The New Poverty by Stephen Armstrong

Author:Stephen Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

7

Unconnected

Social security must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State – in organising security – should not stifle incentive, opportunity or responsibility.

Sir William Beveridge, Social Insurance

and Allied Services Report

In 2015, Nick East was fined by the government for not having broadband. He’d been unemployed for eighteen months after losing his job as a kitchen porter in a country pub. His ageing motorbike finally collapsed and he didn’t have the money to replace her. The bus was irregular and dropped off some way from the village, so he was late one time too many. When he signed on the Jobcentre told him to apply for a minimum of twenty-four jobs per week on Universal Jobmatch – the government’s digital replacement for the old Jobcentre notice board.

Universal Jobmatch seems like a smart response to the digital age. The Jobcentre can monitor all online activity to make sure people are actively hunting for work. If they don’t meet their targets – twenty-four jobs in Nick’s case – people get sanctioned, losing all benefits for anything from four weeks to three years. But applying for twenty-four jobs on Universal Jobmatch is a complex and time-consuming business at best. You can’t upload your CV for most roles and have to type each line of the form out, adding in the same work record time after time. If you don’t have broadband, it’s far worse.

Nick had to travel to Newcastle’s city centre library from his flat in Newbiggin – a good thirty minutes away, with one bus every half an hour and a return ticket costing £3.90. Nick was travelling in three days a week, costing him £12 taken from his £52 Jobseeker’s Allowance benefit, leaving him just over £5 per day before paying for food, bills or clothes. Newcastle library allows members two hours free computer use in its well-appointed fourth-floor computer room that hosts forty computers and a handful of iMacs, and is almost always packed. In a high-tech version of the old casual labour scrums outside the local docks, he’d scramble for a free screen when the library doors opened. ‘You have to get there very early’, the twenty-four-year-old explains, ‘or all the screens will be gone and you have to hang around. And you can’t afford a city centre coffee so you just walk about the streets.’

Each job took a minimum of half an hour to apply for, up to an hour if there were added questionnaires on skills – meaning anything from ten to twenty-four hours per week online. If he reached the end of his two-hour session, Universal Jobmatch wouldn’t allow him to save his application, meaning if he hadn’t finished he’d have to start all over again when a new computer came free.

Four months ago, he failed to hit twenty-four applications and received an official warning: ‘There just weren’t the jobs. I was down for bar work, factory work and general labouring but there weren’t any jobs. Three months ago, I couldn’t make it

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