YESTERDAY the Tory government was forced to concede that that a further 23,000 tax credit claimants whose benefits had been had been cut by the private contractor Concentrix would have their cases reviewed.
These 23,000 are part of the 59,000 people and families whose benefits were cut or stopped altogether by the US company employed by HM Revenue and Customs in 2014 with the explicit remit to hunt down ‘fraud’ by those forced to claim tax benefits.
Under the terms of the contract with HMRC, Concentrix was paid by results. The results they obtained were, in the words of Frank Field MP, the Work and Pensions Committee chairman, through a ‘reign of terror’ against claimants.
This involved targeting claimants on the flimsiest of pretexts, stopping their entitlements on what has been described as ‘cut first, think later’. This left thousands without the benefits they were entitled to for months on end and forced to resort to food banks and borrowing from pay day lenders, plunging them even deeper into a spiral of debt and poverty.
While these families were spiralling into destitution, the profits of Concentrix were spiralling in the opposite direction – upwards. The National Audit Office reported in January that Concentrix was paid £23 million in commission after it had increased its rates from 3.9% to 11%.
The scandal of families being forced into dire poverty while Concentrix reaped huge profits became too much even for HMRC to cover up and they were forced to sack the company in September 2016 and take all the cases back in house.
By mid-December 2016 HMRC had been forced to pay £86,815 in compensation to claimants wrongly denied benefits by Concentrix. Frank Field has commented that ‘HMRC was right to fire its contractor, but many of the processes used by Concentrix were the same as those used by HMRC itself.’
Precisely! The tactic of forcing staff to arbitrarily stop benefits for not just tax credits but for claimants on universal credits has been ruthlessly pursued by the Tories, and it is set to step up in the near future. This is clear from the news that one in ten Jobcentres throughout England, Scotland and Wales are to be closed with the loss of thousands of jobs, according to the PCS union.
The justification used by the DWP for slashing Jobcentres is that most claims for Jobseekers Allowance are submitted online. This conveniently overlooks all those who have no access to the internet. It also ignores the fact that Jobcentres are the main point of contact for people who have had their benefit stopped and are trying to appeal against decisions of the DWP.
Now the Tories plan that anyone claiming benefits in the future will be forced to make them via the internet where delays, lost emails and any confusion filling in complicated forms on-line can be written off as glitches in the computer system. The sole aim is to drive workers and youth off benefits while at the same time slashing thousands of jobs.
This drive to sack thousands of public sector workers and replace them with robots is pushed in a new report by the right-wing think tank ‘Reform’, which claims that 250,000 jobs, including GPs and NHS doctors and nurses, could be replaced by ‘chat bots’ and artificial intelligence in the coming years, saving the government £4 billion a year.
Reform claims: ‘Public services can become the next Uber, using the gig economy to employ locum doctors and supply teachers.’ This heralds an end to full time employment, with those few able to work forced to work in the gig economy of multiple short-term low-paid jobs doled out by computers.
What this scenario doesn’t take into account is that the working class and especially young people are refusing to see their future reduced to that of slaves while the bosses, bankers and privateers live in luxury.
The immediate issue is the fight to overthrow capitalism through the socialist revolution and replace it with a socialist system that will ensure the huge advances in science and technology are for the benefit of all society and not for the enrichment of the handful of capitalist parasites.