The DWP accepted my evidence that Universal Credit pushes people into survival sex work – but that doesn’t mean they care

When Will Quince MP apologised for a memorandum sent by the Department for Work and Pensions that denied that Universal Credit had seen an increase in survival sex, he attributed his changed mind to the “brave testimonies of the young women” who gave evidence in private to the Work and Pensions Select Committee.

Not only did he retract the original memorandum, which insisted there was no direct link between Universal Credit and increases in prostitution, but he submitted a revised version conceding that there was a link, if not an “over simplistic” one.

I was surprised at this U-turn and even more shocked at the apology, given the government’s refusal to accept, let alone say sorry for, things like the systemic violations of the rights of persons with disabilities that a United Nations Committee had previously accused it of. For a moment I thought that this might mark the point where the government finally noticed sex workers and considered ways to improve our lives.

Having considered it properly, I refuse to accept or even entertain such an idea.

There is nothing quite like prostitution for inspiring pearl-clutching horror. In her book Playing the Whore, Melissa Gira Grant notes the transition from prostitution as an act to “prostitute” as an unshakeable identity, an indelible stain on who we are.

In the Universal Credit discourse, those of us who entered the sex industry to survive have become the ultimate symbol of misery, representing the lowest point to which a human can sink. Noting the years of inaction when Universal Credit caused food bank use to soar, I find it strange that the department was thoroughly disinterested when we were starving to death, and yet have suddenly found a moral compass when we have been forced to find a way to survive.

It would be naïve to think that this sudden interest in survival sex has anything to do with a commitment to the welfare of benefit claimants. Rather, stories about the horrors of prostitution tend to sell papers and the whole affair has become something of a PR nightmare. Comparing the old and new versions of the DWP memorandum sees not only a new acceptance of links between Universal Credit and survival sex work but a conspicuous shift from the arguably negative term “prostitute” to the more respectful “sex worker” as the department try extra hard to convince people that they actually care about us.

Yet in both versions, the department firmly states that it is “misleading” to uniquely blame Universal Credit for an issue that has historically been linked with a wider “lack of welfare support”. It seems astounding that the DWP would, essentially, incriminate themselves in the process of exonerating Universal Credit, confidently asserting that the entire welfare system is falling short. It is this that exposes the entire inquiry as a charade; the scope of the investigation is limited to Universal Credit, and so the department can happily admit to not helping those in poverty with the knowledge that they won’t actually be held accountable any time soon.

While the myriad of issues with Universal Credit, including delays and hefty deductions, have highlighted the situation, I firmly believe that the entire welfare system is designed to be hostile towards those who are, for whatever reason, unemployed.

Benefit sanctions, which predate Universal Credit, are ineffective and increase the hardship that the welfare system is supposed to protect us from. Personal Independence Payments (PIP), a form of disability benefit, sees claimants with complex illnesses and disabilities evaluated by work capability assessors who are unfamiliar with their cases and fail to meet the government’s own standards of quality. It is hard to believe that the benefits system exists to support the welfare of the British public when the DWP set a target of rejecting 80 per cent of benefit appeals, rather than considering cases purely on their own merits.

It does not take a statistician or an economist to figure out that any policy change which makes people unable to meet their basic needs drives people like me into the sex industry, where we can make up the shortfall and work around the barriers that stop us succeeding in traditional employment – whether those barriers are our disabilities, caring responsibilities, or lack of qualifications.

The government did not even need to reach that apparently groundbreaking conclusion themselves, given that the English Collective of Prostitutes has been demanding that they “outlaw poverty, not prostitutes” since 1975.

I don’t accept that the DWP is sorry for dismissing the link between Universal Credit and survival sex, or even shocked or saddened to see a link at all; as Blair Buchanan, representative of the Sex Worker Advocacy and Resistance Movement, asked the committee, “What did [they] think was going to happen?”