of the first interview the photographer
introduced himself and said he’d like to take a photo of all the clients
queueing in the corridor….one could argue that the sight of people
queueing would indeed be most representative of the service….however I
informed him that he was not allowed to photograph the clients for
reasons of confidentiality, so that left just me.
I’ve never wanted to be a
model ( trust me.. it was never an option). It seems a superficial
sort of occupation to me. So poncing up and down a school corridor full of
clients with a press photographer clicking away like the Papparazzi is a
novel experience. “Just walk along the corridor one more time please? And
now back…and would you hold up that leaflet? Point to the sign? Engage in
fake conversation with a member of the school staff rolled in the
purpose”….whilst being watched patiently by one house repossession, one
relationship breakdown, one unmarried father about to discover that he
does not have parental rights over his troubled son, and a traffic
accident with no insurance …..
However I did go on Media
Training at Cit A a year or so ago…..so that wasn’t wasted! “No one
will notice it in the local rag” I consoled myself.
Two days later I had a blocked drain at home and the plumber came
and his first question was “Are you signing autographs tonight?” “Only
for 15 minutes” I said.
*I use this glibly….there
is nothing lowly about the volunteers at my bureau …we could put up a
good fight against a hunting pack of Arctic wolves.
Blog No. 2
Fully Engaged
A client came in who was,
what we call in the business, street homeless. Fleeing from an abusive
partner with no where to go, she (let’s call her Rosie) was desperate to
move out of the area as quickly as she could. Via the CAB office Rosie
found a place at a women’s refuge in Kent. This was what she wanted but
she had no money to get there. She needed a crisis loan and urgently. She
had been calling the Social Fund for days…at first unable to get through
with the lines always engaged. When she finally managed to get through
she was told someone would call her back but they didn’t. CAB tried all
afternoon but couldn’t get through. Rosie left the office still trying.
Next day when we tried to call her, her phone was dead . She didn’t come
back to us and we don’t know what happened .
Pots and Kettles you may say
and you would be right. At the local outreach I saw a client from a
neighbouring borough who had been unable to get through to CAB by phone
at all and didn’t know how else to access the service.
The CAB nationally is now
moving to a primarily phone access system and
BCAB and other local agencies are
opening a call centre in Barnet next year. The aim is that this will
increase access to the CAB and local services. We desperately hope this
is the case. (BCAB will keep its drop in service with normal opening
hours running alongside this.)
My question is
this “Who counts the phone calls that never get through?” to the
Jobcentre, Child Benefit, Tax Credits, Crisis Loans and the
CAB…..do some people fall by the wayside? Is Rosie safely installed in
her refuge in Kent picking up the pieces of her life or is she sleeping
on a street near you because she ran out of credit on her phone and gave
up?
Blog No. 1
The Cost of Housing
A client came in with a repossession
order from her landlady…the issue being one that the client, mother of
three young children is on housing benefit but it does not cover the full
rent. Ironically when she took the tenancy in 2007 it did…then there was
a rent review. The rent is not especially high for the area but the
clients only option is “to find somewhere cheaper” which she has been
unable to do.
We all know that there is
shortage of affordable housing in London, which includes council housing,
which is nigh on impossible to access in the borough. The client
will have to do the best she can in the private rented sector, which will
most likely mean yet another short term tenancy. The client said,
“My eldest child is seven.
She is already at her third primary school. How can I tell her she’ll
have to move again?”
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