63
Parents of severely disabled teen told to hunt for jobs he can’t do in 'nightmare' DWP battle
(www.dailyrecord.co.uk)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
63 points (100.0% liked)
news
24824 readers
573 users here now
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
I’ve never actually met a single person who works for the DWP. They must be so far far out of my circle of potential people I would ever interact with.
They must be like the actual worst people alive, I’d starve than do the job of basically sentencing people with disabilities to death.
Or maybe the job is just outsourced like everything else in this fucking country
I recently googled my old school friends and was appalled to find that my best friend from school, who I haven't seen in 17 years, now works for the DWP as an assessor, and seems to be doing very well out of it, with a flashy new BMW and house.
My aunt works with the the level of government that handles welfare payments and stuff and her and the manager above them keep telling the individuals who handle the payment stuff to chill the fuck out about trying to claw money back from someone who's living on $700 a month. Like, someone needed a laptop to look for work, got a used one for like $75 or something and they wanted the leftover $75 back from the $150 total that's alotted to fund stuff like that. Stories like that over and over and over. Looking for any excuse to withhold these paltry amounts of money.
I've been on disability benefits for 10 years in total now. After a while, they contacted me and told me that they'd actually been paying me a slightly higher amount than I was entitled to and I'd have to pay it back. So far, the extra had added up to about £2800. I spent 5 years paying back £11 a week. It was totally their own mistake but I had to lose £11 a month for 5 years, and at the time I was only getting £135 a week, so I had to live off £124 a week (and that was the total amount, for rent, utilities and food) for 5 years and got massively in debt because who can live off £124 a week?
Now again, because they wrongfully put me through an appeal that took about a year and a half, I'm massively in debt again from living off credit. I'll never be debt free because of all this. This is why I have to spend my life begging for help on mutual aid, because the amounts paid on disability are so low (I now get more than £135 a week but still not anywhere near enough) and due to being put through appeals, told to pay money back etc I'm always in debt, so not only am I always paying off debt but the interest accrued from the debt too.
So on top of telling people to work when they clearly can't, causing them endless stress and bullying them to death they've set up a system where claimants can never get out of debt either. I have to spend my life begging for people to buy me food and toothpaste and going without a lot of things. Yet the newspapers make out that disability benefits are a free-for all, so easy to claim and pay massive amounts. I remember one woman on reddit who worked as a nurse and said she only earnt £1700 a month and she could not live off that. But when I said my disability benefits are much lower than that and I couldn't live off it either she told me disability benefits are too high and should be cut!
My disability benefits are so low, plus all this debt, that the only place I can afford to live is renting a room in an old lady's house. She's only renting the room out because her pension is so low that she can't afford to live without an extra income especially since she is taxed to death, it's not just that utility bills are astronomical but council tax is ridiculously high despite getting hardly any services for it (our rubbish is collected only twice a month and the roads are full of potholes) but even her pension gets taxed! This is why I had to beg on mutual aid for people to help us buy a washing machine, and why we can't afford the £160 repairs for the oven. We literally can't afford to get the oven fixed, can't cook food unless someone comes through on mutual aid. What kind of life is this?
Same scenario in the US and Canada, these people are fucking demons to an individual.
Along with nursing and HR, it's the classic "high school mean girl" job pick. They're paid to bully the disabled.
I get where youre coming from but isnt this just misogyny. Lots of bullies of all stripes
Sure yes, absolutely there are all sorts of bullies out there but there are also some gendered job roles out there too. These are three of the most common jobs for women who were bullies in school. The most common jobs for men who were bullies in school are law enforcement, military, and sales. Real estate is also extremely common but roughly equal in gender distribution.
PubMed is overflowing with psych studies on this subject. There's an incredibly common phrase in medicine, "Nurses eat their young". Misogyny comes in when you ascribe this to being an individual problem of bad eggs, rather than a systemic one of a job category which is toxic and has asymmetrical power dynamics.
All of these industries permit low accountability, give aggressive people unchecked decision-making authority, and provide easy access to and control over vulnerable populations.
Nursing ive never really understood maybe its a US thing cos if ur getting a job as a nurse in the UK to be a mean girl like welcome to hell I guess its such a high requirement and hard job just to bully people.
Idk if it has the same problem here I think the NHS mean girl position is operating the front desk at any and all doctors practises. Some absolute demons in those roles that exist to prevent you from accessing medical care oh and also said all sorts of racist shit to my mum while she was actively dying
In North America, doctor's office receptionists aren't typically gatekeepers, they're like an office receptionist.
Nurses and insurance claims adjusters end up filling that role, sometimes even retroactively in the US.
In Canada, the worst experience I've ever really seen with reception is in our equivalents of A&E, urgent care or the Emergency Department, is typically a response like, "sorry the wait time for walk in is 38 hours" (because they triage anyone who actually needs to be there to the front and you're actually supposed to make an appointment with your GP if you're not bleeding out basically)