Stop. Let’s tell the real story

Every Wednesday, a group of chatty elderly ladies get together at their local Age UK centre. They’re here to knit, crochet, paint, and to have a good old natter about their lives. It’s a safe space for these women, many of whom have been widowed at least once and whose families are increasingly spread far and wide across the country.

One day, there’s a new face around the table. Dolores* is sixty-five, funny as hell, and can crochet like no-one else. She helps staff members run the sessions, giving personal support to the members who struggle with the techniques. It’s a bit tricky at first, because it takes her nearly an hour and a half to get to the centre — her local one had been shut several months before, and she’s really keen to have the chance to spend time with friends.

In fact, that was the most important thing for Dolores — she felt that she’d made some friends among these ladies. She’d spent years moving from house to sofa to spare room, struggling with mental health issues and the grief of her sister passing away. These Wednesdays were, for her, a real respite and chance to feel like a person again.

But a few weeks later, she doesn’t show up to the session. Nor does she appear the following week either. It turns out that in order for her to receive her benefits, the JobCentre requires that she spend 35 hours a week looking for jobs: travelling around London on expensive transport, leaving her dog at home unsupervised, on her feet constantly. It’s unsurprising, really, that the three-hour round trip to the crochet sessions is one of the first things that she has to give up on.

But this has wider effects. Dolores is near retiring age, not very mobile, and has long-lasting depression. None of these factors play into the strict regulations for receiving benefits: the mental health, work & pensions, and transport systems are far too siloed for any sensible system of support to develop. For Dolores, giving up her weekly trip to the crochet sessions is an inevitability, but a desperately sad one.

Katie* has worked at Age UK for years and has heard countless stories like this. She does her best to help Dolores, phoning every week to check that she’s ok. It seems there are other concerns too — a tenner borrowed, worries about not being able to pay it back — and Dolores can’t bring herself to leave the house for anything more than the bare minimum.

It’s frustrating for Katie — not least because she could reel off a long list of small changes that could be made that would make the situation better for Dolores and so many like her: communication between government departments, for example, or ensuring that the first contact when a person is about to go onto benefits is a human one, rather than another online form.

But no-one’s listening to her. The expertise and ideas of those who work in frontline services is consistently undervalued, ignored and side-lined in favour of “evidence-based” policymaking with brief and inaccessible online consultations. The years of austerity under Conservative governments, stripping local services back to their bare minimum or less, has gutted our communities and silenced people’s voices. The constant search for the most “efficient” way to provide services, often through outsourcing to private profit-making companies, distorts incentives and reduces human beings to numbers on a spreadsheet.

I want to see a government that starts to look at people as individuals again, with voices and agency and ideas. I want to see a government that is committed to improving the lives of all those who have been left behind over the last ten years: poor people, working people, disabled people, people of colour, women, LGBT people. I want to see a government which values human connection and collaboration, and equips communities with the tools and the autonomy to help shape their own future. Because for people like Dolores, the lack of connection we see everywhere today can be life-threatening. Perhaps she’ll come back to the centre in the New Year — we can only hope.

We are Stop. Let’s tell the real story. Click here, here and here to read just some of our testimony to inequality in the UK. We’d like to tell your story of austerity too. Sign up to hear how.