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Government organisations compete fiercely to be the most incompetent. With so many departments with decades of experience, it is a hotly contested title.
In the dim and distant past, if you wanted, ‘sick pay’, you signed and dated the back of the note the doctor gave you which was the size of a prescription form. It took ten seconds at most. However, the DWP decided that this was not creating many pointless jobs so they introduced a 40 page form with 16 pages of guidance notes in very small type which had to be completed for your ‘sick pay’. As the form was incomprehensible to the average member of Mensa, it did cause the DWP some hassle as people rang in with dozens of questions such as, ‘why is the form written in gibberish?”. It did, of course, cause hassle for the claimant as they had to take an extra three days off work to read the form and the accompanying notes and another three days to lie down in a dark room with a cold compress to recover, not that this concerned the DWP of course.
So, the whizz kids at the DWP came up with another hare-brained scheme. All claims would have to be completed by telephone. Bear in mind that the Government wishes to reduce public expenditure and so makes it as difficult as possible to claim money to which you are entitled in the hope that you will give up or die.
After 40 minutes on the telephone answering pointless questions, our correspondent was sent a letter telling him that he could not make a claim for, ‘sick pay’, because he hadn’t paid any national insurance contributions, but still demanding all sorts of information so that they could continue to build their mountain of pointless paperwork and keep their employees busy doing pointless tasks. Of course, our correspondent had paid by way of credits but facts are not welcome at the DWP as they get confused by them.
We have selected two from the deluge of forms and paperwork which may amuse our readers.
The questions to be answered on the DWP form include the ward number, telephone number and postcode of any hospital you have been in in the past 12 months even if your claim is for a completely different and unrelated illness. The DWP also want to know when you will be disposing of business assets and why there is a delay if you are not going to dispose of them immediately. So, if you are off work with ‘flu’ for a couple of weeks, be prepared to take on a new hobby called – “obtaining your, ‘sick pay’, from the wallies and prats and the DWP".