Church and State blog: Newham Council: Still no assurance from Newham Benefits Service that our Housing Benefit will not be suspended after HM Revenue and Customs update my address online without my authority (WITH UPDATE 28/7/2017)

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Newham Council: Still no assurance from Newham Benefits Service that our Housing Benefit will not be suspended after HM Revenue and Customs update my address online without my authority (WITH UPDATE 28/7/2017)

Re: Internet cuts since 26 May 2017

From my earlier blog post's Update 28 July (8.37am):

"And it's not just Facebook blocks, blocks on public access to our Church and State website and the daily targeting to fluctuating degrees of category pages throughout the site that Declan and I are dealing with these days. We have also been dealing with Internet cuts since 26 May. See my blog post of 21 June, Internet cuts: We pay £65 per month for BT Infinity but feel we are in a race against time to stay online (WITH UPDATE 28/7/2017 RE: 89th Internet cut since 26 May 2017)."

We had to suspend work on our Church and State website on 15 June after 4 internet cuts in one night. With a then unprecedented 6 internet cuts on 6 July; 5 cuts on 18 July; 6 cuts on 22 July; 3 cuts yesterday; none since midnight today (as of 28 July at 8.37am).

The War on Free Expression

Last Thursday 13 July Newham Council confirmed that our Housing Benefit may be suspended as a result of the unauthorised updating on 11 July of my address online by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC); see my previous blog post of 13 July, HM Revenue and Customs: My Self-Assessment address has been updated by HMRC without my authority and Declan has just been informed by Newham Council that our Housing Benefit may be suspended as a result (WITH DOUBLE UPDATE 14/7/2017). Then last Friday, 14 July, Newham Benefits Service (NBS) told Declan that they had received his email below and that our Housing Benefit "is still open"; there was no assurance, though, that it won't be suspended.

For the attention of Kim Bromley-Derry, Chief Executive, Newham Council

Chris Boylett
Head of Newham Benefits Service
Newham Council

Address removed for email

14 July 2017

Housing Benefit Reference [number removed]

Dear Mr Boylett,

I refer to my wife's email to HMRC CEO Jon Thompson as below.

Please could you provide me with assurance that Newham Benefits Service will not suspend my Housing Benefit as a result of the unauthorised updating of my wife's address by HMRC on 11 July 2017.

I can confirm that my address has not changed. It has been effective from 17 May 2014, not 11 July 2017.

Yours sincerely,

Declan Heavey
Managing Director
Network for Church Monitoring

71 Queens Road West
Plaistow
London
E13 0PE

Mobile: 0788 043 7681
Email: dheavey@gmail.com

The last two times Declan has had to update his address with HMRC, Newham Council wrote that they suspended our Housing Benefit because the Department of Work and Pensions notified them that our address had changed. The first time this happened, last October, Declan was summoned to a full-blown investigation by NBS. He produced a bundle of 57 pages with a number of further documents, and was interrogated for over an hour and a half by a Senior Council Tax and Benefits Officer before our Housing Benefit was de-suspended. We have absolutely no idea what we could be looking at this time around. (Declan wrote the pre-action letter below in respect of the second such suspension last February.) Suspensions can also last any period of time and the tenant pursued for rent for the length of the suspension.

Click to enlarge

UPDATE 28 July (8.58am): The jury is still out on whether Newham Council will suspend our Housing Benefit. No response from NBS to Declan's email of 14 July above; nor from HMRC to my Tier 1 complaint of 9 July (two days before they went and updated my address without my authority), adding fuel to our narrative going forward that we are being harassed and distressed even by HMRC. We are still in two minds as to whether or not we should complain to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) about serious staff misconduct, on the part of HMRC, involving criminal or near criminal behaviour; see my blog post of 29 November 2016, Will it take the Independent Police Complaints Commission to protect our address with HM Revenue and Customs? (WITH UPDATE 22/12/2016). We are well familiar with the IPCC; for example, in 2012, Declan complained to the IPCC about the police investigation into the removal of our flat door.

Re: Removal of our flat door

Paragraph 23(ii) of Declan's updated complaint to the United Nations under Article 19 (freedom of expression) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

On 21 August 2012, Ms McKenzie signed an undertaking to the County Court promising not to harass the Applicant and his wife following her builder’s removal of the door to their flat (see Annex 9, p. 31). The Independent Police Complaints Commission later upheld the Applicant’s appeal against the police investigation of the incident "on information only", stating that "no further action is required by the force in this instance".

From My Picks:

9 June: Ministry of Justice: Complaint to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice against the County Court at Central London, Royal Courts of Justice (WITH UPDATE - Day 13 21/6/2017)

'Let me recommend an important web site churchandstate.org.uk. Operating out of London this well-designed and exciting web site covers church-state, population, climate change and other issues. Check it out.' - Edd Doerr, President, Americans for Religious Liberty

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

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Newham Council: Still no assurance from Newham Benefits Service that our Housing Benefit will not be suspended after HM Revenue and Customs update my address online without my authority (WITH UPDATE 28/7/2017)

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