[user104658]

Originally Posted by joeysteele

Also Kizzy, please excuse me for answering while you are replying to Cherie, however it is amazing how many people connected to someone in this situation don't actually want the 'active' bother of dealing with the problems.

It's not even always that simple - people have their own lives to live. That may sound callous, but it's true, there are very few people who can (or should have to) dedicate their own lives to being a full-time carer.

For example, my mother has been disabled with crippling back problems (and besides that is now a chronic alcoholic) since I was in my early teens. Her and my dad are divorced. She could probably do with more help than she gets but, I have my own family and my children will always come first by a country mile. They are my absolute priority in terms of both finances and time and they always will be. We're not "well off" by any means, we do OK. If we were well off it might be a different story but as it stands, any financial help I could give would be a direct financial disadvantage to my own children. I work full time in hideous shift patterns that mean I don't see my kids for up to 4 days at a time as it is (out before they're awake, home after they're in bed) and so even offering up time to help would be less time spent with my own family. It's just not something I'm willing to do.


The current system absolutely NEEDS easily accessible centers that have people there purely to help. For a start... they've started to computerise the entire system. My mother has been mainly on disability, but she was stuck on Jobseekers Allowance for 6 months after (surprise surprise) a dodgy ATOS decision (that was eventually overturned). She - without exaggeration - CANNOT use a computer. She can't work a mouse. Turning one on baffles her. This isn't even to do with her disability - BEFORE the start of her issues, when she was a top-grade nurse and ward manager, she was completely tech-illiterate. She couldn't work a DVD player.

They've computerised the system and left the slightly older generations completely without help with it - and then they implement punitive sanctions for not complying. The cynic in me suspects it's deliberate. I had an older guy come into my work really worked up with a letter from the Jobcentre, asking me to help him with it because he couldn't understand it. It was just an information leaflet about browser cookies on the Jobmatch website. Completely irrelevant, but it might as well have been written in Japanese to him, and he was very distressed about it.

They NEED to have staff available to help people with simple things like this. To sit with them and fill in the online forms for them in a Q&A, to help them with online applications and that ridiculous Jobmatch site. Even the very basics like this, they're getting completely wrong. People are set up to fail and then they have benefits sanctioned entirely for weeks at a time. By the time they're reinstated, bills have piled up on the doormat. They start to get bank fines, charges through interest, debt collectors start knocking... and of course they're STILL struggling to meet govt. demands and get hit with sanction after sanction.

For a family member to deal with all of this, to keep so many balls in the air and at the same time have their own full-time job and family, is verging on impossible.