This morning I wrote to the Citizens Advice Bureau in Stroud:
Many thanks for your letters of 12th and 19th
November. On 12th November you sent me a letter from The Pension
Service addressed to you, in which Glyn Caron wrote: ‘It must be remembered
that Dr Tomin has been repaying this overpayment since approximately 2009
without complaint.’
This is not true, I was not repaying a penny. I never
accepted that I was in any way indebted to Pension Service. The Pension Service
has been taking money off my Pension Credit – now from my State Pension – since
2009. On March 30/ 2014 I wrote to the Manager of The Pension Service 1:
“In a letter dated 25th March you wrote to me:
‘At January 2014, the amount you still owe will be £ 637.38.’ I never accepted
any debt on my part, as you may see from the relevant part of my letter of
7/10/2009 a copy of which I enclose. I have never been given the evidence on
the basis of which my debt was decided, and my appeal against the decision had
therefore no effect. Now I shall do everything in my power to find a lawyer who
would investigate the decision professionally.”
On 01 May 2014 I got a letter from The Pension Service 1
that stated: ‘Thank you for your letter regarding your Pension Credit. [This
clearly indicates that this is a reply to my letter of 30th March.]
There has been an overpayment of Pension Credit from 20 January 2014 which we
have deemed non recoverable from you.’
I received this letter with relief, for I thought that was
the end of the matter. But then, in a letter dated 16/05/2014 I was told:
‘Amount owed £10,535.38 … We will take £52.00 from your benefit every four
weeks, starting from the payment you are due to receive on 02/06/2014 …
Deductions will continue to be taken every four weeks until the amount owed is
paid back … 02/06/2014 – 20/04/2026.’
My weekly State pension of £39.01, which is my only income,
was thus reduced to £28.38 a week. This is why I decided to ask you to help me obtain
clarity into the basis on which the Pension Service decided to find me in debt
of £11,763.64, of which they informed me in a letter of 11th August
2009.
This date of the Pension Service letter, 11th
August 2009, is worth noting, for as you have informed me on 12th
November 2014 Glyn Caron from The Pension Service 1 sent you a copy of a letter
addressed to me, dated 18/02/2009. I had not received the letter dated 18th
February 2009. It was in the letter dated 11th August 2009 in which I was
informed about the alleged debt; this letter I received under the circumstances,
which I described to Ursula Grum, Debt Management, in a letter of 07/10/2009: “In
a letter of 08/09/2009 you informed me that my Pension Credit was overpaid
£158.34 for the period 06/07/2009 – 26/07/2009. I received the letter on Monday
September 14. In the letter you stated: ‘The overpayment occurred because on
09/07/2009 your circumstances changed and the office that paid your benefit was
not told at the correct time about a change to the level of earnings in your
household.’ This allegation is false. On 23rd July 2009 I sent The
Pension Service a letter in which I informed you of my wife’s earnings for
three days of supply teaching for the period 2 to 14 July, and I enclosed the
three pay slips. I did so as soon as my wife received the pay. I did not contact
you on the day 8/9 on which I received your letter, for I expected a visit from
the Pension Service Liaison Officer, announced for the following day, with whom
I wanted to discuss the issue.
On September 15 I was visited by the Pension Service Customer
Liaison Officer to whom I showed the relevant documents concerning the supposed
overpayment. At that point she gave me your letter of 11th August
2009 in which you inform me that in the period from 01/08/2008 to 12/10/2008 I
was overpaid £11,688.36, and from 13/10/2005 to 19/10/2008 I was overpaid £75.28,
which is in total £11, 763.64. I phoned your department in the officer’s
presence, appealing against your decision.
In a letter dated 22/09/2009 you wrote to me: ‘We have
looked again at the facts and evidence we used to make our decision and looked
at the points raised. As a result we have not changed our original decision.’
In a letter dated 30 September 2009 The Pension Service informed me that at
your request £9.75 was deduced from my Pension Credit: ‘the amount you still
owe will be £1846.66.’ A mistake? In a letter, also dated 30 September, you
wrote to me ‘about the £11,846.70 still owed’. Would you tell me, please, how
you arrived at the sum £11,846.70, which I allegedly still owe you?”
In October I received the
following letter from The Pension Service in Cardiff, dated 6 October 2009: ‘I
am writing to tell you we will not be taking money for Overpayment from your
Pension Credit. This is because these deductions have been cancelled.’ Signed
by Paul Lewis, Manager.
A few days later I received a letter of 13/10/2009 from Debt
Management, Mitcheldean, Oxfordshire, from which I quote: ‘Thank you for your
letter to us dated 07/10/2009 … The overpayment of £158.34 for the period
06/07/09 – 26/07/09 is due to an increase in your wife’s part time earnings
from 09/07/09, and we were aware of this on the 26/07/09, as you informed us by
letter. The second overpayment was for a total of £11,763.04 for the period
01/08/2005-12/10/2008, but of this total, £75.28 was deemed to be Official
Error and was written off, leaving the recoverable amount as £11,688.36. This
overpayment was due to your wife’s self employment earnings … If you can
provide us with evidence that these overpayments were not your fault, you can
appeal against this decision.’
I had been sending regularly to the Pension Service in
Cardiff the information about self-employment earnings of my wife. What more
evidence could I have given them?
In your letter 19 November 2014 you write: ‘they [i.e. The
Pension Service 1] have sent a copy of the letter where you clearly requested
the decision about the overpayment be looked at again, I wondered if you had
intended this to be the appeal? … Can you recall why you did not choose to
pursue this at this stage?’
My conflict or controversy was never primarily with the
Pension Service or Debt Management of the Department for Work and Pensions; my
conflict had been and still is primarily with Oxford University. I came to
Oxford in 1980 at the invitation of the Master of Balliol. Since then I have
been working to my best abilities in my domain, which is Ancient Philosophy. On
November 18 1989 Nick Cohen published ‘The Pub Philosopher’ in which he wrote:
‘The judgments passed by Oxford dons on Julius Tomin seem outrageously brutal …
Jonathan Barnes, Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford,
impatiently brushed aside the suggestion that the Conservatives’ reduction in
funding for British philosophy since 1980 might explain why there was never an
academic post for Tomin at Oxford. “That’s not the point at all,” he said. “He
would not be accepted as a graduate here, let alone be given a teaching job.”’ –
This amounts to a blacklisting, with all the consequences that blacklisting
entails. If my weekly income is nowadays £28.38 a week, it is one of its
consequences.
Let me now refer to a curious juncture at which the attitude
of Oxbridge dons to my work and the actions of the Pension Service overlaped.
From 2000 to 2008 I worked on my book on Plato; the first volume of this book I
published on my website www.juliustomin.org
under the title The Lost Plato. The
‘Preface’ consists of ‘Eleven e-mails on The
Lost Plato addressed to Classicists and Classical Philosophers’. In the 1st
email I wrote that the 1st volume deals with dialogues written prior
to Socrates’ death: ‘What remains to be done from the perspective opened by The Lost Plato is a systematic study of
the dialogues written after Socrates’ death. In your view, should this work be
undertaken? If so, what can be done that it is undertaken in conditions worthy
of the work it requires?’
A distinguished Classical Philosopher from Cambridge
University Nicholas Denyer, supported by David Lee from Oxford University,
wrote a decisive No to these two questions. In my 6th e-mail I
wrote: “As of yesterday my questions acquired an unexpectedly grave existential
dimension. From the Stroud District Council I received the following letter:
‘We have been advised that your Pension Credits have stopped, which may affect
your entitlement to Housing or Council Tax Benefits. We have therefore
suspended payments of these benefits in accordance with Regulation 11 of the
Decision and Appeals Regulations 2001. There is no right of appeal against this
decision.’ I phoned the Council, informed the lady I spoke to that my wife, who
was self-employed on a part time basis until September is now studying at Cheltenham,
taking a year-long post-graduate course to become a teacher. The lady told me
that on the information they received from the Pension Service my Pension
Credits were disconnected as of July 2008. This surprised me, for when I asked
my wife a few days ago whether I was receiving the Pension Credit as normal,
she looked at my account and said ‘yes’. I was advised to contact the Pension
Service, which I did. The lady I spoke to told me that my last Pension Credit
payment would be sent to me on October 19: ‘Your Pension Credit is stopped
because we have been informed that you and your wife are receiving Working Tax
Credit.’ I told the lady that they were badly misinformed, for my wife ceased
to work, as I duly informed their office at the beginning of September. I
pointed to a letter I received from her office on 10 September, which said:
‘Thank you for informing us of the cessation of your partner’s
self-employment.’
The Pension Credit I had been receiving until October 19 was
£62.79 a week. Since we neither smoke nor drink, and live frugally, we have
been able to survive. This morning I received a letter from the Pension
Services, dated 13 October 2008, which says that ‘from 21 July 2008 you will
get £5.10 a week. From July 2008 you are not entitled to Pension Credit … the
minimum amount of money the Government says you must have each week taking
account of specific circumstances is £189.35. State pension for Julius Tomin
£31.38. Working Tax Credit for Doina Cornell £70.18. Earnings of Doina Cornell [my
wife has kept her maiden name] £82.69. Total income £184.25. Your appropriate
amount of £189.35, less your total income of £184.25. So your total guarantee
credit is £5.10.’
I see a certain similarity between Denyer’s NO and the
Pension Service calculations. Denyer does not need to look at a single page of The Lost Plato in order to proclaim
confidently that there is no reason to suppose that my views are correct and
that therefore my question whether my future work deserves to be undertaken in
conditions worthy of such work deserves a NO. I may phone and write to Pension
Service as often as I wish, informing the office workers that my wife is now a
student, that she has no earnings, that we consequently do not receive any
Working Tax Credit – the Pension Credit officers KNOW better.”
After I sent this email to my Oxford and Cambridge
colleagues, without any explanation my Pension Credit was renewed and paid retrospectively
for all the weeks and months it had been disconnected. We could repay my wife’s
parents the money we had borrowed to survive. – But let me return to the
statement from the Pension Service lady ‘Your Pension Credit is stopped because
we have been informed that you and your wife are receiving Working Tax Credit.’
Who had misinformed the Pension Service? It must have been someone whom they
trusted. Was it not the same source on the basis of which the Pension Service
decided in 2009 that I owed them £11,846.70?
The overpayment of £158.34 of which I was informed in a
letter of 08/09/2009 was calculated as follows: 06/07/2009 -12/07/2009 weeks 1,
days 0, Incorrect Paid 165.5, Correct Payable 111.78, Excess 53.72, Amount
overpaid 53.72; 20/07/2009-26/07/2009 weeks 1, days 0, Incorrect Paid 165.5,
Correct Payable 60.88, Excess 104.62, Amount overpaid 104.62. The misgiving
concerning this overpayment I articulated in my letter to Ursula Grum. At the
time for which the Overpayment was calculated my wife had not received the pay
slips: Ursula Grum wrote ‘office that paid your benefit was not told at the correct
time about a change to the level of earnings in your household.’ I replied:
‘This allegation is false. On 23rd July 2009 I sent The Pension
Service a letter in which I informed you of my wife’s earnings for three days
of supply teaching for the period 2 to 14 July, and I enclosed the three pay
slips. I did so as soon as my wife received the pay.’
The Overpayment Calculation for the period of
01/08/2005-19/10/2008 is very different: 01/08/2005-09/04/2006 Weeks 36 Days 0
Incorrect Pay 71.9 Correct Payable 0 Excess 71.9
Amount overpaid 2,588.40. 10/04/2006-30/7/2006 Weeks 16 Days 0 Incorrect paid
78.14 Correct Payable 0 Excess 78.14 Amount
overpaid 1,250.24. 31/07/2006-08/04/2007 Weeks 36/ Incorrect paid 62.21 Correct Payable 0 Excess 62.21 Amount Overpaid
2,239.56. 09/04/2007-06/04/2008 Weeks 52 Days 0 Incorrect Paid 68.8 Correct Payable 0 Excess 68.8 Amount Overpaid 3,577.60.
6007/04/2008-19/10/2008 Weeks 28 Days 0 Incorrect Paid 75.28 Correct Payable 0 Excess 75.28 Amount Overpaid
2,107.84.
In those days I worked very intensively on my book The Lost Plato. As I have written in the
6th email of my ‘Preface’, written in October 2008, I asked my
Oxbridge colleagues whether this work deserved to be undertaken in conditions
worthy of such work; they replied NO. Doesn’t the Overpayment Calculation for
the years 2005-2008 clearly indicate that in the eyes of those on the basis of
whose intervention Pension Service calculated my ‘debt’ I should not have been
paid a penny even when I had been writing The
Lost Plato?
Your last question was ‘Can you recall why you did not
choose to pursue this at this stage?’ Prompted by your question, I have
recalled that I did my best to do so, as my exchange of letters with David Drew,
who was my MP in those days, indicates. David Drew wrote to me on 22nd
September 2009: ‘Thank you for your e-mail of 17 September. I am sorry to hear
about your problems with Pension Credit. If you would kindly send me your
National Insurance number and a few more details of the problem, I am happy to
look into this on your behalf.’
The letter from the Pension Service of 6 October 2009 that
stated ‘we will not be taking money for Overpayment from your Pension Credit’ may
have been sent to me in response to David Drew’s intervention.
These good intentions on the part of the Pension Service
failed to come into effect; I wrote to David Drew on the 10th of
January 2010: “I am sorry to bother you again concerning the alleged debt which
I am supposed to pay Debt Management of the Department for Work and Pensions. I
know that you are very busy and work very hard on behalf of your constituents,
and I, being a Czech citizen, cannot even give you my vote. Still, I should
greatly appreciate it if you asked Debt Management of the Department for Work
and Pensions (Contact Centre Nuneaton, Debt Management, PO Box 171, Micheldean,
Gloucestershire, GL17 0XG, tel. 0845 602 3881) and Paul Lewis at The Pension
Service in Cardiff, on what basis was the decision originally made concerning
my alleged debt, on what basis it was then cancelled, and on what basis it was
made again. To inform you about some steps that I am making in this matter, I
am sending you in the Attachment the e-mail I have sent to the Master of
Balliol. I wish you all the best in the year 2010.”
It is good to see that the Citizens Advice Bureau in Stroud
is prepared to intercede in a case, which even a well-meaning MP ultimately set
aside as hopeless.
No comments:
Post a Comment