8 ms·

Given the bureaucratic complexity of welfare and social support in most countries there might be a solution to a problem nobody wants to see. Welfare support h

by yason 9y ago

Given the bureaucratic complexity of welfare and social support in most countries there might be a solution to a problem nobody wants to see. Welfare support has long time ago reached the level where it's difficult if not impossible for a normal, working, and still mentally capable person to understand everything and their caveats — not to mention someone who has first had hard luck, is then subsequently out of energy, and is finally subjected to the experience of being a cog in the very machine that is the bureaucracy. From programmer's point of view the obvious solution is encapsulation. Let's keep the private parts to the implementation and only offer a reasonable public interface. That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you. An outsider can't be expected to chug along with the ever-mutating directives, laws, guidances, and rules that are part of the bureaucracy's own operation and related legislation. Let the bureau have people who take human descriptions of one's life and work out the best plan out of available benefits. The insiders have the knowledge of what works together and how to make the system work. This would also be more efficient: failed applications, missing actions, mismatched assumptions, eviction orders, court cases, etc do all cost the bureau some time and money already in the current system. If there was an inside person who could rule out the impossible branches right away and check eligibility on the applicant's first or second visit, everyone would save time.

Y_Y 9y ago
Maybe their purpose isn't too be efficient. If everyone automatically got all the benefits they were entitled to it works surely be a lot more expensive.
- masklinn 9y ago
  Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate, with more gates people won't be able to pass through, and an entire bureaucracy to administrate that — conveniently drawing even more resources from actually fulfilling the system's avowed purpose, ending with a system which keeps costing more and delivering less. As long as you can provide a steady stream of anecdotes and scapegoats it'll go fine. This can in turn justify cutting the system because it doesn't pull its weight[0], and the people who hate social support systems can pat themselves on the back over a job well done. [0] not all at once of course, you by start cutting ancillary services like legal aid[1] in order to feed the ever-increasing gate-keeping machinery you keep adding to [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts-benefits-cases-state-help-dla-esa-ministry-justice-disability-living-allowance-a8028936.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate Not sure if that's a lie. In my experience, a big chunk of the general population is selfish enough that they'll abuse any system if they can get away with it. In a way, it's tragedy of the commons all over again - those people, confronted, will tell you, "I'm just a single man, just a drop in a bucket". They conveniently forget that there are 20 million other people in the country thinking the same thing.
- grkvlt 9y ago
  In this automatic-benefits-allocating world, there would also be no more fraudulent claiming of money not entitled to! It should overall result in a net saving, I believe...
  - masklinn 9y ago
    That's at least part of the theory behind basic income concepts: there's no fraud since everybody gets it, and you can get rid of the organisations in charge of validating & allocating.
  - spiralx 9y ago
    Benefit fraud in the UK is estimated at around 1-2% of the total - a small enough amount that it shouldn't be the focus of policy instead of the 98-99% of genuine cases.
pjc50 9y ago
There are volunteers that perform this function. However, the hostility of the bureaucracy today is not an accident. It's a matter of policy. The intent is to make people go away without paying them money. The people responsible blind themselves to the fact that some of these people "go away" because they have died.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Yes. OP talks about independent medical assessments. Imagine you're signed off work because of heart problems. You're invited to a medical assessment, and you have a heart attack during the assessment. The medical assessor calls an ambo, and the paramedics take you to hospital to treat your ongoing heart attack. We might think this is clear evidence the person actually is ill and wasn't faking. The DWP sees this - failure to complete the assessment - as a sanctionable failing. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm130319/debtext/130319-0002.htm#column_839 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm13... > Debbie Abrahams: [...] > Again, I support the principle of a sanctions regime. If somebody consistently fails to turn up for work experience or a Work programme scheme, sanctions should be applied. However, I believe that sanctions are being applied indiscriminately. For example, one of my constituents was a beneficiary of employment and support allowance after they had retired on grounds of ill health as a result of a heart problem. He was required to attend a work capability assessment with Atos. During > 19 Mar 2013 : Column 840 > the assessment, he was told that he was having a heart attack and the nurse said that she had to stop the assessment. He got a letter a couple of weeks later saying that he had withdrawn from the assessment and, as such, was being sanctioned. That beggars belief. I have other examples, as I am sure do colleagues.
  - wallace_f 9y ago
    That's awful, adding insult to injury: 'fuck you for being poor while having a heart attack.'
- gambiting 9y ago
  I've been told by someone who knows the process that it's the same reason why applications for Permanent Residence in UK are held up for the maximum allowed time and then rejected for applicants from certain countries - they are accepted on appeal, but the sheer annoyance of the process turns people away which is what they are aiming for.
DanBC 9y ago
> Let's keep the private parts to the implementation and only offer a reasonable public interface. That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you. > An outsider can't be expected to chug along with the ever-mutating directives, laws, guidances, and rules that are part of the bureaucracy's own operation and related legislation. Let the bureau have people who take human descriptions of one's life and work out the best plan out of available benefits. The insiders have the knowledge of what works together and how to make the system work. In England a "Decision Maker" looks at the details of your case, and applies all the relevant acts, statutes, statutory instruments, and case law you your case. This person is an expert, employed by the Department for Work and Pensions and all they do is this. If you think they've got something wrong you can ask for a mandatory reconsideration: they'll have another look. If you still think they're wrong you can go to lower tribunal. A panel looks at the decision. And if they're wrong you can go to upper tribunal. Here's what a tribunal judge has to say aboutj DWP: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-which-reach-court-are-based-on-bad https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-... Note that they are fobidden by law from awarding costs. Number 10 here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/488476/consolidated-sec-rules.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... The figures for PIP are particularly bad: https://twitter.com/CommonsWorkPen/status/942773136390590465 https://twitter.com/CommonsWorkPen/status/942773136390590465 If you want to look at the book of rules to see how bizarre it is, it's available online. Have a think about how many pages you're expecting, then have a count of the page numbers. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-guide-staff-guide https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-gu...
- yason 9y ago
  I almost assumed there must be such people employed but then concluded there cannot be because of the problems mentioned in the article. I'm happy to hear this is how it has been planned and very unhappy to hear that the theory is apparently not working in practice, maybe because of sheer incompetence from (at least) DWP's part.
marcosdumay 9y ago
> That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you. Or, we can stop assuming government's efficiency and create an UBI. Because there will never be a dedicated social worker caring about your side - even if it was viable, voters would never allow that.
- pjc50 9y ago
  At the moment, voters are even less likely to back an UBI.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    Yes, but once created, UBI is more stable than expecting every public servant to keep a single goalset focused on poor people.
intended 9y ago
A happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for politicians who want to show they are vanguards of small government or better saving/spending. Good welfare programs are targets. Therefore they will only be mediocre programs, even if you could have a good program. Any good program will survive only as long as its not a target.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  And the other side of the coin: a happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for both dishonest individuals and parasitic "entrepreneurs". That's the primary reason welfare programs get so complicated very quickly - because the first to get to unconstrained free money are not those who that money was intended for; the first ones are the greedy bastards. Combined with what you wrote, that's why I stopped believing there can be an efficient welfare program in our current system of things; we can at best try to minimize the total waste of bureaucracy and people cheating the system.
  - cjrp 9y ago
    It's true that some will cheat the system, and that has a cost. But there is also a cost associated with people going hungry, or being made homeless, or even dying due to their circumstances.
    - hirundo 9y ago
      While the cost to those people may be infinite, the cost to everyone else may be less than the cost of doing something effective to help them. If you reduce things to economics you may not like the answers you get. Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        > Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death. Does it? I thought it increased the costs due to lung cancer treatments.
notabee 9y ago
Social workers do this very thing, at least in the U.S. Unfortunately it's a poorly paid role that requires a lot of educational investment and is excruciatingly difficult and depressing. So to continue your encapsulation metaphor, imagine designing that but only being allowed the crappiest, most underpowered server to run that service on, and it is rebooted at random intervals for good measure. Source: I know someone getting their Masters in Social Work.

by yason 9y ago

Y_Y 9y ago

Maybe their purpose isn't too be efficient. If everyone automatically got all the benefits they were entitled to it works surely be a lot more expensive.

masklinn 9y ago
Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate, with more gates people won't be able to pass through, and an entire bureaucracy to administrate that — conveniently drawing even more resources from actually fulfilling the system's avowed purpose, ending with a system which keeps costing more and delivering less. As long as you can provide a steady stream of anecdotes and scapegoats it'll go fine. This can in turn justify cutting the system because it doesn't pull its weight[0], and the people who hate social support systems can pat themselves on the back over a job well done. [0] not all at once of course, you by start cutting ancillary services like legal aid[1] in order to feed the ever-increasing gate-keeping machinery you keep adding to [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts-benefits-cases-state-help-dla-esa-ministry-justice-disability-living-allowance-a8028936.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/legal-aid-cuts...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Or maybe that's the lie told in order to make the system more complex and harder to navigate Not sure if that's a lie. In my experience, a big chunk of the general population is selfish enough that they'll abuse any system if they can get away with it. In a way, it's tragedy of the commons all over again - those people, confronted, will tell you, "I'm just a single man, just a drop in a bucket". They conveniently forget that there are 20 million other people in the country thinking the same thing.
grkvlt 9y ago
In this automatic-benefits-allocating world, there would also be no more fraudulent claiming of money not entitled to! It should overall result in a net saving, I believe...
- masklinn 9y ago
  That's at least part of the theory behind basic income concepts: there's no fraud since everybody gets it, and you can get rid of the organisations in charge of validating & allocating.
- spiralx 9y ago
  Benefit fraud in the UK is estimated at around 1-2% of the total - a small enough amount that it shouldn't be the focus of policy instead of the 98-99% of genuine cases.

pjc50 9y ago

There are volunteers that perform this function. However, the hostility of the bureaucracy today is not an accident. It's a matter of policy. The intent is to make people go away without paying them money. The people responsible blind themselves to the fact that some of these people "go away" because they have died.

DanBC 9y ago
Yes. OP talks about independent medical assessments. Imagine you're signed off work because of heart problems. You're invited to a medical assessment, and you have a heart attack during the assessment. The medical assessor calls an ambo, and the paramedics take you to hospital to treat your ongoing heart attack. We might think this is clear evidence the person actually is ill and wasn't faking. The DWP sees this - failure to complete the assessment - as a sanctionable failing. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm130319/debtext/130319-0002.htm#column_839 https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm13... > Debbie Abrahams: [...] > Again, I support the principle of a sanctions regime. If somebody consistently fails to turn up for work experience or a Work programme scheme, sanctions should be applied. However, I believe that sanctions are being applied indiscriminately. For example, one of my constituents was a beneficiary of employment and support allowance after they had retired on grounds of ill health as a result of a heart problem. He was required to attend a work capability assessment with Atos. During > 19 Mar 2013 : Column 840 > the assessment, he was told that he was having a heart attack and the nurse said that she had to stop the assessment. He got a letter a couple of weeks later saying that he had withdrawn from the assessment and, as such, was being sanctioned. That beggars belief. I have other examples, as I am sure do colleagues.
- wallace_f 9y ago
  That's awful, adding insult to injury: 'fuck you for being poor while having a heart attack.'
gambiting 9y ago
I've been told by someone who knows the process that it's the same reason why applications for Permanent Residence in UK are held up for the maximum allowed time and then rejected for applicants from certain countries - they are accepted on appeal, but the sheer annoyance of the process turns people away which is what they are aiming for.

DanBC 9y ago

> Let's keep the private parts to the implementation and only offer a reasonable public interface. That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you. > An outsider can't be expected to chug along with the ever-mutating directives, laws, guidances, and rules that are part of the bureaucracy's own operation and related legislation. Let the bureau have people who take human descriptions of one's life and work out the best plan out of available benefits. The insiders have the knowledge of what works together and how to make the system work. In England a "Decision Maker" looks at the details of your case, and applies all the relevant acts, statutes, statutory instruments, and case law you your case. This person is an expert, employed by the Department for Work and Pensions and all they do is this. If you think they've got something wrong you can ask for a mandatory reconsideration: they'll have another look. If you still think they're wrong you can go to lower tribunal. A panel looks at the decision. And if they're wrong you can go to upper tribunal. Here's what a tribunal judge has to say aboutj DWP: https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-which-reach-court-are-based-on-bad https://www.buzzfeed.com/emilydugan/most-dwp-benefits-cases-... Note that they are fobidden by law from awarding costs. Number 10 here: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/488476/consolidated-sec-rules.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm... The figures for PIP are particularly bad: https://twitter.com/CommonsWorkPen/status/942773136390590465 https://twitter.com/CommonsWorkPen/status/942773136390590465 If you want to look at the book of rules to see how bizarre it is, it's available online. Have a think about how many pages you're expecting, then have a count of the page numbers. https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-guide-staff-guide https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/decision-makers-gu...

yason 9y ago
I almost assumed there must be such people employed but then concluded there cannot be because of the problems mentioned in the article. I'm happy to hear this is how it has been planned and very unhappy to hear that the theory is apparently not working in practice, maybe because of sheer incompetence from (at least) DWP's part.

marcosdumay 9y ago

> That means a dedicated social worker who knows both the rules and knows you. Or, we can stop assuming government's efficiency and create an UBI. Because there will never be a dedicated social worker caring about your side - even if it was viable, voters would never allow that.

pjc50 9y ago
At the moment, voters are even less likely to back an UBI.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  Yes, but once created, UBI is more stable than expecting every public servant to keep a single goalset focused on poor people.

intended 9y ago

A happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for politicians who want to show they are vanguards of small government or better saving/spending. Good welfare programs are targets. Therefore they will only be mediocre programs, even if you could have a good program. Any good program will survive only as long as its not a target.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
And the other side of the coin: a happy useful system that gives money out is an easy target for both dishonest individuals and parasitic "entrepreneurs". That's the primary reason welfare programs get so complicated very quickly - because the first to get to unconstrained free money are not those who that money was intended for; the first ones are the greedy bastards. Combined with what you wrote, that's why I stopped believing there can be an efficient welfare program in our current system of things; we can at best try to minimize the total waste of bureaucracy and people cheating the system.
- cjrp 9y ago
  It's true that some will cheat the system, and that has a cost. But there is also a cost associated with people going hungry, or being made homeless, or even dying due to their circumstances.
  - hirundo 9y ago
    While the cost to those people may be infinite, the cost to everyone else may be less than the cost of doing something effective to help them. If you reduce things to economics you may not like the answers you get. Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death.
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      > Like smoking tends to _reduce_ public health expense via premature death. Does it? I thought it increased the costs due to lung cancer treatments.

notabee 9y ago

Social workers do this very thing, at least in the U.S. Unfortunately it's a poorly paid role that requires a lot of educational investment and is excruciatingly difficult and depressing. So to continue your encapsulation metaphor, imagine designing that but only being allowed the crappiest, most underpowered server to run that service on, and it is rebooted at random intervals for good measure. Source: I know someone getting their Masters in Social Work.