RELACIONES HUMANAS

In a further example of tension between benefits claimants and public service officials, Paulina – a Polish Roma woman in her twenties – discussed her frustrations with a claim for sickness benefits. She was initially claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, but at the advice of her GP, she made an application to receive Employment and Support Allowance (a benefit for people unable to work due to health problems). At the time of interview, her relationship with her husband had recently broken down and she was living

again with her parents. In addition to worsening health problems, the tense circumstances of her relationship breakdown and the financial difficulties that came with it created a sense of urgency in accessing support to manage her health condition. She disclosed these details to me in an emotional interview, during which she broke down in tears over her sense of powerlessness and fear for the future.

When Paulina initially made her claim to ESA, she was suffering from severe and debilitating back pain, which could cause her legs to unexpectedly give way. When she attended the assessment, she described how she experienced a sudden attack of pain and fell down. The assessor was outwardly sympathetic:

Because of the pain, cause this is what’s happening, and when the lady, she goes to me ‘Is that what’s happening to you all the time?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what I mean about my health’, and then the lady was looking at me and she had tears in her eyes and said in two or three weeks we’re going to text you or send a letter to you.

By including the detail of the tears in the assessor’s eyes, Paulina conveyed her expectation that the assessor understood the severity of her health problems and that her ESA application would be successful.

As her discussions with the assessor progressed, however, she began to question this expectation.

Despite her apparent sympathy for Paulina’s condition, the assessor appeared eager to identify alternatives to awarding Paulina regular ESA payments. In this vein, the assessor suggests that Paulina could be provided with a wheelchair:

And then the lady said to me that in this case, in my case, that there’s a huge chance for them to give me a wheelchair. And then I asked her, ‘how am I gonna work in a wheelchair?’, and she goes to me, ‘you gonna be on the wheelchair, you gonna have the easiest job in the world, and plus we’re gonna give you assistance for, like, doing the work with you.’ And then I’m like, ‘if you’re gonna give me a wheelchair, are you gonna give me my own house?’ Because there’s no chance for me to go in a wheelchair.

Paulina saw wheelchair use as incompatible with her life circumstances, highlighting the inaccessibility of her house and her belief that she would be unable to perform any work that could be done entirely from a seated position. She narrated this segment to me in an ironic tone, reflecting her perceived absurdity of the situation with the assertion that DWP may as well give her a new house if they expect

her to use a wheelchair. Ultimately, however, the assessor disregarded her protestation and deemed her ineligible for ESA.

Frustrated in her efforts to secure an improved standard of living, Paulina turned her attention more generally to perceived inadequacies of UK public service provision frameworks. She described her experiences of attempting to access physiotherapy services, calling attention to administrative inefficiency:

Well, they told me that, um, that they’re gonna send me to, um, what do you call it? A physiotherapist in hospital, and then I was like, waiting for the letter for like three or four months, and then I received the letter, but I didn’t go because when I received the letter it was five days after my appointment. And they put the blame on me that I didn’t go, that I missed the appointment. Now again I’m waiting almost three months again.

With this discussion of inordinate waiting times for appointments and inability to promptly reschedule missed appointments, Paulina presented herself as a victim of service inefficiency. In her interpretation of the situation, it was a service error that led to the late delivery of her appointment letter, yet she ultimately found herself penalised with a longer waiting time for an appointment.

Tying together her experiences with physiotherapy services and her attempts to gain support from benefits systems, Paulina closed her narrative with an overarching criticism of the treatment of individuals within UK public services:

Well I’m just gonna say, yeah, I’m not trying to be rude, but honest to god they’re working, but they don’t know how to do their job properly. And they like to confuse people, but when people get back, like, to them, like getting rude, then they’re like “oh, you guys don’t have respect, and that’s why you end up like that.” Well, it’s not our fault, it’s your fault because you guys are making us to do things.

Paulina’s narrative highlighted the possibility that individual attempts to hold services accountable for their errors will simply lead blame to be turned back on the individual. Presenting herself as helpless in the face of bureaucratic frameworks, she found herself compelled to meet seemingly arbitrary sets of requirements yet saw no potential for recourse when officials misconstrued or underestimated the challenges posed by her health conditions.

7.3.2.1 Connections to grounded theory categories

Where Elzbieta’s narrative highlighted the assessor’s neglect in failing to take Jan’s full medical records into account, Paulina’s narrative addressed the lack of transparency on the part of DWP officials with regard to their means for determining claimants’ benefits eligibility, revealing additional dimensions of the grounded theory categories focusing on the assessor-claimant relationship. Not only did Paulina feel that she was misled by the assessor’s behaviour, but she also expressed frustration that the assessment result failed to account to the practical difficulties of her personal circumstances. In contrast to Elzbieta’s representation of the assessor’s dismissiveness, Paulina viewed refusal of her claim not as a sign of professional detachment from the challenges in her daily life, but rather as an indicator of ineptitude. In her interpretation, the assessor’s suggestion that a wheelchair could be provided in lieu of benefits payments disregarded the practicalities of her daily life – particularly her housing situation – and reflected a failure to undertake a thorough assessment. Perhaps because she entered into the health-related benefits system at the suggestion of her GP, Paulina expected that the assessment process would involve a holistic and sympathetic assessment of her health needs, and she thus saw the refusal of her claim as a failure of the system.