Claimants bullied and reduced to tears, MSPs are told
Holyrood's welfare reform committee has heard how Jobcentres bully and often reduce claimants to tears.
And those on welfare to work schemes spend all day repeatedly cold-calling frustrated companies who do not have any work to offer, MSPs were told.
The committee heard from claimants on a first-name basis only for fear of incurring sanctions by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP).
One claimant who gave evidence to the committee said that Jobcentre advisers made her ill and stressed after being made redundant from a lifetime of working.
Donna, a former Church of Scotland development worker from Glasgow, said she felt bullied by Jobcentre advisers.
She said of her first interview with the Jobcentre: "He made me feel like I was imagining my problems and I didn't have any problems,” she said.
I would have been in a mental institution if I had stayed with that first adviser
"He was saying to me: 'It's not like you've got a leg missing.' Each time he made me cry.
"I would have been in a mental institution if I had stayed with that first adviser - or I would have shot him."
Another claimant called Jake, from Glasgow, said: "Sometimes you sit on the phone from nine to five each day making calls for jobs but you know you're not going to get anything. It's depressing."
She added: "The booklet I got was all of the cleaning companies, the laundry companies, you were just to phone up and say you're looking for work. Most of them would say: 'Don't phone here again.'
SNP MSP Christina McKelvie said the system amounts to "class warfare" with "propaganda" against the unemployed.
"A report from the DWP suggested only 24% of people going through the work programme were successful and only 9% of them were in a job after a year," she said.
"The DWP had paid the providers £1.8bn since the scheme had started for that kind of outcome. Is all of that money worth it?"
Labour MSP Neil Findlay said: "If it is as described, this is in effect state-sanctioned cold-calling. This has really disturbed and upset me. In fact it has disgusted me.
"The system that we have created and the atmosphere in this system is so wrong, I find it incredible the more evidence that people presents to us.
"It also disgusts me what they have done to public services on the frontline having to deal with people going through this bloody system, because I don't think for one second 99.9% of them want to treat people like this.”
