Sanctioned Again

It always happens just when you manage to quiet the nightmares from the previous. A slip up thanks to a BT Engineer that needed extended access to my apartment to put my line back in. I have again gotten myself a sanction. Looking at things logically it has been a year since the previous WRONGFUL sanction but logic doesn't count for shit when you got bills to pay and 4 weeks with no money. I do have to say that it is too early to know whether or not my reasons were acceptable or not because surprise I have still yet to receive my Decision Letter despite the sanction going through and the fact that my Good Reason letter was sent more than a week ago.

UPDATE:

What I've done

I have sent an email of complaint that has been passed on my Job Centre.

Still no Decision Letter.

Picked up my hardship form today and hand delivered my request for a written statement of reasons.

Also somewhat calmed down and stopped freaking out (THIS IS IMPORTANT)

Left a message with my local CAB as far as I know from last time they prefer a call and then they tell you a day to go in with a sort of pseudo appointment but heard nothing back yet. So will have to do that again.

What next

The next steps are to return the hardship form and request the mandatory reconsideration which I would hope to start before the end of the week as I know it took more than 3 months last time to go through the process but this time is far less straightforward so I'm not sure I'll be successful.

The Bad

Out of nowhere I get a letter saying I've missed Council Tax payments which is nonsense but I now have to chase up or get called to court over.

I was planning on paying off some bills with this week's money which included my 2nd to last payment of my current over priced phone contract which I am more than happy to get out of to save some money and my phoneline/broadband payment. When it rains it pours.

The Indifferent

After nearly two weeks I got a call from one of the panel at my last ingterview who gave me feedback saying nice things like don't change your approach, you researched the role well, you were a good candidate. He told me the reason I didn't get either of the roles (I think there were two) was that the people they hired were doing the exact same job at other institutions.

I guess it is nice to hear you are doing the right things at an interview but to me that is erased by the whole you pretty much had no chance of getting this when we could just hire some people already doing it but maybe that is my jaded perspective.

This link right here from @refuted got me started with what I needed to do and it was with help from @refuted that I managed to get compensation for the royal mess that happened last time when I was wrongfully sanctioned and it took more than 3 and a half months for the DWP to realise they had been totally ignoring their own rules in order to sanction me.

Make no mistake sanctions are just a multi-faceted tool for propaganda and to be used against the unemployed and under-employed.

1. Figures on high numbers of sanctions each month or year adds credence to the foolish idea that all the unemployed are out there trying to scam the system and that there are plenty of jobs.
2. Sanctions are a legal way to steal our money and for the government to profit from it. If person A gets wrongfully sanctioned and loses say £290 that he was entitled to help him survive while looking for work firstly there is only a 50% chance he is going to take it further just for the first level of appeal and god knows what that percentage will be for those who go through all 4 stages of appealing meanwhile Person A's money is sitting in the government coffers making them money and even if he is ultimately successful it will take MONTHS before he gets the cash with no compensation to help mitigate the costs of missed direct debit payments, fines, court action or anything else that may have arisen from the wrongful sanction.

Just a personal story to share after leaving university I would now and then be lucky enough to get temporary jobs from the employment bureau there while claiming JSA. That meant each week having to fill out a complicated bit of paperwork putting out in excruciating detail days and times of each role, fair enough. 

After I did a temporary job let's say as waiting staff at a graduation it would likely take two weeks before my payment came around with the payment slip sent to me but oh JSA won't release funds of any kind without my pay cheque so that meant I was often going without any money for up to a month which lead to missed payments on my bank account which charged £30 per OD transaction, my bank must have made £300 from me easily before I just stopped taking short term roles and it was only years later and too late according to the JSA that I learned that I could have claimed back for all that messing around.

The DWP and JSA just want you the unemployed to disappear off their books one way or another and then slap themselves on the back about how the unemployment figures are going down all the while ignoring more and more stories of horrific incidences were unemployed people crack under the pressure and commit suicide because of the circumstances and stigma of being unemployed in this country it makes me sick.