Chapter Three – Deep Thought

Friday 3^rd November

As Deepak Malhotra came through the door into the Solent Welfare Rights Project’s general office, he found those of his colleagues who had arrived before him engaged in lively debate about the morning’s news.  In that respect, it was a typical day.

‘It’s fucking appalling!’ declared Martin Connolly.

‘I don’t generally approve of that use of that word,’ Hilary reminded him.  ‘However, in the circumstances, it seems rather appropriate.’

Deepak noticed that although that might have been a joke, Hilary herself wasn’t laughing, so he didn’t either.

‘Are you all okay for drinks?’ he asked.

Deepak himself was parched.  His parents were away from home and he had woken late, dashed out of the house without breakfast, run for his bus (which had arrived late anyway) and been caught in the usual dreadful traffic along the Fair Oak Road into Bishopstoke for almost an hour.

Hilary and Martin both had full mugs.  Toby’s was on his desk, half-empty.  Deepak guessed he was probably in the computer room, setting up for the morning’s Universal Credit clinic.  He thought he might appreciate a fresh one, so picked it up.

Hilary was in full flow as he left the room.

‘Is it really too much to expect men to behave decently and with respect in the 21^st century…?’

Deepak hoped he always behaved with decency and respect, to women and men alike.  He had no doubt that, if he fell below standard at work, Hilary would be the first to let him know.  He wondered what had set her off that morning.  Toby would know, although he seemed to get away with a level of banter Deepak couldn’t imagine Hilary would accept from himself, Martin or any of the other men in the building, even Tom, her husband.

He found Toby where he expected, turning on computers and putting his sheets of troubleshooting tips beside each keyboard.  The machines had been a gift from Wave Community Housing, the massive social housing provider who had inherited most of the local ex-Council stock.  Once seen as an evil empire by the Project’s staff, Wave had undergone something of a metamorphosis in the wake of a property development scandal and were now viewed as part of the rebel alliance.  It was this gift that had enabled Toby to pitch the idea of the UC clinic to his colleagues and levered in the matched funding for the new post – releasing Toby to mastermind the IT project.

‘I was making myself a coffee.  I thought you might like…’

‘Mate!  You’re a star!’  Toby perched himself on the edge of the nearest desk and took a long swig of his tea.  ‘It looks like they’re down again.’

‘You’re joking?’

‘Nope.’

‘It’s not our end?’

‘It’s definitely not our end.’  Toby looked forlornly around the room.  ‘It’s going to be a pretty quick clinic if it stays this way.’

‘I’ll see if I can find out what’s up.’  Deepak, who had escaped from the DWP in the days before Universal Credit went live, still knew a few people on the inside. ‘Louise?  Hi!  Yeah, I’m good.  You okay?  I thought you’d say that.  You don’t know.  Okay, hun.  Speak soon.  Bye.’ 

‘It is their end?’ asked Toby.

‘Yeah.’

‘Bollocks!  It’s always on a bloody Friday, too!’

‘Except when it’s on a Monday.’

‘Or a Tuesday, or a Wednesday…’  Toby cradled his mug and swung his legs back and forth.  ‘Digital by default my arse!’

To be fair, they hadn’t had the whole UC system out of action for a long time.  During the Gateway phase, it had been horribly unpredictable, but the Full Service rarely let them down. 

‘Who’s seeing drop-ins this morning?’ Deepak asked.  He knew it wasn’t him; he had an appointment with a potential PIP appeal.  It was usually Hilary’s other half and volunteer, Tom Appleby, on Friday mornings but he didn’t seem to be in.

‘Hilary’s doing them.  Tom’s got a hospital appointment.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope?’

‘His knees, apparently.’

There was a pause in which neither man dared speak aloud the joke he had framed about the likely consequences of Hilary's well-known passion for her husband. 

‘H seems a bit wound up this morning,’ Deepak said at length, not relishing the prospect of breaking the news that UC was down to his already antagonised colleague.

‘It’s all this stuff in the news about sexual harassment in high places.’

‘I wondered if it was.’ 

Deepak could quite understand.  There had been some dreadful behaviour reported recently, firstly about international celebrities and, in the aftermath of that, concerning MPs and members of their entourages.  Having started his working life in the Civil Service, with copious training on professional ethics and appropriate conduct in the workplace, and being brought up to believe people in high office had a duty to set an example, these revelations had been very shocking to him.  He could only imagine how depressing they must be to the veteran feminist.  Poor old Hilary must feel that all her years campaigning for equality had been in vain.  He said something along these lines to Toby.

‘She’s rightly pissed off about it,’ he replied.  ‘But that’s not what’s got her back up today.’

‘No?’  Deepak thought he knew the reason.  ‘Was it that crap Newsnight debate about this, the one with scores of blokes and only a couple of women?’

‘No.  That’s what she was cross about yesterday,’ Toby explained.  ‘This morning, she was reading us a Daily Mail article that her mate up north tweeted her.’

‘Why would anyone do that?’  Sharing Daily Mail articles was tantamount to treason in this office.  ‘No wonder Hilary’s angry with her friend.’

‘She’s not cross with Daphne – it’s the article.  One of their women journalists has dismissed all the Pestminster revelations as a witch-hunt.  She read it out to me when I came in this morning and, when Martin came in, she asked if he’d seen it.  I think she feels let down, especially after making such a determined case for us to appoint a female candidate yesterday.  Hilary likes to think of her fellow women as sisters and allies.  When they fail her, she takes it personally.’

Deepak thought back to the interviews the previous day.  He hadn’t really wanted to be on the panel but, when his close friend Louise told him she that she wasn’t applying for the job after all, he could no longer use potential conflict of interest as a get-out-of-jail-free card.  Martin was interviewing clients all day, Tom was needed as head chef in the café, Vaughan excused himself on the basis of being ‘rather rusty’ when it came to recruitment protocols and, as for Lyn…

‘I don’t think I could, luvvie!’

Hilary had done her best to talk her into it but nobody had been surprised when their stalwart volunteer had politely, but firmly, declined.

Deepak reluctantly agreed to be the third member of the panel on condition that he had a well-prepared script to stick to and questions with clear right and wrong answers to assess.  He didn’t feel ready for anything more demanding.  It hardly seemed any time at all since he had been recruited to a full-time paid post himself, following Tricia Williams-Ellis’s resignation in the spring.  He had been interviewed by Hilary, Martin and an elderly little partially-sighted woman from the management committee, who he had mistakenly assumed would be asking him the softer questions about previous work experience and future aspirations.  In the event, she had come at him with some tough and tricky casework dilemmas based around cohabitation, sanctions and the severe disability premium, while Hilary had adopted the nice cop role.  Analysing his performance later, he had never expected to be offered the job and had certainly not pictured himself interviewing candidates only a few months later.  

Deepak had delivered his own killer questions, even-handedly, to five different people the previous day.  He had picked real-life conundrums on PIP and the Bedroom Tax to test them, situations that had foxed him completely when he had first encountered them and which his colleagues had generously guided him through.  The first candidate, a volunteer with a disability rights project in Southampton well-used to attending tribunals, had aced the PIP one, although she fell flat when it came to Housing Benefit.  The second, a housing officer from the City Council whose application had looked the most promising, flunked both.  Candidate number three presumably had a better offer as he didn’t show up at all.  Candidate number four, an unemployed support worker and the first one after lunch, caused raised eyebrows all round by declaring forcefully that the only way to get PIP for anybody was to fill in the form on the basis of their worst possible day and state that this was how they were all the time.  Deepak had been so shocked that he was at a loss how to respond to that but Toby had stepped in with a suitable follow up question to him on the different consequences of claimant error and deliberate misrepresentation of a material fact.

‘We’d spend the first six months of the contract putting that one through our political re-education programme,’ Toby had remarked to the others, when they were comparing notes at the end of the afternoon. 

‘Or the next six years trying to win hopeless overpayment and fraud cases at tribunal,’ sighed Hilary.

‘That would keep you busy until you retire, H!’ Toby mocked.

‘If only!  I still have another decade to go before I get my pension.’

‘I do believe that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you wishing you were older,’ laughed Toby.

Hilary glowered at him.

‘The laugh’s on us,’ Deepak pointed out.  ‘Hils gets to retire at sixty-six but we could still be working when we’re sixty-eight.’

‘You could be looking at sixty-nine, nipper,’ Toby reminded him.  ‘Or seventy.’

They had left the candidates who looked to be the strongest for the end of the day.  Hilary and Toby both knew Andrew Burrows, although they weren’t close friends.  He had helped Deepak through an unfair dismissal claim against the DWP in his role as a PCS union officer, before leaving the DWP himself for a short-lived appointment at the local authority.  Of all the candidates, he was the one who had the best grasp of the bigger picture.  He gave a grimly compelling account of his former job, juggling competing demands on the DHP pot and trying to prepare the council for the arrival of Universal Credit.

Unfortunately, he proved woefully uninformed about PIP and didn’t seem to see the Housing Benefit case from a claimant-focused perspective at all.  Disconcertingly, he seemed cheerfully confident of his chances throughout.

‘It’s going to be a bugger telling Andy he’s not our man,’ Toby remarked, as they whittled the list down to the last two over tea and cake, thoughtfully brought in by Paula when she noticed their light was still on when she prepared to open up for soup-run supper.  It had been six-thirty by then.  Deepak didn’t like to push his colleagues to make their choice, but the last bus home went at seven.

Their last candidate was probably the only one who scored better in person than on paper.  A quietly-spoken and dowdily-dressed woman in middle middle-age, she’d come across as nervous and short of confidence, shuffling in her seat as Hilary told her tale of the Project’s repeated rise and fall.  Unexpectedly, however, she’d cut through his tricky casework queries with an impressive combination of knowledge and compassion.  She had handled some of the other questions less well.  Toby was worried that she didn’t seem to know enough about universal credit and had floundered somewhat when asked to identify some good and bad features of the benefit.

‘Her reply to my question on challenging discriminatory language was rather disappointing too,’ Hilary noted.  ‘It felt rather too rehearsed.  I couldn’t actually picture her applying it in practice.’

Deepak agreed.  It hadn’t sounded authentic.  One of the other candidates – the housing officer, he thought – had been impressively honest and admitted that sometimes she let minor transgressions go without a direct challenge, especially if the speaker was an older person, although she insisted she would make her disapproval quietly apparent and never acquiesce.  He reminded his colleagues of that.

‘Actually, that was Ashley,’ Hilary said, checking her notes.  ‘The young woman from Into Action.  I wasn’t sure I entirely approved of that, but she was honest and gave a couple of very credible examples.  She did quite well on everything, apart from mixing up her social sector housing benefit restrictions with those for private tenants.  That was really rather concerning.  If it hadn’t been for that she would have been my clear first choice.  I did like Catherine, though.  I can’t help feeling we didn’t quite get the best out of her today and there is hidden strength there. I’ve actually scored the two almost identically.’

‘Ashley’s just edged it for me,’ said Toby.  ‘She’s got the right outlook, she’s confident around IT – which is crucial these days - and she’s tribunal-ready.  We can sharpen up the legal side as we go along.’ 

‘What about you, Deepak?’

‘Catherine was best at my questions, the casework side of things,’ he said. ‘You’re right about Ashley’s IT skills being better, but I’m not sure her tribunal work is more relevant.  I got the impression she’s going along as moral support, whereas Catherine did have to address the tribunal.’

‘As a witness against the appellant,’ Toby reminded him. 

‘Let’s share our scores,’ said Hilary, before this could become tetchy.

They did so.  At the end of the tally, Ashley had a two-point lead.  With the agreement of her colleagues, Hilary had called her, there and then, to offer her the job.  She had accepted.  Deepak had run for his bus and just made it.

‘Has Hilary called the unsuccessful candidates from yesterday yet?’ Deepak asked Toby, who was skimming through his appointments list for the morning's clinic.  There looked to be a fair number. 

‘She said she’d do it at nine, before we open up.’  He looked a little anxiously at his colleague.  ‘She’s going to get Andy’s out of the way first.  He’ll be gutted.’

‘I bet.  He ought to have done so much better, with his credentials.’

‘We have to go on the interview, though, don’t we?’

‘I suppose, although it feels like we’re doing the same as the DWP do with ESA and PIP cases – putting too much emphasis on the face-to-face and not enough on the other evidence.’

Toby gave him a concerned look.  ‘You are happy with yesterday’s decision?’

‘Yeah.  It was tough, but fair, based on the interviews.’

‘I hate having to choose, especially when it’s as close as that,’ said Toby. ‘It was too close, really.  Either of them could have done it.’

‘Maybe Catherine will do like I did and volunteer for a while, to build up her experience?’

‘You could suggest H offers her the opportunity.  It’ll show her we liked her and give her confidence a boost.  She can always tell H to get lost if she’s not interested!’

Deepak didn’t think Catherine seemed the sort to tell anyone to get lost.  As he went to leave the room, his phone buzzed.

‘It’s Louise,’ he told Toby.  ‘Her boss says Deep Thought is up and running again.’

‘Deep Thought?’

‘It’s what he calls the Universal Credit computer.’

Toby laughed.  ‘Because it manages life, the universe and everything?’

‘That was the original reason.  Also, the forty-two thing seemed to fit, since it’s the number of days from claim to payment.’

‘If you’re lucky,’ said Toby.  ‘I bet that’s not what the guys who come in here at ten o’clock will call it.’