The government has dropped its hardline refusal to accept that destitution caused by five-week waits for universal credit payments has been a major factor in forcing some women to turn to sex work.

Giving evidence to the work and pensions select committee, the minister for family support, Will Quince, apologised for a memo his department sent to the committee last month and said it “did not very well reflect my views on this issue”.

The memo dismissed evidence that universal credit was a cause of increased numbers of women turning to sex work as anecdotal. It said the phenomenon was influenced by a range of factors, from drug addiction and the rise of AirBnB to EU immigration.

Quince told the committee he had changed his views after hearing accounts from four women who gave evidence of how impoverishment related to universal credit issues had led them to take up escort and brothel work.

“Those very brave testimonies of the young women who have gone through the most horrific of experiences gave me a better understanding through their lived experiences. What it showed me more than anything is we need to better understand this area,” he said.

A transcript of the private committee hearing in May included a testimony from M, a brothel worker. She said the fact that drug and alcohol drove people into survival sex workdid not mean that universal credit had not caused “a really big influx”.

She said: “It is particularly bad with universal credit because we have seen these huge waits, but the whole welfare system is stacked against us and it is pushing people into survival sex work.

“It is the long wait, it is the payments in particular that I think are really dangerous because when we apply for things like this we are in crisis already, like we don’t have the ability to wait, and sex work is the only real job you can go out and earn money that night.”

T, a care worker, who went into escort work after using food banks during a six-week wait for her first universal credit payment, said: “It is horrible to say, but it is the easiest thing to keep us girls alive.”

Another witness, K, said she had worked out she would be £200 a month worse off on universal credit. “I will sell my body. I want to tell this committee that there are a lot of girls out there just like me,” she said.

The committee also heard an unexpectedly positive, if qualified, endorsement of the recent report by the UN rapporteur Philip Alston, who last month called austerity cuts the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.

Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, responded at the time by saying the report was politically biased. She alleged that Alston did not do enough research, having only visiting the UK for 11 days, and said the government would complain to the UN.

Donna Ward, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) senior civil servant responsible for children, families and disadvantage, told the committee chair, Frank Field, that it had fact-checked Alston’s report, which had in passing referred to a rise in survival sex.

“He made a lot of good points. It was factually correct,” she said. “I think where the secretary of state took issue with it, and where I as a civil servant can’t be involved, was the political interpretation of a lot of what’s happened.

“But in terms of the facts, in terms of austerity, cuts to local government, in terms of the reliance that we have on the labour market and the risks we face if there is a recession – all of those things were really good points that we have taken on board, and we should take on board.”

Helen Purdon’s life was turned upside down in September 2017 when her application for personal independence payment (PIP) benefit was rejected. Purdon, 47, had been on disability living allowance (DLA) for 10 years, following a diagnosis of epilepsy, which means she has seizures every 10 to 15 days. She is unable to work and assumed her transfer to PIP would be seamless. But she was wrong. “It was unreal. My DLA stopped, which was around £400 a month. I didn’t get any money at all for months,” she says. “We couldn’t afford to put petrol in the car, we were living off pasta and beans.” Purdon, who is from Irvine in North Ayrshire, decided to appeal against the PIP decision.

It took more than a year, but in October 2018 a tribunal found that Purdon was entitled to PIP, awarding her £119.90 a week and backdated payments of £5,700.

Purdon’s case is all too common. According to the latest figures from the Department for Work and Pensions, more than half of existing epilepsy patients and two-thirds of new claimants are being denied disability benefits.

PIP was introduced in England, Scotland and Wales in 2013, replacing DLA. The benefit is supposed to cover some of the additional costs of having a long-term health condition, and is available to people in or out of work. It is worth up to £87.65 a week to meet daily living needs, plus up to £61.20 a week for the mobility element, depending on assessment.

But since PIP was introduced, 65% of claims from people with epilepsy who did not have DLA were rejected, while 54% of those in receipt of DLA were turned down for PIP, the second-highest refusal rate of all health conditions and double the national average. Of those who challenged the decision 78% won on appeal. According to Epilepsy Scotland, which obtained the figures, the benefit assessment system is flawed because it fails to take account of fluctuating conditions like epilepsy. Claims assessors focus too heavily on the type and number of seizures a person has, while ignoring other symptoms like memory impairment, confusion, anxiety and depression.

Frances Brown, Epilepsy Scotland’s welfare rights officer, says: “About 70% of my work is PIP-related. Since 2017 we have had to double our workforce to cope with demand and have recovered £1m in unpaid benefits, including PIP.”

Being denied PIP brings financial hardship but also damages mental health. “We’ve had numerous people tell us that they don’t want to be here any more – that they have had enough,” says Brown. “It’s that feeling of not being believed – of not being listened to.”

Epilepsy charities in England and Wales are also reporting soaring demand for help. Daniel Jennings, senior policy and campaigns officer at Epilepsy Action, says the number of people contacting their helpline about PIP rocketed by 123% between 2016 and 2017. “Many people use that benefit to travel to work on public transport, as a lot of people with epilepsy can’t drive. If people lose that money, they lose the one thing that might give them their one bit of independence,” he says.

An early-day motion, signed by 34 MPs, expresses “serious concern” at the number of people with epilepsy being denied PIP, and “alarm” at rejection rates. They want the government to make the system fairer for people with epilepsy.

The figures are just the latest in a litany of problems with PIP. Disability rights organisations and patient groups have widely campaigned against the PIP process, which a former top civil servant described as Kafka-esque in its complexity when his own application was rejected. Last year a cross-party committee of MPs concluded the system was failing a “substantial minority” of claimants; the process was undermined by basic errors, insensitivity and ignorance about people’s conditions. The criticisms prompted key changes to PIP guidance.

In November 2017 and again in June 2018 the DWP issued amended guidance, following a successful legal challenge, which found that government policy had been “blatantly discriminatory” against people with mental health conditions. This has resulted in an increase in the mobility element of the benefit for some epilepsy claimants. Even so, nearly half of claims since November 2017 were still turned down.

In theory, things should improve for epilepsy patients in Scotland, as the Scottish government intends to reform PIP when responsibility for the benefit is devolved next year, with changes coming in 2021. Scotland’s social security secretary, Shirley-Anne Somerville, says: “We will be replacing PIP with disability assistance for working-age people, a new person-centred benefit. We will be working to get decisions right first time, supported by a reformed assessment process, delivered by Social Security Scotland, not the private sector. We will reduce the need for face-to-face assessments, but, where these are necessary, we will provide people with choice and flexibility over their appointment. Our new system will also provide for the needs of people with fluctuating conditions like epilepsy.”

PIP has not been devolved in Wales but the Welsh government has repeatedly called for the system to be overhauled. A government spokesman says: “We will be carrying out research into the implications of devolving parts of the benefits system to Wales. This will include looking at the Scottish model.”

Charities in England also want a reformed system. Phil Lee, chair of Epilepsy Action, says: “We are looking at what’s happening in Scotland very closely; it’s an opportunity to learn from mistakes and put them right. Hopefully, we will see a better system in place in Scotland which the rest of the UK can model – Scotland is leading on this.”

In a statement, the DWP said 27% of people with epilepsy get the higher level of PIP support compared with 6% under DLA. “In November 2017 we updated our guidance, which will increase entitlement for a number of claimants, particularly those with conditions such as epilepsy.” It is now identifying existing claimants who may be entitled to more PIP support.

Back in Irvine, Purdon is finally getting her life back on track. “I feel a lot less stressed. We’ve got money for the house and we don’t have to worry about food bills. It also means I can give my daughter pocket money again – having to say ‘no’ to her for all those months was heartbreaking.”

Case study – Murray Goulder

HR professional Murray Goulder, 39, from Crawley, West Sussex, knows firsthand just how difficult it is to qualify for PIP if you have epilepsy. Goulder takes 20 tablets a day to reduce the risk of seizures, which come without warning and bring mental “absences”. Each episode can last from a few seconds to three minutes. He has four or five seizures a month, but they are unpredictable – one weekend he had 90.

“I have almost walked off train platforms before, without knowing,” he says. “I get tired very easily and terribly forgetful – my memory is in tatters – and my mood can be drastically effected. I also have constant headaches.”

Goulder applied for PIP when his DLA – worth £174 a month, typically spent on public transport and medication – ended in November 2017. His application was rejected but was finally granted this February on appeal: he was awarded £468 a month with £6,608 in back claims. He says: “It caused a lot of stress and made me feel like I was a liar. It meant I didn’t have enough money for pursuing my hobbies like going to concerts and the theatre.”

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

The mother of a disabled woman who took her own life after some benefits were stopped has been given a personal apology by government officials.

Jodey Whiting, 42, from Stockton, had some payments halted after she missed a capability assessment because she was in hospital with pneumonia.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) later admitted mistakes were made and paid the family compensation.

Senior officials travelled to Teesside to explain what changes have been made.

Ms Whiting, a mother of nine, suffered multiple physical and mental health issues including curvature of the spine and a brain cyst, and took 23 tablets each day.

Following her death in 2017, an independent inquiry found that the DWP did not follow procedures, such as telephoning and visiting Ms Whiting after she missed the appointment.

Her mother, Joy Dove, who has been campaigning for justice, said the officials told her they felt they had to apologise in person.

She said they “seemed sincere”, but “apologies mean nothing, they won’t bring Jodey back”.

I grew up in a Britain that said life would be full of promise for disabled people like me. We might not have conquered the media and corridors of power, but – unlike generations before me – by the 1990s we were no longer hidden from sight. Grim words such as “crippled” and “retarded” were no longer part of everyday speech. Charity tins that until recently symbolised the scraps handed out to us were now accompanied by concrete rights – from the groundbreaking disability civil rights law of my childhood to the welfare state’s tailor-made benefits and services for disabled people.

Progress, though, is rarely as permanent as it appears. Nearly 20 years later, in the spring of 2013, I watched as David Cameron’s coalition government launched what would become an unprecedented assault on disabled people: from the bedroom tax to the rollout of “fit for work tests”, and the abolition of disability living allowance.

Britain likes to tell itself that it is a fair and compassionate country. How it treats disabled people has long been at the heart of this. And over this past decade of austerity, ministers have relied on this narrative more than ever: that even in tough economic times, “the most vulnerable” would always be protected.

Listen to Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and you start to get an idea of just how far the spin is from truth. Disabled people have been “some of the hardest hit by austerity measures”, he warned in a damning report last month, with many “driven to breaking point” by cuts. A broken benefits system has led to thousands of people dying after being found “fit for work”. Food banks are packed with people battling mental and physical health problems. The threadbare social care system is leaving disabled people trapped in their homes, in some cases waiting 14 hours without access to their toilet.

It is not simply that Britain is shirking its responsibility to its disabled citizens. We have reached a point where negligence is so widespread that at its extremes it is tantamount to abuse. The British state has to all intents and purposes turned on the very people who need it most.

I’ve spent the last seven years speaking to hundreds of these people, and 18 months writing a book. What I found were individuals who had been fundamentally abandoned. Susan, who has multiple sclerosis, has lost 4kg (8.8lb) after skipping meals to pay for her care and even her incontinence pads. Paul, a homeless part-time wheelchair user, sleeps rough in disabled toilets and at Heathrow airport. Rachel, a former nurse, has had her entire social care package removed; without someone to help her into bed at night, she now sleeps fully clothed in her wheelchair.

Anyone who thinks these horrors are an aberration in Britain’s supposed long history of care for disabled people is missing the point. That brief period of gains when I was a child aside, the crisis befalling us is so horrendous not because it is new, but precisely because it is not. People forget how recently it was that disabled people were shut away in institutions in Britain, or effectively banned from public transport, schools or jobs.

The brutal cost-cutting of the last decade has been a lesson in just how quickly hard-won rights for minorities can be rolled back. Just ask the parents protesting last month after their disabled children were pushed out of education because of funding cuts. Or the young disabled adults threatened with being forced out of their family homes and into care homes for the elderly.

None of this has happened by accident, though. Rather, it has come about as a deliberate attack on disabled people. In a climate of disenfranchisement, squeezed wages and growing inequality, post-2010, ministers and large parts of the media saw the so-called “scrounging sick” as an easy target. Smearing disabled people as little more than a drain on the public purse was not only a means to distract from the real causes of people’s problems, but came to excuse and normalise any number of nightmarish results that, even a few years ago, we’d have said were unthinkable.

While the ill-treatment of disabled people over the last decade has been the direct result of political choices, Britain is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, and so has every chance to turn the situation around – if it wants to. That none of this is inevitable is both bleak and a sign of hope.

Polling consistently shows that tolerance of government cuts is collapsing. The left can seize on this shift to recapture and build on the optimism of my childhood, remaking the case for flourishing public services, and with them, disability rights.

The most effective way to tackle the inequality faced by disabled people is to think about it in the round, looking at issues of housing, employment, social security and social care, and offering a coordinated strategy that is not only morally right but also speaks to common sense. Invest in accessible homes, care packages and benefits, and NHS bills go down and tax revenue up.

One of the greatest challenges in any of this is the way disabled people are perceived. Longstanding cultural prejudice around disability, combined with the demonising rhetoric of austerity, has exacerbated a sense of difference in society; an othering that perpetuates the idea that disabled people aren’t quite normal, or don’t want a life, a family, a home or an education like everyone else.

These attitudes do not spring from nowhere, but are directly related to how willing non-disabled people are to let state programmes for disabled people be decimated, and allow ministers who wield the axe to get away with it. What’s the point in funding social care if disabled people don’t really go to the pub with friends or travel to the office like “normal” people? Attitudes, just as much as funding cuts, need tackling in the coming years.

Britain feels increasingly as if it is at a point of national reckoning – this country, scarred by a decade of austerity and fatigued by Brexit, is now charged with working out what kind of society it wants to be. Where disabled people fit into any of this is rarely part of the conversation, and yet it should be one of the most pressing questions. The poignancy of this is all the greater considering we have largely been here before: generations had to fight for the disability rights that are now being carelessly stripped away.

This is a warning sign that should rally all of us who care about the future of our welfare state. When disabled people are hungry and housebound, the idea that Britain still has a meaningful safety net is increasingly obscene.

Arranging her working hours around fluctuating health is especially easy with sex work, she explains, as she is able to earn a lot quickly on her good days, “if you put the time and energy in”. However, her health means she has often not got enough energy to take bookings. Alice uses what she calls “standard rates”: £130 for an hour at her place, £150 at someone else’s, £50 for 15 minutes and £750 for overnight. Most clients tend to go for half an hour or an hour, she says. She describes her working hours as “binge and starve”: she goes several weeks without a client and then sees several men a day, for a few days. “Then I recover,” she says.

There is a pressure to take on as many clients as possible when she is well. Without her disability benefits or a regular income, Alice is thousands of pounds in debt: £10,000 to friends she has borrowed from over the years; her student loan; a £3,000 overdraft; and maxed-out credit cards. Rare periods of hypomania can lead her to shop excessively. But for the past five years, it is simply her lack of income that has seen her finances spiral. She is getting into more and more debt every month, as her outgoings exceed her earnings. The stress of the debts is taking a further toll on her mental health, “only making the situation a vicious cycle”. Finding clients has become a way to alleviate the debt and keep her head above water. “I wouldn’t have been able to survive without sex work,” she says. “It’s quite literally saved my life.”

As we talk, Alice repeatedly tells me there are times she really enjoys sex work, but she admits her choices are heavily controlled by circumstance. She says: “I’m definitely being failed by the system right now – being financially coerced into it by the government.”

As the UK recession and the subsequent austerity measures kicked in, I began to speak to a number of disabled women who had turned to sex work in order to get by. The methods of work varied. Some met men in person who paid them in exchange for sex. Others began sex-cam work; half an hour stripping on Skype for a stranger across the internet. Women with pain- or fatigue-related disabilities were particularly prevalent in the latter. Sex work was the one job they could do from their beds. But if the disabilities varied, the reasons for taking on this work often came back the same: like Alice, without access to benefits or traditional employment, sex work was the only way they could survive.

Alice’s best friend, Sarah, is also disabled and has chronic pain. Unlike Alice, Sarah has been granted disability benefits but does sex work to top up her low payments. The government gives her “some, but not enough to live off as a human being”, Alice says. Many of her friends with disabilities and chronic illnesses started sex work for the ease and flexibility it offered to those who are too unwell for traditional employment – or, as she puts it, whose energy levels are sometimes too low to function properly but “who need money to survive in the world”. “It is what it is,” she says. “If the state won’t support vulnerable people, they have to find work. And if they can’t, they’ll find options.” .

This use of sex work as a last option for marginalised women is not a new phenomenon, but as benefit cuts have been rolled out, austerity measures are exacerbating it. In 2018, Frank Field MP, chair of the work and pensions committee, reported that some women in his Birkenhead constituency had been pushed into prostitution because of the local roll-out of universal credit. The union Aslef suggests that on-street prostitution increased by 60% between 2010 and 2017, which has, in particular, been linked to an increase in women having their benefits sanctioned.

Women’s organisations and outreach workers across the country repeatedly point to this pattern. Changing Lives, a charity that provides women’s services across the north of England and the Midlands, conducted research in 2016 into what it termed “survival sex work”. It found women to be selling penetrative sex for as little as £10 for a place to stay or even in exchange for clean clothes, with “punters” approaching them to offer as little as a fiver at times when the women are perceived as being particularly vulnerable. Staff at the organisation’s women’s outreach centre tell me that a growing number of women are being pushed into sex work because they have their benefits stopped for things such as missing JobCentre appointments or failing to attend interviews.

“We noticed a big increase in women selling sex after the introduction of benefit sanctions, not just to make ends meet but, in some cases, to provide the basics for their family,” says Laura Seebohm, the director of operations at Changing Lives. “Some of the women were so desperate that they were selling sex for the first time while others had successfully got themselves out of the world of survival sex only for the sanctions to come along and force them back into it.” Another staff member at the service, Laura McIntyre, told me that women with learning disabilities and those with multiple and complex needs have been particularly at risk.

At the same time, Sheffield Working Women’s Opportunities Project in 2016 warned that austerity measures, including benefit rejections and sanctions, were behind an estimated 400% rise in women using their service who had entered prostitution. Some were new to sex work, they noted, but many were women who had previously managed to leave prostitution only to have to return as much as a decade later because of losing their social security. “We know that some women come out just so they can buy food, and once they’ve raised enough they go home again,” the manager of the centre went on. “Quite a lot of women might only intend to come out for five or six weeks to make some money while they wait for payments to come through but once they’re in it again, it can be very difficult to leave.”

Alice is, in many ways, in a much safer environment than the women resorting to on-street sex work. She finds her clients through the internet and coordinates them through a work phone and email address. “Ninety per cent of sex work is admin,” she laughs. But she admits that, even working in this safer environment, she is sometimes more vulnerable because of her mental health. If she is hypomanic, she doesn’t just take on more work but forgoes safety checks: during those periods, she is active, creative, energised, “and everything seems a good idea”. “It’s not necessarily safe. I make riskier decisions – like driving two hours to somewhere I don’t know at 3am,” she says.

Alice is doing this at a time when women generally, let alone those contending with health problems, are facing an increasingly arduous labour market. The push to insecure, low-paid work in recent years has disproportionately affected women, who are already more likely than men to be in part-time or low-waged roles. Since the start of the global crash in 2008, 826,000 extra women have moved into low-paid and insecure work in the UK, according to the Fawcett Society. At the same time, the number of female part-time workers who would like to be working full-time has nearly doubled, to 789,000.

This shift to precarious work will likely exacerbate what are already poorer working opportunities for those women with disabilities. Research by Comic Relief in 2017 found that as much as 50% of the work disabled people perform is in low-paid, short-term and part-time roles, meaning female disabled workers are contending with the impact of both sex and disability. Even cuts to disability benefits are, in some ways, gendered. Women are more likely to be disabled – there are around 6.4 million disabled women in the UK compared to 5.5 million disabled men – and the Women’s Budget Group in 2018 found that almost six in 10 individuals claiming PIP are women.

When we next talk, Alice has just received a large pack of documents from the Department for Work and Pensions: 100 A4 pages front and back. She needs to read and understand all of them before her tribunal appeal of her PIP rejection; a process that has, overall, taken the best part of a year so far. “The government is making it deliberately as confusing, intimidating and difficult as possible,” she says. A local disability charity has been helping her navigate the appeal, but lottery funding – its only source of income – is due to run out in a few months’ time and Alice is worried she will be left to take on officials at the tribunal alone. “It’s all very overwhelming and distressing,” she says. “I really need the government to recognise that I have next to no income and it is a direct result of being disabled.”

Her mental health is deteriorating as a result and she has been put under the care of her local crisis team for suicide prevention after developing suicidal feelings. Despite sending out multiple CVs each day she is, more than ever, “not in a place where I can manage a traditional job”. Alice is trying to formally withdraw from her degree so she is eligible for ESA, and with it she might finally get a bit of support from the benefit system. In the meantime, it is a case of borrowing money from friends, credit cards and her growing bank overdraft. “I don’t know what to do at this point,” she admits. “I’m treading water. Or at least delaying my drowning through … sex work.”

Names have been changed.

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

Anti-poverty charity Z2K have made an official complaint to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) about the DWP’s taxpayer funded fake news campaign.

Earlier this month we revealed that the DWP was launching an advertising blitz disguised as news in the Metro newspaper.

In a leaked memo, Universal Credit Director General Neil Couling boasted that people would not be able to tell that the 9 weeks of fake features were written by the DWP and would instead “wonder who has done this ‘UC Uncovered’ investigation.”

The adverts have now begun running in the Metro and online and Z2K have complained to the ASA on a number of grounds.

They point out that one ‘myth buster’ claims that it’s a “myth” that “you have to wait 5 weeks to get any money on Universal Credit”, followed by “fact: Jobcentres can “urgently pay you an advance.”

Z2K point out that:

“It is not clear that an advance must be paid back, the advert omits that these advances are taken out of future benefits and have to be paid back over several months, leaving people in subsequent months, with less money than they are entitled to, and less money than they will have actually budgeted for.”

The charity also takes issue with the simplistic claim by the DWP that they can pay your rent directly to your landlord.

Instead, Z2K explain that:

“In reality, you have to apply to the job centre for this to happen, and you have to meet certain criteria. As an advice agency, we have applied for people with numerous vulnerabilities to have the housing element of their Universal Credit paid directly to landlords, and we have not been successful in securing this.”

Finally, Z2K takes issue with the statement that it’s a “myth” that “Universal Credit doesn’t work”, followed by: “fact: it does.”

They point to the “damning evidence” the work and pensions committee have published on the hardship caused by UC and also quote the committee’s chair, Frank Field, whose furious reaction to the DWP adverts was:

“If the DWP wants to understand the facts about Universal Credit, it could look to the horrific, harrowing evidence we heard this morning. People – mostly women, single mums, students – are telling us that they are forced through sheer desperation to exchange sex for the means to feed, house and warm themselves and their children. Instead of going out to get the evidence for itself, the DWP just dismisses this testimony as anecdote and brushes it aside.”

“Rather than wasting huge chunks of desperately needed resources on 10 weeks of advertorial, why won’t the Government just take a look at the terrible reality of the facts we and so many others are showing them, for free, and instead spend that money on making some of its claims about UC helping people come true?”

Z2K have warned that the adverts could lead people on legacy benefits to wrongly believe they would be better off on UC and make a claim as a result. They have asked the ASA to act as quickly as possible.

You can read the full text of the complaint on the Z2K website.

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

Come with me on an eerie visit, where we step through the looking glass into an alternative universe where everything is as good as can be. You will like it here. Everyone smiles: they only want to help their clients fulfil themselves, nothing bad ever happens here. They love their work. This little utopia is the Middlesbrough jobcentre. As everywhere, they are rolling out universal credit to new claimants or existing “clients” with any change of circumstance. Here they prompt unemployed or underemployed people into work or more work, telling them how many jobs to apply for, what appointments and courses to take, and (whisper it) with what penalties if they fail (“But that’s very, very rare”).

It has taken me all of seven months’ applying to the Department for Work and Pensions to get here – my requests ignored, forgotten or parked, despite regular prodding. Pre-2010 I often sat in with jobcentre staff: but since then, in department after department, visiting any frontline is tortuous. With HMRC, eight years of requests to visit minimum-wage inspectors has yielded nothing – though they have never been outright refused.

Finally, here I am in a jobcentre I chose. Accompanied by a Whitehall press officer, I talk to work coaches and managers and sit in on some interviews with claimants. Recently the work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd, tweeted a little YouTube video of her visit to a Lancaster jobcentre, so I knew what to expect. “I love my job,” one member of staff told her. Another said: “The good thing about work coaches is we are the human side of [universal credit].” Rudd says to the camera: “It’s been a really inspiring visit,” to “hear first-hand about the really personal, tailored, caring approach that work coaches have with helping people into work”.

That’s exactly what they told me too, but does she actually believe this is how universal credit works?

I now guess why my visit just came through. My colleague Aditya Chakrabortty wrote on Tuesday about a leaked memo from DWP top brass planning a charm offensive to promote universal credit, with £250,000 wrap-around ads on the Metro newspaper’s front cover. They complain UC “is portrayed incorrectly and/or negatively in the media” with “negativity and scaremongering”.

The Middlesbrough staff did their valiant best to hold that line. I’ve met many jobcentre staff and most are genuinely decent people, trying to make the system work against the odds. But their answers on this supervised visit floated in airy realms beyond the credible. Have staff cuts made their caseloads harder? “I think cuts have made us work smarter and harder,” said one. How often do they sanction people? “We find sanctioning doesn’t help,” another said, adding, “We’re all passionate and proud about our work. We live here and we’ve all had friends and family using our services. We ask, how would I want my husband to be treated?”

What about benefit cuts as people move to UC? “My impression is that the vast majority get more when they move on to it,” says one. The Commons work and pensions select committee says the switch leaves 2.2 million people in work better off by £41 a week, but with another 3.2 million losing an average £48 a week, I ask if any workplace changes could make it easier to do more for clients? No, nothing they could think of. A test question: what did they think of wider cuts in Middlesbrough, where the council has been hit hard? “I’ve not noticed we’ve got a lack of anything round here since the cuts, and I live here.”

Visit schools, hospitals, councils or any public employees trying to deliver against a backdrop of the deepest cuts in living memory and you hear their determination and despair, what works and what doesn’t, pride mixed with frustration at lack of the right tools. But this felt like conversations with automata in Stepford. It felt like my visit in the old USSR to the national women’s committee led by cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, when they all clapped to hear every single Soviet female worker had donated voluntarily to the state’s peace fund.

Numerous reports reveal the chaos and cruelty of the UC upheaval. Arrogantly dismissing experts, the former work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith promised to “simplify” six benefits into one, varying the sum with each change in earnings and circumstance. At 10 times original costs, full rollout promised by 2013 is now pencilled in for 2023. The National Audit Office says it will never be value for money, or be proven to get more into work. George Osborne’s cuts leave claimants destitute and food banks swamped, with 73% in rent arrears.

Families half starve waiting the official five weeks for payment, or sink into debt. For every extra pound they earn, 63p is deducted: what if the rich paid 63% in income tax? Over the years, an informant inside another city jobcentre has told me what’s really happening. Yesterday, they told me it was “panic” in their office – some caseloads at 400, everything set aside to unblock urgent benefit payments. Yes, Rudd had eased things: sanctions targets were dropped, and the savagery had diminished from the days when they were ordered to catch out the vulnerable. My informant recalls the day their office made its first three-year sanction and the managers celebrated: Rudd has ended three-year sanctions, but they can still last many months.

Is Middlesbrough jobcentre an exceptionally happy planet? The local MP’s office deals with pile-ups of UC disaster cases. I asked the Middlesbrough staff if things had got better, but they denied they’d ever had sanction targets or whips on their backs. If they had admitted anything was ever less than pluperfectly flawless I might have believed them, but the DWP will need a more realistic script or its upcoming charm offensive will fall flat.

A cross-party group of MPs have written to Amber Rudd, the work and pensions secretary, demanding more details of a reported £250,000 “unbranded” PR campaign to promote universal credit.

A leaked internal document revealed by the Guardian this week says the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has taken out newspaper advertorials purporting to “myth-bust common inaccuracies” about universal credit in a “UC-uncovered investigation.”

The campaign, consisting of an advert wrapped around the Metro newspaper and a four-page feature inside, will not feature any DWP branding, according to the leaked memo. “The features won’t look or feel like UC – you won’t see our branding,” it states.

This week the Leicester Mercury carried a lengthy feature under the headline “I think universal credit is great – here’s why”, based on interviews with staff at a jobcentre. “It’s a good thing. It is helping people and it is making a difference,” Steve Bruce, a team leader at Leicester’s Wellington Street jobcentre, was quoted as saying.

Bruce appears to have been well briefed by the DWP communications team on the lines to take about universal credit. “It’s designed to break the cycle, get people into work, and it is doing that,” he said.

A write-up of the article in other regional titles owned by the publishing group Reach was similarly sympathetic. The headline “Universal credit: why it is actually a great idea” appeared in Reach titles in Newcastle, Kent and Wales.

The original article noted that claimants had “spoken about hardship” after transferring to universal credit, and acknowledged its reporter had been invited by Rudd to meet the jobcentre staff. But it did not mention the DWP’s PR campaign, and the other articles did not mention the DWP’s invitation.

The memo, published on the DWP intranet, suggests the campaign will be a counterweight to “negativity and scaremongering” in the media, which it blames for putting people off applying for the benefit.

The chair of the work and pensions select committee, Frank Field, has written to Rudd asking to see the internal DWP documents in full. He has asked for details of the cost of the campaign, whether Rudd personally approved the plans, and what guarantees the department can give as to the accuracy of the advertorial.

“I know that the department will be keen to ensure the accuracy of its communications. Will you ask Citizens Advice, who deliver your Help to Claim service, to approve the wording of any written communications – including the reported wraparound in the Metro – to ensure that they are clear to claimants and do not risk misleading or confusing them,” Field wrote.

He called for guarantees from the DWP that the unbranded advertorials would not confuse claimants or potential claimants, and he asked for evidence that the department had assessed the risk that the PR campaign could prompt people to sign up to universal credit when they did not need to.

The committee is concerned about reports that some jobcentre staff wrongly advise benefit claimants to switch from legacy benefits to universal credit even when in some cases they will be left hundreds of pounds worse off as a result.

Field has also asked for more details of the DWP’s plans to partner with the BBC on a documentary about universal credit. The Guardian revealed that the DWP would have access to the film before transmission, although the BBC insists it has editorial control.

Universal credit, which is running six years behind schedule, rolls six benefits into one single monthly payment. An estimated 8 million people will claim it by 2023. Current estimates suggest millions of claimants will be up to £1,000 worse off when they move on to it.

The online benefit has been subject to widespread criticism in the media – from the Guardian to the Sun – especially for its designed-in five-week waiting time for a first payment, which has been blamed for an increase in food bank use. MPs of all parties, campaigners and the National Audit Office have criticised it.

Last year the UN rapporteur on poverty, Philip Alston, highlighted universal credit in his critical interim report on the rise of poverty in the UK. “Although in its initial conception it represented a potentially major improvement in the system, it is fast falling into universal discredit,” he wrote.

How to sell the unsellable? How to pretend utter chaos is a plan coming together? How to persuade the public, who just refuse to buy it, to at least keep on paying for it? I believe I have found the answer.

It comes in the form of an internal memo from the Department for Work and Pensions that somehow floated past my desk. Published on the staff intranet just a few days ago, on 2 May, it is signed by three of the department’s most senior officials, including the DWP’s director of communications and Neil Couling, its head of universal credit. And it is that toxically controversial benefit which is its subject.

Addressed to the department’s employees, the letter sympathises: “We share your justified frustration when our hard work – in particular our work on Universal Credit – is portrayed incorrectly and/or negatively in the media.” The circular condemns this “negativity and scaremongering”, and blames it for putting people off even applying for the benefit.

It was said that Steve Jobs could conjure up a “reality distortion field”, bending facts into a parallel universe to spur on Apple designers to achieve the impossible. I can only assume that the DWP’s overlords are creating their own distortion of reality, because I cannot think of a single bigger policy failure this decade than universal credit.

After years of ministers pretending otherwise, Amber Rudd, the DWP secretary, now admits universal credit’s introduction has left people so short of cash that they have resorted to food banks. What Iain Duncan Smith hailed in 2011 as a transformation of welfare has turned into something grotesque, with massive delays and huge flaws both of administration and design, repeatedly damned by MP select committees. The independent National Audit Office judges that universal credit has neither saved public money nor helped people into work. But it has left thousands of vulnerable claimants penniless, while others starve and even lose their homes. In a House of Commons debate last summer the London Labour MP Catherine West recounted how one of her constituents had “fallen off benefits” and ended up “sleeping in a tent in a bin chamber” on a housing estate.

Such are the horrors whose very documentation by journalists the DWP letter dismisses as “unfair”. Rather than halt universal credit, as demanded by so many groups, the department’s managers now say they will respond “in a different way … very different to anything we’ve done before”.

What follows is an elaborate media strategy to manufacture a Whitehall fantasy, one in which the benefits system is running like a dream while a Conservative government generously helps people on the escalator to prosperity. It begins at the end of this month with a giant advert wrapped around the cover of the Metro newspaper; inside will be a further four-page advertorial feature. This will “myth-bust the common inaccuracies reported on UC”. What’s more, “the features won’t look or feel like DWP or UC – you won’t see our branding … We want to grab the readers’ attention and make them wonder who has done this ‘UC uncovered’ investigation.”

Not only is this a costly exercise, with a Metro wraparound going for a headline rate of £250,000 (of your money, let’s not forget), but the Advertising Standards Authority will doubtless be interested in that description of the feature. Its guidelines stipulate that“marketers and publishers must make clear that advertorials are marketing communications”.

Two and a half million adults pick up a daily copy of the Metro freesheet, and they will see these advertorials every week for nine weeks. Meanwhile the secretary of state, Amber Rudd, will invite “a wide range of journalists at regional and national publications … to come [to a jobcentre] and see the great work we do”. Doubtless, the Jobcentres will be carefully chosen and everything will be arranged so that when the dignitaries descend, all will be as precisely ordered as the innards of a Swiss watch. Perhaps it’s not too indelicate to mention here that the Tory party is weeks into an unannounced leadership contest, during which plummy columns commending Rudd for turning round a failed service do no harm to her prospects.

Then comes the letter’s grand reveal: BBC2 has commissioned a documentary series, which is “looking to intelligently explore UC” by filming inside three jobcentres. “This is a fantastic opportunity for us – we’ve been involved in the process from the outset, and we continue working closely with the BBC to ensure a balanced and insightful piece of television.” Wading through such adjectives, one remembers how the most important of the letter’s signatories, Neil Couling, told Holyrood parliamentarians that the rise of food banks was down to “poor people maximising their economic opportunities” and that “many benefit recipients welcome the jolt that … sanctions can give them”.

When the BBC’s Panorama last November went to Flintshire in north Wales and found single, elderly men being made homeless as a result of universal credit, and the local council in meltdown, the DWP criticised the corporation for its “lack of balance”, even complaining that the interview with a minister was “unfairly cut”. A Tory backbencher was wheeled out to declare the investigation “fake news”.

No such danger with this three-part series, which is driven by access rather than led by a reporter. When the civil servants’ trade union, the PCS, found out about the filming, it asked if staff could talk frankly to the crew, only to be told no: they would still be subject to the civil service code, which demands complete impartiality. Perhaps this explains an internal PCS note on the BBC series I have seen, which remarks that staff are unhappy about being identified on screen. At one of the nominated jobcentres, in Toxteth in Liverpool, “It is our understanding that there have been no volunteers to take part in the filming.” The risk is that any staff who do participate toe the management line, making the film an advert for universal credit.

The PCS briefing also reports a senior universal credit manager telling union reps that “the DWP would have access to the film before transmission”. The BBC confirms that is the case, although it says it has “editorial control”. When I contacted the DWP it refused to answer even the most basic of questions, advising me to submit them via a freedom of information request.

It’s not uncommon for the Ministry of Defence to use newspapers to recruit soldiers, nor for government departments to grant TV crews access to their workings. What is very unusual is to see a car-crash policy damned even by the Archbishop of Canterbury airbrushed with vast public resources into a triumph.

After reading the documents, I spoke to Jennifer Jones of Sheffield Stop and Scrap Universal Credit. Severely disabled, she is awaiting transfer to the benefit, a move that she believes might deprive her of nearly £400 a month. She showed me Facebook posts of others, who have already lost out under universal credit, and told me how after her autistic son goes off to school she neither heats the house nor cooks, in order to save money. What would she do with the £250,000 that the government may spend on a single newspaper advert?

“I’d make sure there was enough on the gas and electric, that we had food in the cupboards and new school uniforms,” she said. “Then I’d see about the neighbours.” I weighed up the smallness of her wants, against the DWP’s planned extravagance. So what did Jones make of the government’s PR campaign?

“They’re taking money off the public, to lie to us about how well universal credit is working. They could be spending that money on us, but they’re spending it to con us,” she said. “It’s scary our government doing that.”

The government is to abolish “counterproductive” three-year benefit sanctions, in an official acknowledgement that depriving jobless people of social security income for long periods undermines their attempts to move into work.

The announcement, made by the work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd, during a speech on employment on Thursday morning, was welcomed by campaigners and MPs, who encouraged her to make further changes to the controversial policy.

The move marks a sharp change of tone by the government, which has for years doggedly defended the sanctions regime as a way of persuading people into work, despite mounting criticism from MPs, academics and campaigners that sanctions are major drivers of poverty and hardship.

Sanctions withhold unemployment benefit as punishment for apparent infringements of benefit rules, such as failing to attend a jobcentre meeting, or not spending enough time looking for work. Most are imposed for four weeks, a loss of benefit income of about £300. Three-year sanctions are issued when a claimant has made three or more serious breaches of work-related requirements.

Sanctions are notorious among claimants for the way they are issued, often for seemingly capricious and absurd reasons, such as arriving at a jobcentre meeting two minutes late, or for missing an appointment after being taken to hospital after suffering a cardiac arrest.

Rudd said the three-year sanctions would be phased out by the end of the year. In a House of Commons statement, she said: “Three-year sanctions are rarely used, but I believe that they are counter-productive and ultimately undermine our goal of supporting people into work.

“I have reviewed my Department’s internal data, which shows that a six-month sanction already provides a significant incentive for claimants to engage with the labour market regime.

“I agree with the Work and Pensions Select Committee that a three-year sanction is unnecessarily long and I feel that the additional incentive provided by a three-year sanction can be outweighed by the unintended impacts to the claimant due to the additional duration.”

Three-year sanctions were introduced in 2012 under the auspices of the then work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith and the then employment minister Chris Grayling as part of a severe tightening-up of benefits rules.

Sanction numbers increased rapidly as a result, reaching a high point in 2013 when over 1m were issued. In 2015, academics found a link between sanction levels and increased food bank use.

A major five-year academic study of welfare conditionality, published last year by the University of York, concluded sanctions were ineffective at getting jobless people into work and were more likely to reduce those affected to poverty, ill-health or even survival crime.

The National Audit office criticised the government’s sanctions policy in a scathing 2016 report, which concluded ministers had no evidence to show that sanctions worked, and no interest in finding out the effect on individual claimants. Disabled people who were sanctioned were less likely to find work as a result, it found.

Official figures published by Labour indicated that 32,647 claimants had been issued with sanctions of more than six months duration since 2012. Some 20,000 of these were accounted for by people on universal credit.

Margaret Greenwood, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said Labour would scrap the sanctions regime. “There is clear evidence that sanctions and excessive conditionality do not help people into sustained employment. They also cause stress and anxiety for many and are one of the key reasons that people ask for help at food banks.”

The sanctions expert David Webster, of Glasgow University, welcomed the move and said he hoped it was a sign social security policy was beginning to be guided by evidence rather than ideology.

Frank Field, the chair of the work and pensions select committee, said: “Today’s announcements are a step in the right direction – gone are the days of those appalling three-year sanctions – and show she has not been put off by the size of that task, but there is still very much to do.”

Alison Garnham, the chief executive of Child Poverty Action Group, welcomed the change: “We hope today’s announcement will be followed by a review of the sanctions system overall because all the evidence shows it is overly harsh and counterproductive for claimants.”

With many thanks to Benefits And Work.

Government regulations that would leave thousands of people with severe disabilities worse off by about £100 a month as a result of moving on to universal credit have been ruled unlawful in the high court.

The ruling followed a legal challenge to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) over arrangements for claimants who were receiving severe disability premium (SDP) benefits and moved on to universal credit before 16 January this year.

Two men known as TP and AR, and a woman known as SXC, who all have severe disabilities, had argued that the regulations, which restrict the amount of compensation to those affected, were discriminatory.

The challenge followed a court case last year in which TP and AR successfully argued that the DWP had unlawfully discriminated against them after their benefit income was reduced when they were required to claim universal credit because they had moved house into a different local authority area.

As a result of that case TP and AR received £6,517 and £4,788 respectively, in compensation for the “pain and distress” caused to them. They also received payments of £173.50 and £176 a month respectively to meet the continuing shortfall in their benefits.

The government subsequently proposed regulations whereby SDP claimants who lost benefit income after moving to universal credit before the establishment of income protections on 19 January would be provided with just £80 a month in compensation, while those who moved after would receive £180 a month.

TP and AR, represented by the law firm Leigh Day, and SXC, represented by Central England Law Centre, argued that the discrepancy was unjustified because the estimated 10,000 people who moved before 19 January would receive significantly less in compensation than those who moved afterwards, despite their needs being the same.

Severe disability premium and enhanced disability premium are supplementary benefit payments designed to meet the extra costs of living alone without a carer. An estimated 500,000 people in the UK receive one or both payments.

TP and AR said in a statement after the ruling: “After the high court judgment last year, we thought we had finally forced the government to ensure that people with severe disabilities who had to move on to universal credit from the old system would not be without adequate protection or worse off.

“However, we then learned that the government was proposing to short-change us and thousands of other severely disabled persons by around £100 a month. It is extremely frustrating that we have had to fight these cases through the courts when it is clear to all that the government’s unfair and dysfunctional universal credit system is indefensible.”

Tom Short, a solicitor with Leigh Day, said: “We are delighted that our clients have once again triumphed in their struggle against the government’s discriminatory universal credit policies.”

Michael Bates, who led on the case for Central England Law Centre, said: “This is a really important decision from the court. It confirms that the government’s universal credit scheme continues to treat severely disabled claimants differently, and that this treatment is unlawful. There is an obvious solution to this and we look forward to seeing the government’s response.”

A DWP spokesperson said: “We have received the court’s judgment and will be considering our response.”

The mother-of-two, who lives with her two teenage boys, aged 16 and 19, said she had not been able to afford a proper food shop since she was discharged from hospital following a fall caused by her condition two weeks ago.

“We’ve been struggling,” she said. “The three weeks I was in hospital I had to take a £250 overdraught so the kids could feed themselves. Going food shopping is not an option at the moment, we just can’t afford it.”

Ms Woods, whose husband passed away suddenly four years ago, said that since losing her disability benefit she receives £200 a fortnight in bereavement benefit, £53 a week in child tax credits, and £20 every week child benefit – amounting to just £173 a week.

 “My 16-year-old son has been eating pasta and tins of tuna. I try to get eggs, bread and milk – the basics, to keep us going until we can afford to do a big shop. Since I got out on 11 April, I haven’t done a proper food shop. Money has been a real problem,” she added.

“The boys get priority. I’ve skipped a lot of meals. I do feel hungry but there’s too much going on in my head to worry about it. The GP gave me some vitamin drinks – I take one of them instead of a meal.”

Ms Woods, who lives in Manchester, said that after being admitted to hospital her weight dropped from 11 and a half stone to just eight stone over a period of six weeks. She is appealing the decision to stop her PIP, but has been told it won’t be heard until next year.

“I was on the highest rate and they put me on zero. I’ve lost my car. It’s made me not want to go outside. I have good days and bad days – and on the bad days I have seizures and my speech gets messed up. It’s very scary for my children,” she added.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Margaret Greenwood said the “shocking” report highlighted the scale of the UK’s hunger crisis.

“Food insecurity simply should not exist in one of the richest countries in the world. Yet this report suggests that the number of people going hungry is increasing as a result of changes to the social security system,” she added.

The report states that the “rising vulnerability to food insecurity” observed in the survey suggests the “poorest in the UK are worse off today”.

“While the Great Recession also occurred between 2004 and 2016 and may have contributed to a rise in food insecurity at that time, by 2016 the UK was no longer in recession. By contrast, welfare reform continued, the effects of which were keenly felt by those with longstanding illnesses,” it adds. 

“Food insecurity has certainly always existed in the UK, but in light of the welfare changes that occurred over this period, it is possible the current social security system is providing increasingly inadequate protection from food insecurity for more and more people.”

The researchers who produced the findings cautioned that it was an observational study, and as such cannot establish cause, but that if anything, the observed increase in food insecurity among those on low incomes was likely to be an underestimate.

It comes after figures from the Trussell Trust revealed last week that food bank use had soared to record levels, with the number of emergency supplies distributed across the UK having risen by nearly a fifth in one year,

Genevieve Edwards, director of external affairs at the MS Society, said the charity was increasingly hearing from people with MS that they’ve had to cut back on food and other essentials because of problems with disability benefits.

She added: “More than 100,000 people live with MS in the UK and our research shows 39 per cent of those who lost PIP support spent less on food as a result. We’ve also heard from people who turned to foodbanks after struggling with universal credit. It’s simply unacceptable that disabled people in the UK today can’t rely on our welfare system to provide the most basic level of financial security.”

Jess Leigh, Policy and Campaigns Manager at disability equality charity, Scope, said the findings were “further shocking indications of the dire impact extra costs can have on disabled people”.

She added: “Life costs more in you are disabled […] Disabled people often have no choice but to spend more on essential goods and services like heating, therapies and equipment.

“We need a welfare system that recognises these extra costs and provides disabled people and their families with the financial support they need.”

A government spokesperson said: “No family should have to experience hunger and tackling disadvantage remains a priority. Whilst we’ve seen food insecurity fall over the last few years, we recognise we need to do more.  

“That’s why we’re supporting over 1 million children with free school meals, investing up to £26m in school breakfast clubs and spending more than £95bn a year on working-age benefits. Meanwhile employment is at a record high and wages are outstripping inflation.”