Church and State blog: A4E cost Declan a major opportunity with the Terrence Higgins Trust

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A4E cost Declan a major opportunity with the Terrence Higgins Trust

With the exception of one blog on the bringing down of our website, all my blogs this month have been about Action for Employment (A4E), and this trend seems set to continue. Yesterday Declan came home to a letter from A4E Camden informing him that he is to take part in a "work boost", which is basically a mandatory four-week period of unpaid full-time work. So four days before we are due to be interviewed for voluntary work by the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT), the leading HIV & AIDS charity in the UK and the largest in Europe, Declan is forced to withdraw his name.

This is quite startling because Declan and his employment advisor, A4E Camden manager David Lawson, signed a My Journey Plan on 19 January which states that Declan would complete his work boost in April upon completion of an IT course he is currently taking at WMC, a premier adult education college. Declan volunteering for the THT was a huge opportunity to make sure his work boost would take place in a premier non-profit organisation, thereby increasing his chances of securing sustainable employment.

An A4E booklet states: "Together with your Employment Coach, you'll decide when and where the best place to take your Work Boost will be" (emphasis mine), but this doesn't seem to apply to Declan. In fact, we have yet to come across anything A4E states that does apply to him (in the previous blog I list five breaches of contract since 29 September, which include the tampering and altering of documents both Declan and I have signed; this blog also contains a video of Declan taking on A4E outside our a branch of theirs that had him escorted from the building by the police the week previous).

This letter from Lawson (archived here) also announces that Lawson himself is no longer Declan's employment advisor, but Placement Advisor Lola Worth, the very woman I wrote about in the previous blog for insisting, without knowing anything about Declan's CV or our website (or so she says), that Declan do his work boost in a supermarket or a warehouse (the only two options she put on the table). A4E claim in their website that jobs are "carefully" matched to the "skills and abilities" of their customers!

Anyway, Declan has also informed the THT that I too have to withdraw my name. Clearly A4E will likely put me in a work boost when it pleases them, so I might as well do it now and volunteer for the THT after my mandatory four weeks are done.

Church and State

MAYOR OF LONDON RSI PROPERTY
DAY 406 IN A WEEKLY PERIODIC TENANCY
SUBJECT TO A SECTION 21 NOTICE

(SEE PARA. 3 BELOW)

1. Our 308 Honorary Associates include 20 Nobel Prize laureates. Declan and I are engaged in a project that deals with the publication of issues significant to social policy in a number of key areas, e.g., climate change, population, futurism, atheism, and free speech. Established as Network for Church Monitoring, a non-profit company limited by guarantee, our main publication, found at the website, Church and State, calls attention to subjects, not the least which have been critical of the interaction between religious and secular institutions. We have been the target of numerous threats and actions, e.g., the former resulting in threats to Declan's life, and the latter, which have led to vandalism. The various incidents are on record with the police and other official agencies.

2. There are no less than 63 Nobel Prize laureates on the Church and State website from 20 Honorary Associates, eight articles, nine book excerpts and 33 petition signatories. (For example, one Nobel laureate signed our Nobel petition in support of human embryonic stem cell research and gave us permission to excerpt from one of his books.) Our list of associates also includes 18 US National Medal laureates, and six Turing Award laureates (the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in computer science). We have published one article and excerpted from the books of seven members of the British House of Lords. And there are 31 knighted professors on the site from 13 Honorary Associates, one book excerpt and 21 petition signatories. These figures are despite the never-ending assault on our email (this link reveals the targeting of our emails to, among others, a close colleague in Washington, DC as well as space advocates and Nobel laureates).

3. This is Day 406 for us living under the threat to life of a 'no fault' eviction by Peabody Trust.[1] We live in a Mayor of London's Rough Sleepers Initiative (RSI) property. Peabody's appalling new terms of tenancy have forced us into an unstable weekly periodic tenancy that poses a threat to Declan's life and inhibits our ability to exercise our rights. Declan accumulated quite a history with the Housing Ombudsman Service before he received the Ombudsman's decision not to investigate a referral from Lyn Brown MP on jurisdictional grounds. The Ombudsman was asked to consider whether or not our tenancy has been renewed like for like; and whether, if not, it should be in light of the landlord having accused us of not signing a like-for-like agreement. The Equality and Human Rights Commission will not accept a referral of discrimination from Ms Brown, the Commission's helpline (EASS) having grossly distorted the complaint against Peabody. We no longer have pro se access to the courts (see next paragraph).

4. This eviction matter came before District Judge Ruth Fine at the Central London County Court on 30 June 2020, when both counsel for St Mungo's (the charity in effective control of our tenancy) and Declan presented their positions. Declan lost the case and was ordered to pay £1,850 in costs. A publishing colleague in America cleared these costs within 24 hours of my blog post about this hearing for strike out on a related issue that was the essence of the claim, i.e., that St Mungo's would take a phone call to confirm that we are clients of the Mayor of London's RSI programme. Within a week of the hearing, St Mungo's had agreed to take this phone call for us both, the Court having ruled that they were not obliged to do so despite our circumstances. This time we escaped bankruptcy (counsel for St Mungo's asked for £3,407.50 in costs), but consider that to seek pro se access to justice in the courts has become far too dangerous for us. Declan currently has before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman the decision of the Information Commissioner that allows St Mungo's to continue processing coercive support plans without our knowledge or consent and that also poses a threat to his life.

5. When it comes to traffic, we have had 10.7 million hits in the past three years on Facebook; however, I left the platform on 13 March 2021 for one year rather than risk being banned for life. It is indisputable that with any sort of level playing field Church and State would have far exceeded 2.5 million hits last year. In addition to a large variety of blocks without explanation, Facebook had so severely restricted our Page's distribution by October 2020 that it was almost as good as an unpublished page.[2] Currently, we are up to their 85th block since 1 December 2015, and as usual without an explanation. This block records as one half of their 3rd double block in the first five weeks of this year that lasted 60 days. Our traffic has also been curtailed by over 2.5K blocks on access to Church and State since 26 July 2016, including 29 full distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks since 17 May 2019 that have lasted for as long as 54 hours at a time.[3] About 70% of our hits are from Americans.

"This is precisely the hard hitting kind of response needed to clarify the unfair way Facebook is treating your highly reputable site." Don Collins, Founder, International Services Assistance Fund, Washington DC

Last updated: 26/06/21

_________________________

[1] Once a fixed term has elapsed, the landlord has the option to seek eviction even if the tenant has upheld their obligations in full (though of course the landlord must still apply for and obtain a county court order).

[2] 17/10/20: We have permission to publish this ISAF letter of 30 September to Facebook COO Sheryl Samberg. Facebook has so severely restricted our Page's distribution since 4 September that it's almost as good as an unpublished page

[3] Since October 2019, we have been defining a full DDoS attack as having such a high volume of up to 4-minute blocks on access to Church and State that we don't bother recording them all.

Church and State blog

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

A4E cost Declan a major opportunity with the Terrence Higgins Trust

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