The Long View

Another 'recycled' blog from January 2014 about the amazing place that inspired the Solent Welfare Rights Project. 

In a residential Southampton side-street, a few hundred yards from the east side of the Itchen Bridge and next to the Masonic Hall, there's a grand old Victorian building with 'Public Baths' inscribed high on its facade.  The 'Old Slipper Baths', built and managed by the City Council when none of the terraced houses in this ship-building district had their own bathroom became a 'Labour Exchange' when public health policy and home improvement made the original use redundant and, when the Department of Employment moved to new premises, in the dark days of Thatcher's Tory Government the Labour-led Council let it to a group of Trade Unionists, who founded the Southampton and District Unemployed Centre.  

The Unemployed Centre did advice with a difference.  None of this 'impartiality' malarky - it was the Tories who were cutting benefits and driving up unemployment with their attacks on workers' rights and privatisations, and at the Centre you got practical assistance with claims and tribunals (Social Security and Industrial) with a generous side-order of left-wing politics.  They didn't generally do 'confidentiality' either, as there weren't individual offices: clients were interviewed en masse in what had been the waiting area, sitting on the wooden pews around the front bay where shipyard workers might have sat clutching their towels waiting their turn for a wash and brush up a hundred years earlier. 

It fitted the ethos of the place to encourage people to share their misfortunes, listen to each others' stories and learn from the advice given to their fellow unemployed workers - to encourage solidarity.  There was never any lack of that; with Southampton a marginal council politically and the Conservative group pledged to withdrawing funding and closing the place down within days if they got to form an administration, the workers' jobs seemed little less precarious than those of the people they were advising.

I joined the inspirational team at the Centre as a volunteer in 1985, becoming a paid worker in the Poll Tax era, before making a spectacularly ill-judged decision to become a Housing Officer for a neighbouring local authority.  But I stayed in touch, doing a stint on the management committee and watching the place evolve into a slightly more conventional, less precarious and arguably more effective and professional advice organisation.  I even got to work there again for a few months just before we moved north, refreshing my welfare benefits knowledge and tribunal skills and gaining a useful insight into Legal Services Commission standards and practices.

I went back just before Christmas to the organisation now known as the Southampton Advice and Representation Centre.  The old interview area still has the wooden pews but is now the reception and waiting area and the workers have their own offices in which to interview their clients confidentially and do their work, but it still feels friendly and welcoming.  The current staff team include a colleague from the 1980s (he did desert briefly, but couldn't stay away), but reminiscing we realised that fewer than twenty staff had worked there in over thirty years.  The number employed fluctuates with funding but with an average of probably six or seven most of the time, it's an impressive indication of commitment.  There's still the same mission - to help disadvantaged people get the advice and representation they are unable to afford from commercial legal advisers, and to as good if not a better standard - and the same small signs of appreciation help to mend the wounds when despite everything, justice is not done.  While I was there, one of the workers who had apparently had a miserable outcome at an Employment Tribunal the day before had two grateful clients call in with Christmas treats for him and the team.  You don't expect that when the people you work for have so little, but their kindness touches you deeply when it happens.

Sadly, one of our old comrades from the Thatcher era is currently terminally ill and while I had been shy of calling on him (both fearing to be a nuisance at a difficult time, and sefishly afraid to see an old friend so changed by ill health), the others encouraged me to do so.  I was glad I had: he was still very much his old self, bright-eyed and full of fighting spirit both against his illness and the injustices he'd fought to combat all of his life.  A former UCATT steward, he'd been our Industrial Tribunal champion in the early years with an impressive ability to think on his feet which made him a reassuring ally but a formidable adversary in the hearing room.  If ever rebuked by a tribunal chair for a procedural faux pas he would turn on the Irish charm and ask for forgiveness on the basis that he was 'only a carpenter and joiner by trade' - if one who had apparently not just kissed the Blarney Stone, but made mad, passionate love to it!

What neither of us could have anticipated when we first worked together was how benign the Social Security regime of that era now appears.  'I never thought I'd say it,' said my former colleague, 'But this lot - they're worse than Thatcher!'  I could only agree.

True, some changes came in with the introduction of Income Support in 1988 that set the tone for future cuts and a system that required little human intelligence to administer.  Gone were judgments on whether a claimant was a 'householder' or 'non-householder', replaced by a clumsy 'under 25' or 'over 25' differentiation, and a system of flat-rate 'disregards' from earned income came in where previously actual work-related expenses, such as travelling costs, were taken into account.  Crucially, under Thatcher's government, earnings-replacement benefits ceased to be uprated in line with earnings.  Shamefully, the Blair/Brown governments didn't reverse this and the gulf between earnings and benefits has continued to widen despite propaganda to the contrary.

Back then, Invalidity Benefit didn't rely on a points system and poor-quality pseudo-medical assessments - a person was fit for work only if a real job existed in the local 'travel to work area' which he or she was capable of doing.  This was a decision made by a Decision Maker worthy of the name, who had to weigh up both medical evidence and the local labour market when coming to a decision.  Contribution-based Unemployment Benefit was paid for a year, not the current six months and while sanctions existed, the maximum (for losing a job through misconduct, for instance) was a six week sanction - and we used to appeal these to chip a week or two off, even though a full year's entitlement might still be paid from the end of the sanction.  Now it's a minimum of 13 weeks and up to 3 years for another 'failure' and for claimants of contributory JSA, any sanction is deducted from the mere six months' entitlement.

'Foodbanks!  I never thought we'd see such a thing!'

No, we never did.  Thirty years ago it would have been inconceivable that churches would be putting together food parcels for families in or out of work who simply could not afford to feed themselves, and that there would not be public outrage.  The generation that defeated the Poll Tax surely wouldn't have accepted the sudden imposition of Council Tax on people living on subsistence benefits which were never calculated to allow for it.  But there isn't the sympathy for the Unemployed that there was then.  Perhaps the saddest thought of all is that it's hard to imagine many current Labour councils finding funding and premises for an organisation like the Southampton and District Unemployed Centre.  They would say there wasn't a 'business case' for it.

It really did seem for a moment as if we'd been fighting a long defeat, but then my friend smiled.  'We never thought the Centre would still be going after thirty years though, did we?' he said.

We never did and yet it is. 

Here's to the next thirty!

I ought also to have mentioned our computers from the 1980s, which were cast-offs from the TGWU's office: huge things about the size of a fridge-freezer, which used 5 1/4 inch 'floppy discs' to 'boot up' and store data, and rattled and clattered like something from a 1960s episode of Dr Who.  There was great excitement when we acquired an 'Amstrad'.

One piece of news from the current workers may come as a shock to readers of Severe Discomfort and Continual Supervision - there's no longer a vending machine at the Southampton Tribunals Service venue!