Highgate Jobcentre Plus will go for anything!

If we had any doubt that Highgate Jobcentre Plus is gunning to terminate our benefits, we need look no further than this afternoon. Declan's new IT course, which takes place on Mondays and Thursdays, was clashing with our 'sign on' at the Jobcentre this coming Thursday - we sign for Jobseeker's Allowance every second Thursday. It should have been pretty straightforward to have our sign times changed from 12.10pm to 4.00pm. But nothing is ever straightforward with the Jobcentre.

Senior Operations Manager Tia Ahmed doesn't change my time, but in changing Declan's from 12.10pm to 4.00pm, insisted on writing that his original appointment had been scheduled for 9.15am, meaning now I don't know whether I am supposed to turn up this Thursday at 9.15am or 12.10pm. Declan even went so far as to tear Ahmed's note up, but she still refused to rectify the error and told Declan to take the torn up paper with him. So tomorrow Declan will dispatch his first tier complaint to the manager of the Jobcentre, just in case I run into any problems when I turn up to sign at 12.10pm, as scheduled.

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It never rains but it pours! When Declan got back to the flat on his own this evening, he opened the bathroom door and it came off its hinges! It was awkward for him because within two weeks of the dispatch last August of his application to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) regarding the interception of our communications and directed surveillance, our live-in landlady, human rights activist Belinda McKenzie, served us with backdated notice to vacate our flat by the end of January.

Anyway, he says it was nothing on discovering in September 2010 that the four TV blow-outs we had had within the first ten months of our tenancy were due to make-shift and damaged wiring on the roof of the house, which although live could end up lying in pools of water in heavy rain.





Belinda's builder, a Polish guy who has been working on an underground extension in the garden for months now, came up and took the bathroom door away. Great!

Declan's first interview with Reed in Partnership

We hate coincidences! Within two weeks of Declan's dispatch last August of his application to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) concerning the interception of our communications and directed surveillance, our live-in landlady, human rights activist Belinda McKenzie, served us with backdated notice to vacate our flat by the end of January and Haringey Council left us with our first £77 shortfall in rent to pay, among other things. This time, the day after Declan sent his application to the European Court of Human Rights (following the IPT's dismissal of his complaint), our jobcentre, Highgate Jobcentre Plus, issued letters notifying us that we were being placed with Reed in Partnership, a private-sector provider of the Department for Work and Pensions' Work Programme.

This is a letter that Declan wrote to the chief operating officer for DWP prior to his first meeting with Reed in Partnership this afternoon:

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This afternoon Declan's adviser kept mentioning the "mandatory activities" Declan could expect from him in the weeks to come, without being specific about what he had in mind. All Declan could do is keep reminding the adviser and the manager who sat in on the interview that his first tier complaint would not be directed at Reed in Partnership but at Highgate Jobcentre Plus for sending us to an unsuitable provider, if and when a case can be made.

Suffice to say that we both remain deeply concerned that Highgate Jobcentre Plus has selected Reed in Partnership to use us as cheap labour for dead-end jobs. Declan will be raising this concern with a High Court judge next month in the matter of Heavey v Highgate Jobcentre Plus referred to in paragraph 17 of his application to the European Court of Human Rights. My interview with Reed in Partnership is on Friday.

Application to the European Court of Human Rights

Yesterday Declan sent his application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) regarding the interception of our communications and directed surveillance, having introduced the case to the Court on 5 September. As Declan writes in paragraph 20, within two weeks of the dispatch of his complaint to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), dated 10 August, I had my Facebook account disabled; our IP address was twice blocked by our web host; our live-in landlady, human rights activist Belinda McKenzie, served us with backdated notice to vacate what has been our home since July 2009; and our local housing authority, Haringey Council, left us with our first £77 shortfall in rent to pay. Nonetheless, the IPT came back to us on 1 September, stating that Declan's complaint was “obviously unsustainable”.

There is no appeal from a decision of the IPT, leaving us with the ECHR and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. This is Declan's application to the ECHR:

This morning our jobcentre, Highgate Jobcentre Plus, came at us again, despite that Declan has them before a High Court judge next month. First an officer was keen for us to agree to let the jobcentre send our CVs to any employer of their choosing! Then we were issued letters staing that we are now being placed with Reed in Partnership, a private-sector provider of the Department for Work and Pensions' Work Programme. Declan wrote in paragraph 17 of the application above that we are deeply concerned about what lies in wait for us with the next provider.

No sooner will we have completed our first interviews with Reed in Partnership than we will turn on our skeleton argument for the High Court hearing, given the nightmare we were put through for a year with Action for Employment (A4E) and the blasé attitude Highgate Jobcentre Plus had towards all four of the formal complaints Declan lodged with the jobcentre alleging serious breaches of contract by A4E.

Declan's claim for Judicial Review against Haringey Council

Within two weeks of Declan's dispatch last August of his application to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) concerning the interception of our communications and directed surveillance, human rights activist Belinda McKenzie served us with notice to vacate our flat by the end of January and Haringey Council left us with our first £77 shortfall in rent to pay, among other things. This afternoon Declan lodged his case against the Council with the High Court of Justice Administrative Court, an independent tribunal having ruled how local authorities pay housing benefit outside its jurisdiction:

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In October 2007 Declan wrote a petition to the United Nations regarding therapeutic cloning, known technically as 'somatic cell nuclear transfer' (or SCNT). We were living rough on the streets of London at that time - we were forced to live rough in central London for more than 2 1/2 years (see our About statement in the N4CM website) - but nonetheless 28 Nobel laureates and hundreds of scientists and scholars have signed the petition. It would have been signed by thousands if our emails were not getting lost in cyberspace or delivered to spam boxes (see paragraph 8 of Declan's application to the IPT). We believe the petition is more important than ever following the announcement last week that scientists in New York have used SCNT to create personalised embryonic stem cells in humans for the first time.

Prof Robin Lovell-Badge from the UK National Institute for Medical Research, who signed Declan's petition, said of the research published in the journal Nature: "This paper will be seen as significant both by those who are trying to use somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce human patient-specific embryonic stem cell lines and by those who oppose human 'cloning' experiments."