All we need is a person on the end of a phone - is it too much to ask?

WHEN it comes to public services, it seems to me this Conservative government will do absolutely anything except employ people and reward them properly for their work.
We see it with the refusal to train enough doctors, with the devastating shortages of nurses, midwives, teachers, police, with the current bout of nastiness directed at ‘91,000 unnecessary civil servants’ who can’t answer back …
To which I’d reply: “If you think you can do without 91,000 of your staff, why have you done nothing about it in your last 12 years in power?”
It suggests to me that this is softening up the population for more and more privatisation, enabling ministers to argue that our current systems ‘aren’t working’ and could be ‘more efficiently run by the private sector’ when actually the problems are political incompetence and interference, the creation of unnecessary layers of complex management and regulatory structures, and too little trust in professionals.  
We also see it in the nigh-impossibility of actually speaking to an adviser on any of our so-called ‘help lines’.
I’ve been trying (not for the first time) to get through to the Child Benefit number to inform them that the Ukrainian refugee and her young daughter who lived with us for three months or so have now gone back home. Basically because she could see no prospect of them being able to afford to live here independently.
Our former guest is supposed to let them know about her departure, but her computer’s broken (not easy to sort out in wartime) and she can’t get through to a human being on the phone line for callers from abroad. It’s very expensive to spend hours at a time on her mobile in the vain hope of getting an answer.
All she wants to do is stop them paying her money she’s no longer entitled to. UK taxpayers’ money.
She’s increasingly worried that she will be in trouble for not informing them about her change in circumstances. So she asked me to help.
But I can’t get through on the phone either, and I’m not sure ‘data protection’ will allow them to speak to me even if I eventually succeed.
Wiltshire Council’s refugee advisers tell they can’t do anything and she’ll have to contact Child Benefit herself. 
The website does give a postal address, so I’ve advised her to write a letter and hope that will do the trick. She’s been told it could take at least a fortnight to arrive.
A few words with an actual person might have saved all this. 
‘Just because we can’ isn’t a justification for doing anything and that includes removing the human element from essential public services.

A sad farewell to our new Ukrainian friends

OUR Ukrainian guests have gone home. Or at least, my husband’s driving them to Luton airport.  I waved them off an hour ago, biting my lip until they were out of sight. “Don’t cry,” said Mary, “or you’ll make me cry, too.”
So I’ve been walking aimlessly round the house, stumbling across discarded things. A pair of slippers and another of winter boots in the utility room. Kids’ travel sickness pills and an assembled Lego funfair with a big wheel, a reminder of an outing to the London Eye, ready to pass on to some other child, in the dining room. Shampoo and conditioner by the sink in the bathroom, the bottles too bulky for travel.
In the spare room wardrobe, neatly folded clothes – too many to pack without exceeding the baggage allowance, some of them kindly donated by wellwishers, along with Anna’s school uniform. I ought to return it to be used by some other needy family, but I’ll hang on to it for a while, just in case the war takes a turn for the worse and they have to come back. If not, I’ll return it to the school in a term or two. 
Hoping they’ll come back. Hoping they won’t.
I’m going to miss them terribly. We all are, even the dog, who loved her new nine-year-old playmate and is now just lying quietly at my feet, sensing that something’s changed and life won’t revert to the way it was yesterday. 
We’ve told them they’ll always be welcome to come back. But if they do, it’ll mean things in Ukraine have got even worse. It’ll mean failure, not least the failure of world leaders to deal with Vladimir Putin once and for all.
We in Salisbury understood already how little he cares for the suffering of ordinary people. How he feels free to subject innocent civilians to terrifyingly random acts of cruelty. We still can’t make sense of it. And now he’s doing the same thing on a global scale. 
Meanwhile, our would-be leaders faff about pretending to their party members that they have the ability to make everyday British lives better. They don’t actually have the faintest notion of how to deal with a monster holding the Western world to ransom. They don’t even know how to deal with the people who have fled here, seeking sanctuary. Not in the longer term. Housing, jobs – jobs that pay enough for single parents to live independently, I mean – childcare …. Not a clue.
I barely knew, before all this, anything about Ukraine. I’d never needed to know. And as a result I didn’t question the oversimplified way foreign news can be reported to us.
Now I’ve begun to grasp a little about this complicated, divided country. Mary is a native Ukrainian speaker, though she speaks Russian, too. She told us that many Ukrainians actually supported Russia – even some of those who have found their way here, their homes flattened by the dictator they so admire. 
So among her fellow countrymen here in Salisbury she never completely relaxed, never really knew who to trust. 
She trusted us, but there were so many ways in which we couldn’t help. 
For 12 years she taught English in a school in Lviv to children across the primary and secondary age range. But schools here don’t need people, however highly qualified, to teach English as she did, as a foreign language. 
And she didn’t have the right pieces of paper to work in a language school. You have to pay to study for a Celta certificate in Britain. She didn’t have the money. 
She couldn’t even get an interview as a classroom assistant. Mostly, the vacancies were for supermarket cleaners and shelf-stackers, care assistants …. Shiftwork impossible to fit round childcare or school holidays for a lone mother, which is what so many of our Ukrainian guests are, with their other halves forbidden to leave their country.
She’d say: “How will I ever earn enough money for a deposit and rent on a flat?” I had no answer.
I asked Wiltshire Council leader Richard Clewer. Not unreasonably, he told me: “What do you think the people who’ve been on our waiting list for years would say if they saw refugees jumping the housing queue?”
Then came the decider. Her headteacher in Ukraine said she could not hold her job open any longer. 
We’d offered her a home for a year. We couldn’t commit to longer. She stayed for 14 weeks.

NB I wrote this a month ago but waited to post it till I was sure they weren't planning on coming back.