The Department for Work and Pensions has reportedly launched an urgent review of several benefit claims after photographs emerged online showing members of a local protest group successfully operating a ladder.
The images, posted as part of a campaign to install England flags around Heywood, show activists engaged in activities previously thought impossible without years of specialist training, including standing upright, carrying equipment and displaying what officials described as “a concerning level of mobility”.
The photographs have sent shockwaves through Rochdale Council.
“We were initially told these individuals were fighting an exhausting battle against HMOs, the council, the government, modern Britain and occasionally geography itself,” said one DWP source. “Now we’ve discovered some of them can climb six rungs of a ladder while holding cable ties. That’s practically a skilled trade.”
The department is understood to have developed a new Work Capability Assessment based entirely on Facebook activity.
Under the revised criteria, claimants will lose points for operating power tools, organising protests, carrying flags, shouting for more than four consecutive hours, or writing the phrase “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” in capital letters on social media more than three times per day.
Officials claim the Heywood operation has revealed an untapped workforce.
“At one point we observed a man installing flags at three separate locations before lunchtime,” said an investigator. “That level of productivity would place him in the top 10% of local authority project managers.”
Witnesses reported that the group spent hours erecting flags throughout the town while documenting the process online.
The photographs have allegedly been forwarded to every Jobcentre in the North West under the heading ‘Potential Scaffolders and General Labourers Identified’.
One image showing a protest leader balanced halfway up a ladder has become particularly problematic.
Within minutes of being uploaded, DWP analysts reportedly concluded that anyone capable of ascending a vertical structure voluntarily could also be capable of attending a 9am shift, surviving a Teams meeting and pretending to care about quarterly performance targets.
Medical evidence is now said to be secondary to what civil servants are calling the “Ladder-Based Assessment Framework”.
The new system ranks employability according to height achieved.
- One rung: fit for part-time retail.
- Three rungs: warehouse operative.
- Five rungs: site supervisor.
- Above six rungs: middle management.
The discovery has also raised difficult questions for the wider protest movement.
Residents noted that campaigners who previously claimed Britain was collapsing now appear to have spent several days carrying ladders around Heywood decorating lamp posts.
“It’s the most community work some of them have done in years,” said one local. “If they put this much effort into an actual job, Heywood might have a second industrial revolution by Christmas.”
At press time, the group had announced plans to install even more flags, while DWP officials quietly updated their records to read: ‘Excellent mobility. Enthusiastic outdoors. Can work unsupervised at height. Potentially overqualified.’
Reporting from down the M62.
