Picklesgate: How Many DWP Ministers Have Lied to the House?

The revelation of Eric Pickles' January letter to the PM expecting 40,000 homeless families as a result of benefit caps and housing benefit changes looks like touching off a row in the Commons as to whether Tory ministers have been systematically lying to Parliament.

An article in the Guardian identifies a DWP report in February and statements in the House by Chris Grayling (Welfare Minister), Grant Shapps (Housing Minister), Maria Miller (Minister for Patronising Disabled People) as all stating that it is either impossible to quantify the number of affected households or that the problem will not get worse. Yet Eric Pickles' Community Department delivered precisely that quantification of the problem into the Prime Minister's hands in January.

Labour are expected to try and force an urgent question on the issue in Parliament today.

According to the DWP it does not accept the figures in the letter and "There might be some people who have to move to a less expensive area. But that doesn't mean they won't have anywhere to live. We are very optimistic about the behavioural change that this will bring about" Behavioural change? That would be us mere plebs not expecting to be able to continue living near right-thinking, posh Tory voters then?

The DWP spokesperson also said "We cannot carry on with a situation where people on benefits can receive more in welfare payments than hard-working families" But what if those people on benefits need that amount of money simply to survive while supporting family members with complex needs?

Benefits Cap to Make 40,000 Families Homeless

...And Cost More than it Saves

According to a story in the Observer and picked up by the BBC, Eric Pickles' department warned No.10 in a letter from Eric Pickles' Private Secretary to David Cameron's Private Secretary (the standard method for a minister to draw something to the PM's attention) that the £500/week benefits cap would result in 40,000 families being made homeless and cost more than it saves.

Of the families made homeless, 20,000 will result directly from the cap, while 20,000 will result from related changes to the rates of housing benefit.

The letter claimed the supposed savings of £270m would be more than wiped out by the increased cost of caring for newly homeless families and generate a net loss, while 23,000 of the 56,000 affordable homes the government wants built by 2015 will not be built at all because it will be impossible for the builders to recoup their costs, and that this will primarily affect family homes.

The letter was apparently sent in January, casting doubt on Chris Grayling's claim before parliament last month, in respect to families being made homeless by the benefits cap, that "It is not yet clear to what extent they would be affected by the overall benefit cap."

In confirmation of the effects of the changes, Westminster Council announced on Friday that 81% of the families on housing benefit in the Borough, more than 5,000 households, were at risk of being made homeless, because rental rates in the borough require housing benefit payments in excess of the revised housing benefit cap, with most seeing a cut of £84 to £130/week, and nearly 1 in 8 seeing a cut of more than £300/week . The Tories are naively hoping that landlords will accept lower rents -- yeah, right.

80% of landlords surveyed by Westminster Council said they would rather end the tenancy than lower rents. The council's own figures show that 4,000 children would have to leave the borough and change schools (so school closures to come, I suspect), half the children on the council's At Risk register would be forced out of the borough. 300+ pensioners, 95 of them with serious health concerns, and 61 disabled people will be similarly affected.

The council warns it could be forced to find £18m in order to temporarily house 1,500+ families from next January, but in 2013 the benefits cap is extended to temporary housing and the only alternative would be to move the families affected entirely out of the borough. The report cheerily predicts that within 3 years, homelessness won't be a problem in Westminster, because it will all have been packed off to become the problem of the outer London boroughs.

Boris Johnson was widely reported to have warned that this policy would amount to the 'Kosovo-style ethnic cleansing' of London social housing, but, reassuringly for those of us whose worlds would be shaken by a Boris with a social conscience and a line in incisive social commentary, he was misquoted, is in agreement with government policy and insists that it will not result in social-cleansing and that 'no such exodus will take place on my watch'. Westminster Council would appear to be putting one of his assertions to the sword and the other to the test.

Westminster will be one of the worst affected boroughs, but other inner-city boroughs are likely to see similar effects, and all boroughs will be affected to some degree. Now take Westminster's 5,000+ and extrapolate those effects across the entire country....

Pontius Grayling has Spoken

So the Work and Pensions Committee had Chris Grayling over for a little chat, and the members chose to take him to task over the hatred of disabled people the DWP press releases on disability benefits are whipping up in the tabloid press, spilling out from there into the general population.

Mr Grayling promptly claimed himself "bemused" (not 'horrified'?) at how the tabloids chose to portray the DWP press releases, claiming he had been criticised for saying benefit claimants shouldn't be called 'scroungers' -- criticised by whom, Mr Grayling? Saying it when?

If DWP is so lily-white and innocent of all wrong, why exactly did it release press releases proclaiming 70% of people on IB were fit to work, when that 70% consisted of 40% in the Work Related Activity Group who by definition are not currently fit to work, and 30% placed on JSA, but still very much disabled. Why has DWP been trawling through the IB stats, looking for the most seemingly outrageous claims it can find? Why did the Prime Minister feel it necessary to proclaim on national news that disabled people whose disability causes addiction or obesity were not fit to receive benefits -- ever heard of Praeder-Willi Syndrome, Mr Grayling?

You have said much the same thing about being 'bemused' by the results before, Mr Grayling, and since then Scope has found it necessary to warn the government of the rise in disability hate crimes as a result of these press releases, so you can't claim to be surprised by the hatemongering headlines, and yet still your press releases go out. And each one seems to come with its anonymous quotes from 'a source close to the reforms', snidely wondering things like why someone with a mere bad back might need to claim benefit.

And then there is Polly Toynbee, on the list to receive all DWP press releases, yet strangely not receiving this latest one. And when she enquires about it, what is she told? That it was sent only to a small number of “key contacts”. That would be the Tory rags you can rely on for the 'bemusing' headlines, then Mr. Grayling?

So the DWP dug up the most extreme examples it could find, sent them only to the "key contacts" known to take the most outrageous stance possible, briefed them to take an extremely negative attitude towards people with long term spinal conditions, and yet Mr Grayling proclaims himself to be 'bemused'. Do you also proclaim yourself to be clueless, Mr Grayling? Or might your 'bemusement' relate to people actually having the audacity to try and hold you responsible for the hatred you are sowing?

Pilate, it seems, has washed his hands of responsibility for whatever the mob may do.

That Proverbial 'Bad Back'

Goldfish has already had one pop at this BBC article, but I want to pick it up on a specific point and look at it on a little more personal a basis than I would normally use for WTB.

"during that time there was a widespread belief that back pain could be long-term and could seriously incapacitate people.

Now, people are aware that if they strain a muscle they can be better in a few weeks, Professor Coggon said."

Alleluia! Praise the Lord! I'm cured!

Or maybe not. Maybe there's more to it than the 'good' Professor Coggon is letting on.

We've been seeing a lot of this in the past few months, disabling conditions deliberately undermined to outrage the Tabloidigentsia. Cystic Fibrosis - cough. Epidermylosis Bullosa - blisters. Prader-Willi Syndrome - obese. It's bad enough when they target the rarer conditions without the weight of numbers to enable the people with them to fight back, but a constant in the background statistics when people with these conditions are derided are the far larger figures for 'depression' and 'bad back', with the unspoken intimation that these are just as false. I don't really have the background to discuss clinical depression beyond being sadly aware of how badly skewed are the opinions of the vast majority in our society towards it, but 'a bad back' I have known intimately for twenty-odd years.

The first thing to notice is the labelling, always 'bad back', never 'spinal injury', because that deliberately taps into the undercurrent of belief that we are all shirkers and fakers. Most people have had some experience with back pain, some will even proclaim that they 'suffer with their back', but almost always there will be the implied 'but I cope and so should they'. Then along come tame experts like Professor Coggon, proclaiming that back pain can be cured, if you really want to be cured.

Strangely enough the hired guns always seem to be occupational health doctors, the ones whose bread and butter comes from saying what industry or government wants of them, you never seem to see a spinal surgeon or a pain management specialist up there rubbishing the reality of these disabilities.

A soft tissue spinal injury may have a good chance of healing in a few months, but for many people that healing never occurs, because it isn't simply a pulled muscle - thanks for that one, Professor Coggon! Let's really undermine the shirkers with the most trivial injury imaginable - it's a much more complex situation involving injuries to muscle, bone, nerves and discs. There's a wonderful phenomenon called 'neuroplastic remodelling' in which the spinal cord rewires itself to make pain normal, even if the original injury is gone. Then there's Chronic Pain Syndrome, which is a label for pain that continues longer than 3 months without clear physical cause. Or Facet Joint Syndrome, which is pain from damage to the facet joints at the tip of the wings of the vertebrae, Or Degenerative Disc Disease, in which the discs slowly narrow and can burst, while the vertebrae grow arthritic spurs of new bone, all of the changes constricting the space through which the nerves are meant to pass. And so on. A whole medical speciality's worth of long term conditions that won't magically go away in three months because some hired gun who specialises in 'Occupational Health' says that they should. Even 20 years on I don't really have a clear diagnosis for everything that's going on, my local rheumatology department recently told me they don't actually have anyone qualified to assess my complete set of spinal issues. And I'm far from alone in that. The absence of a definitive diagnosis even after decades of seeing specialists is not a cause for suspicion, it is a recognition of the sheer range and complexity of spinal injuries.

"If it was real it would show up on an x-ray, or an MRI" the self-proclaimed expert in the pub or the office will often claim. Unfortunately self-proclaimed is not the same as actual. I had so many x-rays in the years after I initially became disabled that I was starting to worry about glowing in the dark, never mind cumulative dosage, yet they showed nothing and my consultant was visibly stressed at his failure to isolate the cause because he could see my disability was very real. It finally took a full body bone scan with radioactive tracer to get even a hint of what was going on, and if the problem had been solely neurological, for instance through neuroplastic remodelling, then not even that would have been true. My more recent c-spine problems do show up on MRI, but it was four years from onset of C-spine problems to getting that MRI, 21 years on from first presenting with a clear spinal injury. After 22 years of spinal problems that remains the only spinal MRI I have had, and the analysis makes no reference whatsoever to my still very disabling lumbar spine problems (though it does point out incipient problems in four other major joints). Scans and X-rays are not magical, they do not automatically locate every possible form of spinal injury, sometimes spinal problems are only apparent during dynamic movement or at certain positions, not the neutral postures used for scans and x-rays, and often we have to fight for anything more than the most basic x-ray, and sometimes even that.

Even if we can get people to accept that our disabilities are real, we then face the difficulty of getting them to admit that they are actually disabling. Auntie Agatha may 'suffer terribly' with their back and run three marathons before breakfast, and everyone with an opinion is delighted to explain how they had a bad back once but worked through it, but the reality of long term spinal injuries is in an entirely different dimension to anything most people will ever have encountered. The problem we face is that pain is invisible and that long term pain doesn't go away, it's there one damned day after another. If you're dealing with it every day then whinging about being ill and in pain isn't an option, life goes on and I look the same whether I'm pain free or whether it feels like someone has rammed a dagger into my spine and is laying into it with a sledgehammer. We are often talking about degrees of pain that most people never imagine, never mind encounter, about feeling like bones are sheering apart, or like you have a second degree burn across substantial (and sensitive!) parts of your anatomy. Yes, there are painkillers we can take, all with their own side-effects, but they aren't a solution, when I talk about hammering daggers and extensive burns, those are the sensations with the opiates, not without!

'Surely there's an operation for that?' people ask. Not necessarily, is the unfortunate answer. There's that inconvenient absence of clear diagnoses, for one thing, it is difficult to know what to cut if you don't know what's causing the problem. Then there is the unfortunate reality that cutting may make it worse -- 'Failed Back-Surgery Syndrome' is a very real diagnostic label -- or cause problems at a different level of the spine - a common treatment is to fuse two or more vertebrae into a solid lump, but that simply causes extra stress to the joints on either side of the fusion. Then there are neuroplastic remodelling and Chronic Pain Syndrome, which are by definition independent of any musculo-skeletal clause. Similar problems occur with physiotherapy, which tends to be focussed on those simple pulled muscles and thrashes about in the dark when faced with any more complex problem. Over the years I've had back classes, traction, bracing, manipulation, hydrotherapy, you name it, they've tried it with me, but with no evidence of any joined-up thinking to link one set of treatment to another and try and work out a systematic approach. Eventually those of us who are lucky end up being referred to Chronic Pain Management teams. That is an explicit acknowledgement that the pain isn't going away, that the disability is here to stay and that no more active intervention is envisaged. Forget cure, hello coping.

So the next time Cameron, or Clegg, or Grayling are ranting about how ridiculous it is that people have dared to be disabled for more than 3 minutes without being cured, and there's that big set of statistics on the screen behind him, with 'depression' and 'bad back' highlighted for all to see, remember that the reality you need to consider isn't the one they're painting, it's mine.

A Truth No Longer Fit for the BBC

Mark Easton, the BBC's Home Editor, posted a piece on his blog taking apart last week's DWP attack on us. It's a good, solid article with some actual journalism behind it, considerably better than most coverage out of the BBC in the past fortnight, and points out that the truth is something very considerably different to what the DWP's ministers are trying to have us believe.

But then we get to the comment column, which seems to have been lifted from the Daily Heil and is rife with disablist attacks on disabled benefit claimants. Now remember that the BBC is required to take action against disablism as part of its Public Sector Equality Duty, so surely there's something wrong here? Surely every disablist message is in flagrant breach of the house rules? There are also people like me fighting back, but when I posted a piece to show that Mark's article didn't go far enough, that the deliberate distortion of the truth was far greater than even he had assumed, it vanished into the mists of moderation, not just referred to their normal moderators, but booted up the stack to some sort of uber-moderation. And today they've decided it's 'defamatory' and wiped it entirely.

I talked about 'deliberate distortion of the truth' in the preceding paragraph, but the English language has a shorter term for it, we call it lying, and that's the term I used to sum up what Chris Grayling, the DWP, and Labour before them were doing. And that seems to be where the BBC has a problem. It's easy to demonstrate that the DWP press releases deliberately distort the truth and that they reflect Chris Grayling's deliberate attempts to mislead the public, because he's made exactly the same assaults on us verbally, and that means that my statements are no less than the truth and in the public interest, which therefore cannot be defamation. It is in fact exactly the same conclusion reached by Mark Easton's article. But Auntie Beeb is apparently scared to allow the logical conclusion of its own article to be stated aloud, just as it is scared to enforce its own obligation, both moral and legal, to take a stand against disablism.

So here's that truth that is no longer fit for the BBC, unedited and in my own words:

There's the start of a good article here. I say 'the start' because the reality is even more outrageous than Mark paints it and certainly bears little relation to the twisted 'facts' of the DWP's propaganda -- this is the second four day weekend in a row where they've launched an assault on disabled people, you might almost think they were scared of informed debate...

The truth is that I probably became one of those statistics for withdrawn claims last year. I'm disabled with several different spinal injuries and chronic pain syndrome (and maybe some other stuff -- disability is complicated). When I was finally made redundant, after 4 years of fighting to keep my job and taking my ex-employer to an Employment Tribunal for disability discrimination, I tried claiming JSA, but JCP can't cope with you if you're disabled, can't cope with you if you're highly qualified and god help you if you're both. So in the end, after complaints to ministerial level and abject apologies, JCP asked me to move to ESA.

So I put in my application and laboured through the massive ESA50 form, taking about 9 hours to complete it, and that for someone with considerable writing skills and the ability to explain themselves concisely and clearly. Then came the ATOS WCA assessment. ATOS had been warned in advance that I needed an adjustable chair to have any hope of getting through the assessment, inability to sit for any time, or stand, or sometimes even lie down without severe pain being at the core of my disability, my inability to work and therefore my entire claim. No chair. So we abandoned the assessment at the cost of a wasted trip and considerable pain. But the pain continued to increase even after I got home and I spent the next week not knowing even what day it was, the months after wandering around in a daze from the doubled level of painkillers. In the meantime ATOS called me in for another assessment, but it was months before I was well enough to catch up with my mail and only on receiving a letter four months later telling me my claim had been cancelled was I able to chase through the system and find that ATOS had told DWP I had failed to attend the WCA, carefully omitting to mention their failure to provide the required reasonable adjustment.

Common sense prevailed, with the definite sense from DWP of 'God, not another ATOS cock-up!', and my claim was reinstated. My second WCA was barely better than the first -- the details can be read on Where's the Benefit -- but the ultimate result was that I was placed in the ESA WRAG as clearly not currently fit for work.

And yet for several months, possibly even to this day depending on how the reinstated claim was handled, I would have been one of those statistics for withdrawn claims, supposed evidence of fraudulent intent. It was only my bullheadedness and refusal to give up that got me through, ATOS threw every obstable in my path, and for many disabled people, physically disabled as well as mental, the sheer stress of a claim, the utter contempt for disabled people visible in inaccessible forms, inaccessible centres and the contemptuous manner of the medical professionals will result in claims being withdrawn by people with every right to be placed in the WRAG or even the Support Group.

On top of the claims withdrawn due to the stress placed on claimants, we then need to add those JSA claimants parked onto ESA for a week or two because they are temporarily unable to look for work due to illness, even if they're expected to recover long before the assessment, and certainly not to pass the assessment if their illness lasts that long. Or people in employment who have exhausted SSP but will soon recover. Or people with genuine claims who unexpectedly improve. Or people made redundant for narrowly specific medical reasons, say being medically unfit to hold a PSV license, who are required to file for ESA rather than JSA, even with a disability so narrow that they are guaranteed to fail the WCA, even though there's a good chance of them finding another job before the assessment and withdrawing their claim.

The numbers of withdrawn claims aren't evidence of people attempting to defraud the system, that's Chris Grayling and the DWP (and Labour before them) deliberately lying in order to mislead you. The numbers of withdrawn claims are in fact evidence of the system working precisely as designed. The evidence for this is readily accessible, on disability sides, charity sites, advocacy sites, but the Tory Rags, and now it seems the BBC as well, can't be bothered to do basic research and just run with Grayling's hate-filled spite.

Mark is an honourable exception (though needs to dig a little deeper), but when did journalists lose the ability to do basic research and turn into government propaganda mouthpieces?

#BADD2011 Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality

Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day, when bloggers around the world get together to blog against the disablism that makes life so unnecessarily difficult for disabled people. Sadly, this year those of us in the UK are operating in a target-rich environment, able to turn our focus on not just individuals and the odd organisation, but media en masse, the Civil Service, politicians, and, most notably, our Prime Minister, David Cameron.

That Cameron’s government is hostile to disabled people is no great revelation, we have been subject to a string of bigoted press releases from the Department of Work and Pensions under his henchman, Chris Grayling, ever since they got into power. The structure of the press releases: data without context, damning headlines that are all too easily shown to be false; even their timing, the last two immediately before four-day weekends to prevent any organised response or reasoned debate, all too readily betray the deliberate intent to smear disabled benefit claimants, and all disabled people alongside them, as feckless scroungers, swinging the lead to avoid working a single real day in their lives. That the Tory Rags should run so eagerly with the ‘story’ isn’t surprising, after all their core readership of Little-Englanders aren’t happy without a minority to hate, but lately even the BBC seems to be falling for the government line. There are scores of analyses out there of the data and the twisted way that the press releases are put together, several of us here on WTB have taken them apart, so have other disabled campaigners, charities, advocacy groups and so on. A journalist wouldn’t even have to exert themselves, the story of the government distorting facts to demonise a minority will put itself together all too readily, but no, Auntie Beeb is reduced to recycling disablist government propaganda, hateful, twisted headlines and all. When did the BBC forget how to do basic research?

Now to a (minute!) degree we can excuse this kind of behaviour from Cameron and Grayling, they’re modern politicians, what the Romans might have considered infames, persons of low moral character, just like pimps and those who ran stables of gladiators, who can’t be expected to aspire to the same standards of behaviour as decent, respectable folk. But Cameron and Grayling aren’t putting out the press releases from the DWP on their own, they are helped in their bigotry by full-time Civil Servants who put together the data, the misleading interpretations, and the twisted headlines for them; who carefully see to it that the Press Releases don’t include the context necessary to understand what the figures really mean and the failures in government policy that they reveal. Civil Servants aren’t supposed to lower themselves to the standards of their ministers, the Civil Service code binds them to a standard of behaviour and restricts their ability to engage in party political behaviour on behalf of their minister, or others, or themselves. That code is summed up in four words: Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality.

The truth is that the disablist press releases began before the Con-Dem government came into power, and that DWP policy has actually remained consistent across two different governments; pushing ESA as the solution to all ills and painting those on IB as deliberate fraudsters outwitting the system with fake disabilities. The reality of ESA’s failure, its harsh descriptors that deliberately and calculatedly fail to account for the reality of many disabilities - to the point that even some the ‘health care practitioners’ who have sold their professional integrity for 30 pieces of silver have complained it is almost impossible for them to score people with cancer or MS as anything other than fit to work, the parody of fairness that is the ATOS-operated WCA, the ludicrous surreality of the access-all-areas ‘imaginary wheelchair’, all are carefully whitewashed out of the picture presented in DWP press-releases. So we have to conclude that there is a cadre of DWP personnel who aren’t just working on these press-releases because they have been told to, but who have actively bought into the ESA and WCA ‘reforms’ and are working to drive them on, no matter who they have to mislead and no matter how many facts they have to twist to do that. And yet these are Civil Servants, subject to the Civil Service Code. Do their actions display Integrity? Well, no, because they’re displaying deliberate deceit. Honesty? No, deliberate falsehoods don’t really count as honest. Objectivity? No, the truth about ESA is there to be seen, but they are busy sweeping that under their subjective carpet, eyes blinded by their own particular interpretation of what is best for the country (and disabled benefit claimants be damned). Impartiality? Well, they are following the same path under two different governments, but that path isn’t one a reasonable person would consider impartial, in fact they might consider it to be very partial indeed. So there we have it, not for DWP civil servants Integrity, Honesty, Objectivity, Impartiality, but Deceit, Falsehood, Subjectivity and Partiality.

No, it’s not good enough and someone needs to sweep out this nest of vipers from the core of disability policy. But, and it’s an awfully big, elephant in the corner kind of but, the Prime Minister, Chris Grayling, the DWP and the media couldn’t get away with this kind of behaviour if they knew that they were operating in a society hostile to disablism. Yet there they go, stabbing us in the back at every chance, actively convincing people that we are legitimate targets for their bigotry. What does that say about our society? What does it say about what is wrong with our society?

Abandoned Claims

Originally posted at This Is My Blog in response to a Daily Mail article. Unfortunately, today, the Telegraph and the BBC got in on the act...

Woke up this morning to see that a certain right-wing rag has surpassed itself in the propaganda it chooses to spout about ESA.

I'm not going to link to it because it will only upset me and every reader.

The headline asserted that 75% of those who claim ESA are found "fit to work".

This was then broken down that 75% of those who claim ESA were either found "fit to work" or abandoned their claims before testing was complete. It proposed that the abandonment of a claim meant that the claimant was clearly "trying it on".

Legitimate reasons why an ESA claim may be started and then abandoned:

• The claimant dies.


• The claimant gets better, be it a miracle or a new treatment or being bumped up the waiting list for surgery or getting private treatment.


• The claimant, having lost their job, is offered support and a place to stay by their parents or their children. They decide to abandon their claim and re-start it once their move is complete.


• The claimant looks at the highly personal questions on the form and says "you know what, I'll never be this desperate for money, prostitution is less demeaning."


• The claimant wins an insurance or compensation payout that enables them to survive without benefits.


• Due to their condition, the claimant is unable to understand the importance of filling in the form or unable to remember that the form needs doing.


• Due to their condition, the claimant is unable to fill out the forms - perhaps they have a brain injury or learning disability and cannot read and/or write, perhaps they have issues with their hands and cannot physically hold a pen, perhaps they have a mental health condition that causes panic attacks every time they approach the form.


• Due to their condition, the claimant is unable to access support to fill in the forms - for instance they are unable to go out, they do not yet have formal Social Services support, and their CAB is overstretched with permanently engaged phone lines (I have personal experience of urgently needing to get to the CAB but having to wait until support is available).


• The claimant completed the form, but due to their condition, they are unable to travel to and from the medical examination centre alone, and they are unable to secure help and/or funding to allow them to attend. Because their level of impairment does not exist until ATOS say it does, this is not a valid excuse for non-attendance. (I had this issue with my DLA a few years ago).


• The claimant is sitting at home with the heating off, desperately waiting to hear back from the DWP about their claim, which the DWP has lost.

If it was any other publication (I hesitate to use the term "newspaper") I would be shocked and appalled by the deliberate lies and misinformation being used to attack disabled people. Unfortunately, I'm getting used to it, and so is everyone else, and all these little drops of poison are being allowed to drip on into the public consciousness unchallenged.

A useful comment was also added to the original post, by a commenter called Nemonie:

There is also the fact that if you are on JSA and become ill or need surgery, break your leg etc. So that you are considered not able to look for work they will tell you to open a claim for ESA until you are better, which may only be a few weeks. You can also apply for ESA if you work and get ill but don't get statutory sick pay or have run out of statutory sick pay. Again in this case you may only need to claim for a short time.

Deserving

A lot of hoo-ha in the UK press at the moment about disability benefits. The essence of the story is that the government reckon 80,000 claimants who have what they consider "immoral" illnesses like drug/alcohol dependency or obesity are a justification for their plans to chuck about 570,000 genuine claimants off the disability benefits on which they depend.

According to the BBC article, the Prime Minister's position is thus:

The prime minister denied the government was stigmatising people who were genuinely ill but said the public believed recipients should be "people who are incapacitated through no fault of their own".

No fault of their own, what a strange concept. Does the man intend to start assessing not only the practical limitations of a person's condition, but also the degree of fault involved?

He continues:

"But there are some who are on these benefits who do not deserve them and frankly we are not doing our job looking after taxpayers' money if we do not try and make sure these people go to work."

Benefits are not given based on being deserving. They are given based on need. Going to work or not isn't based on being deserving. It's based on ability. An idiot who drove while high/drunk/ill/tired and smashed up his car and his head so badly that neither will ever function again is probably not considered very "deserving", but his needs will be pretty high and he's unlikely to work again. A young fireman who lost a leg while saving a helpless baby from a burning building is about as deserving as they come, but his needs, while substantial, will be easier to adapt for, and with a relatively small amount of equipment and support the chances are he will be able to do some work.

I wonder... if someone were declared Fit For Work despite a serious health condition, and in the course of making the effort to keep up with the Mandatory Work Related Activity requirement of JSA, their condition permanently worsened to the point where even the DWP and ATOS accept that they are too ill to work - would it be their fault for not saying "I can't do this," and risking having their JSA stopped?

Even taking the sort of example that I think the government mean, it's worrying. Let's imagine, for a moment, that we have a claimant, an alcoholic, and that his alcohol dependency didn't evolve as self-medication for a pre-existing but untreated mental health condition. Let's accept the government assumption that he really did skip gleefully out of the careers office at school saying "I've got a better idea, I'll get pished and the taxpayer will take care of me, bwahahahahaha!" Fixed this in your head? Good.

Now we're twenty years down the line, he has no friends and family left apart from other alcoholics, no work history, very few self-care skills, and all the physical and mental effects of long term alcohol abuse, which if you're not too squeamish you can look up for yourself. There are very few jobs that such a person could do, and even fewer employers who would take such a person on. Then what happens?

Cameron's despicable lie is that his ideal outcome involves people with dependency issues being treated and then helped to find jobs. That will never happen. It is far too expensive, and without wishing to sound defeatist, in many cases it's an impossible outcome.

We could put him into a treatment programme - one that isn't dependent on turning up sober (unlikely), and that won't send him back to his bedsit and alcoholic pals to undo all the work that has been done (so we're looking at an open-ended residential placement - unlikely, and extremely expensive). Then once he's sober, he'll be allowed to access NHS treatment for the underlying mental health conditions that will have developed (unlikely and expensive) and the physical damage as well (amazingly expensive). We'll have to hope that during those years - yes, years - the DWP don't choose him as an easy target and put him under so much pressure that he cracks and starts drinking again. Eventually, after many years of intensive treatment, a lot of money, even more hard work, and a dollop of luck on the side, he might be able to re-enter some sort of employment for a few years until he (a) retires, (b) dies of the irreversible physical damage, or (c) falls off the wagon again.

Cynically speaking, and please don't think I'm advocating this, it is in fact cheaper to allow him to quietly drink himself into an early grave without intervention.

Cameron might talk up "treatment" and "employment" but until we see actions to that effect - boosting rather than cutting the support projects* - what he really means by "getting people off disability benefits," is saving money by consigning them to the lower unemployment benefits.

The benefits system is supposed to be the last safety net. It does not provide a luxury lifestyle, it doesn't try to improve matters, it merely attempts to go towards providing what has been defined as the minimum amount of support necessary for that person to live in conditions that can be considered acceptable for a human being. Reducing that support does not propel people into sustainable jobs, it just makes their lives more difficult and in many cases perpetuates their problems, or in a few very sad cases, hastens their deaths.

*Yes, the article speaks of a £580m investment. However, this is from "private and voluntary organisations", eg not the government, and frankly it's a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of effective long-term treatment and support for that many addicts.

Cross-posted to This Is My Blog.

Grill Chris Grayling about Benefits!

Well, two days after posting about a chat with one government minister, I get an email promoting another event, this time, Rethink are hosting a webchat with Chris Grayling, Minister of State for Work and Pensions coming in to Rethink’s offices for a Q&A about the Government’s proposed changes to the benefits system.

Rethink’s activists brought about the webchat by campaigning really hard towards the end of last year, so it’s great that they’ve given others who will be affected by these changes, a chance to hold the minister to account. People (like you!) have been sending in their questions for the event, and now we’d like to make sure that as many people hear about the webchat as possible

Here are the details:
Date: Thursday 10th February (tomorrow! (will be today approximately two minutes after I publish this post!)
Time: 11.30am
Location: http://www.rethink.org/talk