Town’s forgotten people

ACCORDING to the fat cats, the politicians and the media tarts, everyone in this country lives in a state of gorgeous carefree luxury.
We all spend our days plugged into broadband internet connections and costly digital channels, planning fancy home improvements and extravagant holidays and looking forward to a swanky old age with a generous pension. The millions of people on the other end of the scale are invisible unpeople whose less than glamorous lives must not be allowed to soil the illusion of our consumer capitalist paradise.

Who, for instance, cares that the DSS offices in High Street, Worthing, recently closed shop for two months? From now on, benefit claimants were told, all enquiries would have to be made by phone. And who cares that this is not a free 0800 number to allow the poorest members of our community easy access to the people who control their financial lifeline?

Who cares that calling the offices in Bognor (and inevitably being put on hold for lengthy periods) eats heavily into the meagre allowance they are living on and, if they rely only on a mobile, could easily wipe it out completely? If you are one of those no-nonsense Daily Mail readers who reckon that anyone out of work deserves nothing from society and is probably living the life of Riley at your expense, consider this account of a typical experience of one of Worthing’s forgotten residents.

The woman, in question, in her early 30s, suffers from mental health problems that have made holding down a job difficult over the years, but had managed to do so for some four years until she was made redundant on November 25 2004. She duly filled in the necessary forms and qualified for incapacity benefit. Nearly a month later, however, she had neither been contacted by the social services nor had any money paid into her bank account. She and a concerned friend went to the Job Centre, where staff were heroically trying to cope with some of the queries that would normally be dealt with by the closed office, on an unadvertised basis. This task took all afternoon - not an unusual occurrence as anyone who has ever claimed benefit will be able to imagine. Even the excellent staff found it a difficult process to speak to the right people in Bognor (imagine if that was on your phone bill!), but eventually they announced there had been an error and they would be handing the woman a Giro the next day, which they did. It would have been paid into her bank account as usual, but that would have been too late. When she got the money on Christmas Eve she had received nothing for a month.

What was she supposed to be living on in the meantime? What would she have done if she had not been able to borrow money from her friend?

But the story doesn’t even end there. On January 3 she received a letter from Bognor informing her that her doctor’s sickness certificate would be running out - on January 2, the previous day! In the meantime, she discovered that no money had been paid into her account. She went to the Job Centre on January 6 and, another few hours of tedious waiting around later, was told that money ought in fact to have been paid in on January 4, but instead a Giro would be ready for her the next day. At 11.30am on Friday she arrived there to find there was no Giro. Yet more hours later the answer came from Bognor that they were not going to issue a Giro after all because of the expired sick note.

This was not because they did not believe she was in ill health, or that they thought she could survive without the money. It was merely a bureaucratic decision, taken without any regard for the welfare of somebody medically certified as particularly vulnerable. Eventually, at 2.30pm, her persistent friend persuaded the office to issue a Giro with a promise that the new sick note would be on its way. So the battle had been won. Until next time, that is.

That’s life every week for those invisible unwanted people that don’t even appear on the personal radar screens of the smug and wealthy minority who have never had it so good.



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Summer of discontent ahead as park is grabbed by the bowls!
FUNNY how Worthing Borough Council are always telling us they are there to represent us, have our interests at heart, have a mandate from the people of the borough etc, and yet when it comes to the crunch we’re the last people they care about.

Witness the latest insult revealed by the Worthing Herald on January 13 regarding the popular park area near Peter Pan’s playground at Beach House Gardens. In the summer this is a popular spot for all sorts of people to come and sit, have a picnic, kick a ball about or just lie back on the grass in the sunshine. It’s free and it’s pleasant. But Worthing Borough Council is planning to turn it into a car park for 120 vehicles for the last two weeks of August, the height of the summer holidays.

This is all part of its fawning attempts to butter up the English Bowling Association, which is again holding its national bowls championships at nearby Beach House Park. It is fair to say the bowls event is not universally popular with Worthing folk. For a start, the council spent hundreds of thousands of pounds of our cash making the park suitable for the tournament in the first place. Then we were delighted to discover that the park, which used to be always open to the public, is now closed off to us with security fencing and even CCTV cameras during the contest.

For the council to allow the bowls clique to steal yet more of the Worthing public’s green space by spreading over the road to the Beach House Gardens could well be the last straw for many. The council is already prepared to fork out large chunks of tax-payers’ cash on pandering to the bowls fraternity and the handful of businesses that benefit from their visit to the town, as well as wrecking the gardens. Said the Herald: "It will cost the council £1,500 to £2,000 a week to operate the temporary car park and small saplings may have to be uprooted and relocated for access purposes."

They may want to add on the cost of security to protect the bowls crowd’s cars from the fury of hundreds of miffed Worthing people who have been thrown out of their own park to make way for them. How long are the people of Worthing going to put up with being treated as second class citizens in our own town?