Sunday 8 January 2012

Time Limiting ESA / Clause 51 Amendment

At the moment the Welfare Reform Bill proposes to limit Contributory ESA (cESA) to one year.

This means that if you become too ill to work (for example, if you develop cancer) and you have a partner that earns more the £7,500pa you will not be entitled to any income-replacement benefit. Could the 2 of you really cope on so little? Especially if one of you has such a costly condition?

Lords Patel and McKenzie have put forward the following amendment:

Page 36, line 34, leave out “365 days” and insert “a prescribed number of days which must be
at least 730”

The vote on the amendment is on this Wednesday, 11th January 2012.

We need to lobby Lords before Wednesday. So far the votes have been close.

The Labour peers are planning to vote for the amendment. It's safe to say that the Tories will vote against. What's important is lobbying the Lib Dems and the Crossbench peers. There's a list of all the Peers that user Twitter here (not organised by party, sorry. But if anyone's got the time to create Twitter lists of the Lib Dem and/or crossbench Peers do let us know!)and there's a list of the Email addresses of Lib Dem peers here.

If you can't convince Lib Dem peers to support the amendment, then the next best thing is convincing them to abstain.

There's further info about the amendment in this pdf from the Disability Benefits Consortium that @kmachin dug up.

2 comments:

  1. Ouchtoo.org has a list of 153 crossbench, idependant and lib dem Lord's email addresses.

    Also, if you are emailing a lib dem then consider linking to this blog;

    http://carons-musings.blogspot.com/2012/01/six-days-to-get-rid-of-12-month-time.html

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  2. Thanks so much for the DBC pdf! I've included it in email to some Lib Dem and Crossbench peers & mentioned that it's only 4 pages.

    I've put the text of my email up here http://edyourself.org/articles/ESA.php & on the same page I've made clickable links for all the Lib Dem and Crossbench peers who have email addresses in the public domain.

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