After one of the Select Committee hearings on the Dept of Work and Pensions I had a very brief twitter non-debate with the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS).

PCS members are civil servants some of whom work in Job Centre Plus offices where unemployed people are routinely humiliated and increasingly made destitute. Union members know that sanctions make many people very ill, physically as well as mentally, and homeless. It’s been 2 years since the DWP gave JCP’s guidance on dealing with suicidal people and in those two years there’s been a huge increase in unemployed people killing themselves or just plain disappearing off the face of the earth.

64,000 civil servants have become unemployed in recent years and many of them will now be on the other side of the Job Centre desk. The strain of working in what has become Kafkaesque and cruel employment means that Job Centre staff are classified as ‘high risk’ for taking sickness leave.

So when the PCS started talking about how well they represent their members I asked them if the Union requires members who work in Job Centres to treat claimants respectfully. There was one half hearted answer and some ‘favoriting’ of abuse that was sent my way.

Holocaust Memorial Day is commemorated this Tuesday. We remember millions of people who have been destroyed, whether through death or other means. It’s very simple to feel sorrowful and believe that we are more likely to be a victim rather than a perpetrator.

History demonstrates how easy it is to be a perpetrator. It’s simple to claim victimhood, quite another matter to become aware of behaviours within ourselves that make us an agent of persecution. As the Holocaust Memorial Day organisers say:

We’re fortunate here in the UK; we are not at risk of genocide. However, discrimination has not ended, nor has the use of the language of hatred or exclusion. There is still much to do to create a safer future. 

It’s not just Job Centre staff who treat people-who-aren’t-them as if they should be punished, it’s all of us, potentially. If you believe that you’re not capable of this you’re probably more likely to do it.

What I find particularly depressing about the PCS’s Twitter response is that at their most recent Conference PCS members voted to

• 1. Continue to oppose sanctions targets and pressure on members to meet targets 
• 2. Work with claimant groups
• 3. Use the media to expose the pressure imposed on our members and the social consequences of sanctioning claimants
• 4. Use the PCS parliamentary group to campaign in Parliament to ensure that the pressure faced by PCS members in Jobcentres and the consequences of sanctions on claimants is exposed.
  

The Union's own membership – people who work in Job Centres - want the Union to help them work with rather than against claimants.

Who knows why the PCS isn’t doing what their membership want? They're under pressure too. But just as Union officials are paid more than most members, so JCP staff are endlessly better off than the people they feel so desperately stressed about sanctioning.

Some years ago I worked for two different counselling agencies, one British the other American.  They both offered their clients the same number of free sessions, paying the counsellors a set fee per session.

One had a webpage of counsellors that clients could chose from, gave the authorisation code to the client; the client chose a counsellor and gave the code to them. Client and counsellor met for the allocated number of sessions and at the end of the contract the counsellor invoiced and the organisation paid up within 10 days or so.

The other took a lengthy history and allocated a counsellor – the client had very little choice about who they met. Paperwork became part of every session - one form at the beginning of the session one at the end - which far from offering any kind of meaningful data gathering was used simplistically to demonstrate whether the client was getting better or refusing to take this generous and important opportunity to address their problems. I had to speak with the agency half way through the sessions so that they could determine if their money was being spent well. There was always pressure to break client confidentiality. The agency routinely took 5 months to pay invoices, often significantly longer.

These are difficult days for most organisations and everyone wants to maximise efficiency. It can be tempting to want to control every and anything that moves but, as the examples show, that is likely to add whole new – and expensive – layers of management.

The American company is getting rid of a layer of specialist management by computerising their processes. Now a programme will decide whether a client can be allowed to continue receiving counselling. This still involves huge cost and disruption and still involves paying specialists – this time techies to deal with the inevitable problems – and reduces vulnerable people to computer code.

There’s a real difference between having a tight set of procedures so that everything works efficiently, and teetering on the verge of panic all day long. Nothing is foolproof and it’s very well worth remembering that vital adage:

                                                   Hard Cases Make Bad Law.

Put simply: Stuff Happens: React Proportionately.

Of course, where you are dealing with situations where lives can be put at risk then attending to minute detail is important but proportionately few of us are in that bracket. Most management changes are made to save money and, paradoxically, it almost always results in greater expenditure. In the case of the American counselling organisation, they’re already swiftly losing trust from staff and clients. What price do you put on that?