For Black History Month, we are highlighting the great work done at a national level by Citizens Advice in the past. The following article was originally published in 2018 by Sue Edwards of Citizens Advice national office.
One of the things that the Black Workers' Group was keen to do was to ensure that our policy work better reflected the diversity of our clients. So in 1991 we published "Barriers to benefit - black claimants and social security". This was a time when the DSS was rolling out the Benefits Agency to administer benefit claims, and they had just published a set of standards that they expected all Benefits Agency offices to meet.
Our report aimed to establish whether there was any direct or indirect discrimination in service delivery and design of social security. An analysis of our evidence found that black clients might not not be receiving full entitlement and encounters with social security system were often distressing and humiliating. Some DSS offices didn't have any interpreting facilities, making it particularly difficult for claimants who didn't speak English as their first language. Where there were no interpreting facilities, claimants sought advice from the local CAB.
Our evidence indicated that delays in processing benefit claims also occurred because the DSS sometimes lost black clients' files due to incorrect use and understanding of their names. We also noted negative attitudes to black people by appeal tribunal chairmen and wing members.
Finally, we highlighted that some parts of the benefits system had specific and identifiable impacts on groups of black claimants eg discretionary nature of the social fund; restrictions to IS for 16-17 year olds, levels of payment of income support to asylum seekers, availability for work rules for income support/unemployment benefit.
Our influencing work didn't end with publication of the report. For some years afterwards, we had regular meetings with senior officials at the Benefits Agency where we raised the issues which we highlighted in this report. For example, in early 1993, we were asked to attend the Benefits Agency’s Ginger group set up to raise equal opportunities issues affecting both BA staff and clients to discuss what progress BA had made in the treatment of BAME claimants in the two years since we published Barriers to benefits. We felt that there had been some good initiatives at local level, but there was no national strategy to improve services. Amongst issues discussed included the use of translators and interpreters, and Language Line. On a positive note, Benefits Agency stated that they were intending to organise a conference on the use of interpreters.
