Angela Rayner told the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool on Tuesday that the Government will microchip the cave-people, at public expense, and she gave the figures without hesitation, as one gives a weather forecast. Four point one million pounds. Nine individuals. Chips at fourteen pounds ninety-nine a head. The balance to be spent on consultation, on branding, and on a launch event at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, which your correspondent is told will feature a choir.
“This is about dignity, and it is about activation,” said the Deputy Prime Minister, or words to that effect, for the hall was loud and your correspondent had stepped out for a small sherry.
A delegate from the Fire Brigades Union asked who would hold the scanner. Rayner said that was a matter for the Department for Work and Pensions. The hall applauded for eleven seconds. Your correspondent counted, because somebody must.
Chiptek of Slough denies it has ever chipped a human being
The supplier is Chiptek of Slough, a firm whose entire public record consists of one contract, won by competitive tender in 2019, for the tagging of council grit bins. Its managing director, Derek Pym, met your correspondent in a car park with the easy confidence of a man who has read the specification and found it agreeable.
“The technology is essentially identical,” said Derek Pym, Managing Director of Chiptek of Slough, adding that a cave-person is “a bigger grit bin with opinions.”
The chips are the size of a grain of rice and are inserted behind the left ear with a device resembling a hole punch. Mr Pym confirms that his company has ordered forty thousand units. Nine people are thought to be eligible. Your correspondent put this discrepancy to him directly, twice, and he said the order book was a commercial matter and offered her a Polo.
The cave-people have not been consulted and are not pleased
A man living in a hollow oak near Cinderford, who gives his name as Bunty and his age as “older than the bridge”, says he has never seen a microchip and does not want one. He says he has seen a grit bin, however, and it was full of grit. He seemed pleased with this distinction.
“I came here to get away from exactly this sort of thing,” said Margaret, who has lived in the Forest of Dean since 1998 and declined to give a surname, “and here it is again, on a leaflet.”
The Department for Work and Pensions says both are “within scope”. A laminated leaflet explaining the scheme has been posted to a tree. It is the first correspondence the tree has received in living memory and the tree, one gathers, has not yet replied.
The union will not hold the scanner
The Public and Commercial Services Union has threatened a ballot over who will hold the scanner, on the grounds that holding the scanner is work, and that holding the scanner is not in the job description. A branch secretary, Yvonne Trellick, is firm on the point.
“The scanner is a management tool,” said Yvonne Trellick, Branch Secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, “and management can hold it themselves, in the rain, as is their custom.”
The Department for Work and Pensions has advertised the role at twenty-three thousand and ten pounds a year, plus a non-consolidated supplement for outdoor conditions. The successful applicant will be required to travel to the Isle of Skye, where the first implant is scheduled for the fourteenth of October. Your correspondent notes that the department regards the Forest of Dean as mediaeval, and she would like to record her agreement, though she suspects the department means it as a compliment.
Bunty is chipped, then sanctioned
On a wet Tuesday on the Isle of Skye, a man calling himself Bunty became the first cave-person in the United Kingdom to be microchipped. He was chipped behind the left ear by a contractor named Gavin Prout, who did not remove his coat. Bunty then applied for Universal Credit, on the grounds that he had been activated, which was the entire point of the exercise and had been explained to him by a leaflet.
He was offered a work capability assessment in Inverness, one hundred and twelve miles away and across water. He did not attend. He was sanctioned for four weeks. His chip was scanned at a jobcentre in Portree and returned a number, which the system did not recognise, and the system, having no opinion on the matter, did not care to acquire one.
A department spokesman confirms the scheme is working as intended
Asked whether a man with no address can be sanctioned for failing to attend an appointment he cannot reach, a department spokesman said the scheme was “performing in line with expectations” and that nine people had now been identified, of whom seven had been chipped and two had gone to ground. Chiptek of Slough has invoiced for forty thousand units. Thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-three of them are in a warehouse in Slough, where they will remain, drawing no salary, requiring no assessment, and attending no appointments, until the building is sold. Angela Rayner told the Commons that the Government had “listened” and would extend the scheme to people living in ditches.
It is at this point that your correspondent must make a confession, and she makes it without apology, having made it before. She had understood, until quite recently, that she was reviewing the Government’s new roundabout in Wiltshire, and that the cave-people were a figure of speech. They are not. They are nine people, six of them in the Forest of Dean, and your correspondent rather likes them. She likes Bunty, who has seen a grit bin and knows what it is for. She likes Margaret, who left in 1998 and has been leaving ever since. She would not, on the whole, have them chipped. She would have the department chipped, and the scanner handed to Yvonne Trellick, who would put it in a drawer and go home.
But the chips are in Slough, all thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-three of them, and the weather is closing in, and the tree has not yet replied to the leaflet.
