Mixing files up, losing sick notes, scanning blank pages: how the benefits system really works

In this episode, we take another look at the benefits and public sector system. 

It is a total circus. 

I talk with Michelle Cardno who is a benefits lawyer at Fightback for Justice in Bury. 

Michelle tells an interesting story about the DWP scanning people's medical evidence the wrong way up, so that a tribunal judge at appeal only had blank pages to look at. 

She also talks about the way that the DWP randomly allocates PIP. 

There's also a covert recording from a meeting between a social worker and a homeless woman where the social worker reads from the wrong file entirely - it's another family's file altogether. 

The point to all of this: getting benefit money and keeping it is not as straightforward as DWP head Pat McFadden would have the world believe. 

He wants to put jobcentre staff into GP surgeries to get sick and disabled people into work. Problem is, you can't rely on the benefits system to get people's needs and stories right. 

Public sector systems have been decimated by years of cuts. McFadden needs to look at that and make that work before he gets into his other big ideas. 

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