Conversations with my cab driver

I'm going to write a big old post about the Hardest Hit march and rally filled with photos in a little while. I got a taxi home from the event and I wanted to share the conversation I had with my cab driver:

1. Before I forget the details.
2. Because I think it deserves its own post separate from the main write-up about the events of the day.

I know some people who take a lot of taxis and always strike up a conversation with the driver. I rarely take taxis because I can't afford them. And even when I do I don't tend to talk to the driver because I'm awful at striking up conversations with strangers.

But today I overheard the driver talking on the phone in which he said "I didn't see any demonstration. I don't know what they were demonstrating about..."

So once he got off the phone I explained that the demonstration had been a bit earlier but it was over now and the roads had all reopened. And that it was a protest against the cuts to disability benefits.

"But if you get, say, £100 a week, they're not gonna cut that down to £70 though, are they?"

I explained that actually the planned cuts were much more brutal than that. He still didn't seem to quite accept when I explained just how cruelly disabled people were being treated. He just couldn't comprehend that our government could really do that to disabled people.

"Now, you see, the trouble is is all these fakers."

I tried to tell him that the official fraud rate for IB is around 1% (see page 8 of this DWP report), but on this he just wouldn't believe me. He insisted that there are fraudulent IB claimants everywhere.

I tried to explain that most people have a story of the time they met a faker. The government acknowledges that one in every 100 IB claimants is a fraud. But those other 99 are people he's less likely to meet. The other 99 will include people who are housebound or can't afford to go out and take taxis. The 1% who are fakers might be more visible than the 99% of genuine claimants, but that doesn't mean that they account for any more than 1%. He refused to accept this.

"But why do you believe that it's only 1%?"

The conversation got quite difficult for me here because he made it out to be a matter of religious-type belief. I tried to explain that the 1% figure are the government's official statistics but he wouldn't concede they were "right", he was only willing to accept that I believed them, but he chose to believe the tabloid-ised stats.

"I mean people in wheelchairs and that are obviously genuine, but I think a lot are fakers."

This turned out to be a simple claim to refute when he revealed that he had spondylosis and he found even walking short distances to be painful. He was perfectly willing to accept that some people have conditions that you can't see because he has one himself. I think his statement purely came from repeating sentiments he'd read in the tabloids but had never really thought much about.

But this did lead on to:

"Well I work and pay taxes so I don't see why I should be paying for benefits for people who could work."

We were stopped at some traffic lights about 100 metres from the end of my journey so sadly I didn't have time to address the "well I'm disabled and I work so why can't other people?" subtextual element to the question.

But what I did have time to explain was DLA. I explained that DLA was a benefit that disabled people could get for help with getting around and help with care. And that the benefit wasn't affected by your employment status because if you find a job your need to buy a wheelchair or your need for help getting out of bed in the morning doesn't go away.

I had to explain that the government and the media, in their attempts to whip up hatred towards disabled people, keep claiming that DLA is an "out of work" benefit. So despite what you might read in the papers there are some people who have a job and get benefits, but aren't getting those benefits fraudulently. He seemed to think that, actually, DLA was a really good idea.

Alas my journey ended here. It was quite a shocking conversation for me because it really drove home just much people believe the lies printed in the papers. He seemed like a genuinely nice bloke; I mean he pulled his cab over to pick up a wheelchair user which most cabbies won't so that's a fair indicator of his decentness. But for so long he's been fed these stories that there's a huge problem with people claiming benefits fraudulently that he now believes it and won't accept when just one person points out the facts to him because it's a lone voice in the face of all this propaganda. And so many times he's heard that "the most vulnerable will be protected" that he can't quite grasp that that's not true either.

The fare came to £11.40. He would only let me pay £7.

Incapacity Benefit: Watch out if you go back to work!

The latest broken promise by this government relates to Incapacity Benefit. In the past, if you have been on Incapacity Benefit, you were able to return to work – and if your health failed again, you could go back on benefit at the same rate under the “104 week linking rule”.

This is about to change; from the end of this month, people who are still on Incapacity Benefit will be unable to return to it (if they try going back to work, but find they are still too ill to manage, or become sick again thereafter). Instead they will have to make a fresh claim, for Employment Support Allowance (ESA). Worse still, the first 13 weeks of ESA would be paid at a lower rate than you could expect under the linking rule for Incapacity Benefit. And of course, it will mean going through one of those frightening ESA medicals – frightening because of the number of people who are passed fit for work when they are not capable of doing a job.

More information is available on the Benefits and Work website.

This may have the opposite of the desired effect: instead of going back to try working as soon as they think they may be able to manage, people on Incapacity Benefit may well opt to stay at home until they are certain that they can manage the duties of their job again. It's another example of the short-sighted unfairness typical of this government.

IDS blames benefit claimants for the defecit

A couple of months ago I was interviewed for a piece in Disability Now about The Sun's hateful campaign against benefit claimants.

I said:

“A lot of people, including Sun readers, lost a lot in the recession. The Government is using benefit claimants as a scapegoat for the country’s financial problems. The Sun sees [the campaign] as a way of boosting the egos of their readers, thus boosting their readership, by attacking the people perceived as responsible for all the losses the readers felt.”

Today The Sun and the government have gone one step further than subtly hinting that benefits claimants are to blame for the recession as The Sun has Iain Duncan Smith quoted as saying:

Paying a fortune to the five million on handouts - like X Factor reject Wagner Carrilho - is a major reason the UK's deficit soared to a crippling £155billion, Tory minister Iain Duncan Smith told The Sun.

From: www.thesun.co.uk

That's right: It's not because the bankers messed up and we bailed them out, it's not because Osborne lets his chums out of their multi-billion pound tax bills, it's because people like me have the audacity to eat.

Yes there is some element of fraud and there always will be. However the academic Jane Tinkler from LSE points out that the fraud rate for benefits is less than 1%. According to CityWire tax evasion costs the Treasury 15 times more than benefit fraud. Yet the government and the tabloids continue to portray us as the villains.

The Sun also post some manipulated facts about the process of applying for Incapacity Benefit.

They say:

Mr Duncan Smith only discovered the worrying new statistic that 47 per cent of people on incapacity benefit had been signing themselves on in the last few days.

In the most recently available figures, from the financial year 2007-08, they told him that nearly half of claimants were passed by simply filling in a form and sending it off.

Yes, filling in a form and sending it off is part of the process, but it's not the only part. I claimed Incapacity Benefit in the 2007-2008 year so I know something about the process in the time period specified. At first I had to submit sick notes from my GP. My GP would sign me off for 3 months at a time so every 3 months I had to go back. This was until the DWP sent me the aforementioned form, the IB50. The IB50 doesn't just ask you "are you sick? Yes/no." It's a very long, detailed form. It took me days to fill it in. It asks about your mobility, your sanity, your continence, your communication, your ability to dress and undress yourself, and pretty much anything else you can think of. But you don't just get the form, you also have to go for a medical where a doctor stares at your deformed bits to ascertain that you were telling the truth on the form.

Today's Sun article also says:

Britain was branded the sick man of the world last week after a report found we have more young people on incapacity benefit than any other industrialised country.

Which reminds me of the Daily Mail article in August that indirectly gave me the idea for Where's the Benefit?

I claimed (the now defunct) Severe Disablement Allowance (replaced by Incapacity Benefit) from the age of 16 until I got my first job when I was 22. You see, having impaired mobility I couldn't do bar work, stacking shelves in a supermarket, or any of the other fairly physical jobs people without a university degree tend to get. Which essentially meant I was unable to work until I was part-way through my degree thus educated enough for people to employ me to do a "thinking" job, the only kind I'm physically capable of.

Eugenics have progressed a lot since I was born and now a lot of disabled children don't make it as far as birth. Despite a lot of disabled babies being aborted there's not really a reduction in the number of disabled children around because medical advances mean that premature babies that wouldn't have survived in the past now do, but they're often left with cerebral palsy and other impairments. More children survive accidents and illnesses like cancer nowadays, but are left too ill or impaired to work so claim Incapacity Benefit when they turn 16. Despite his family money, had Ivan Cameron lived to see 16 he'd have been eligible to claim IB from his 16th birthday.

The fact that we have more young people claiming incapacity benefit than any other industrialised country is almost certainly linked to the excellence of our health service and we should be proud that children who'd have died from an accident, illness or premature birth in another country are still alive to claim incapacity benefit 16.

I came across today's Sun article through the fabulous (and award winning!) Disability Hate Crime Network because of their concerns that such hateful propaganda could fuel a rise in disablist hate crime. With our government and one of our biggest newspapers stating that incapacity benefit claimants effectively caused the deficit which the government are blaming all the cuts on, is it any wonder visibly disabled people are getting called "scrounger" and told to get a job by bus drivers?

Cuts to DLA 'The easiest bit of welfare reform to sell'

Benefit Scrounging Scum

The coalition’s assault on what the Conservatives refer to as “broken Britain” is underway. The government has announced for the first time how many of the UK’s 2.6m recipients of disability benefits it estimates will be reclassified as fit-to-work in this parliament. The answer: a cool 500,000 or 23 per cent of the total.

Although this will generate political heat among those affected, it is the easiest bit of welfare reform to sell. Britain’s out-of-work disability benefits have been abused. The last government belatedly recognised this and started to introduce a more rigorous system. But many of the 2.2m people who still claim the old benefit elected to do so because it is more generous than the dole."

Financial Times, September 16th 2010

This article in yesterday's Financial Times* makes very clear the ethos behind the Coalition government's slash and burn attacks on sickness related benefits, that cuts to disability benefits are perceived as the "easiest bit of welfare reform to sell" . The FT don't distinguish between the different types of sickness related benefits so I assume the figure of 2.2million people claiming what they describe as 'the old benefit' refers to Incapacity Benefit, the predecessor to Employment and Support Allowance brought in by New Labour. It seems equally safe to assume that the 2.6million they refer it is actually the 2.9 million Disability Living Allowance recipients, some 1.25 million of which are adults who claim both DLA and IB.

The official Department of Work and Pensions fraud rate for Disability Living Allowance makes it very clear that only 0.5% of the total number of claims are fraudulent. That's approximately 14,500 fraudulent claims out of an overall 2.9million.  So, less than 15,000 Disability Living Allowance awards are fraudulent and the coalition are determined to reduce the numbers claiming DLA by half a million. Playing fast and loose with the DWP's own statistics and assuming they're wildly underestimating the problem of fraudulent claims, which seems particularly unlikely, if an overall fraud rate of, say 5%, 10 times that of the official rate were assumed, that would still only be one hundred and forty five thousand fraudulent claims out of a total 2.9 million. Still some three hundred and fity five thousand short of the half a million proposed reduction.

The agenda is clear. To vastly restrict eligibility to DLA, already the most rigorously assessed and difficult to claim benefit of all.

So much for David Cameron's claim that "Those that can should, and those who can't we will always help. I want to make sure that my government always looks after the elderly, the frail, the poorest in our country." David Cameron, 11th May 2010

*10 articles available to view per month if free registration completed.

‘It frightens me if, when I need support most, it’s whipped away’

Rosemary Bolinger, 53, had to take medical retirement from the NHS after having cerebral palsy diagnosed 14 years ago. A former nurse and hospital manager, she has some savings, a small occupational pension, and is entitled to incapacity benefit.
Her husband is a senior charge nurse — on about £30,000 a year — and they have a mortgage. She would probably lose all her incapacity benefit if it were means-tested. “It frightens me,” she said. “I would find it very distressing if having worked and pushed my body for years I found out that just when I needed the support most it was whipped away.”
She also has a wrist problem, making it difficult to do even desk work. “I don’t think I’ll have be able to work again,” she said. “I would love to be able to work a few hours a week, but I would never know when my body would be able to cope.
“I don’t know what I would do if I lost my IB. I am sure I would become totally isolated. We have a mortgage of £80,000 and I would not be eligible for any social services assistance or equipment, so I would have to pay for a cleaner and home help,” she said.
“I want to be as independent as I can but my health is dictating that I have to rely on benefits. You pay national insurance for years never expecting that you will have to claim benefit. But when you need it you expect it to be there.”

by Jill Sherman, The Times, Fri 10th Sept 2010

800,000 claimants face losing their incapacity benefit – The Times, Friday 10 September 2010

800,000 claimants face losing their incapacity benefit – The Times, Friday 10 September 2010*

George Osborne: said to be demanding up to £10 billion more from the £170 billion social security budget

Jill Sherman Whitehall Editor

Hundreds of thousands of people are likely to lose sickness benefits under a new assault on the welfare state, The Times has learnt.

The Treasury is considering means-testing incapacity benefit — given to those considered too sick to work — a change under which 800,000 people on modest to high incomes would lose it altogether. The entitlement, which is available to those who have paid national insurance contributions, costs the taxpayer more than £6.5 billion a year and goes to more than 2.5 million people.

Millions of disabled and sick people have been on the benefit — which is between £68 and £96 a week — for years and are able to stay on it until they retire, irrespective of their income or that of their partner.

Disability and poverty groups warned yesterday that means-testing would fly in the face of the principle of paying national insurance to fund benefits. They argued that the disabled and mentally ill were becoming the main victims of the Treasury’s spending cuts.

“It would be grossly unfair if someone who had worked for over 30 years and had paid [national insurance] throughout suddenly found the benefit taken away at the moment they needed it,” said Sue Royston, social policy officer for Citizens Advice.

Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, has agreed to £11 billion savings a year. But George Osborne, the Chancellor, is said to be demanding up to £10 billion more from the £170 billion social security budget. Mr Osborne indicated yesterday that he had already identified £4 billion affecting those on “out-of-work benefits”.

“People who think it’s a lifestyle choice to just sit on out-of-work benefits — that lifestyle choice is going to come to an end. The money won’t be there,” he said.

One Whitehall official told The Times that means-testing incapacity benefit, which could save up to £2 billion a year, was being considered. “We are seeking more on incapacity benefit,” he conceded. “If more cuts are made to the welfare budget we should be able to reduce the bigger cutbacks to other Whitehall departments.”

Other benefits under threat include those going to pensioners, such as winter fuel payments and TV allowances, which could save £2.7 billion if scrapped.

Under the latest plans being considered, those on incapacity benefit — or employment and support allowance, which is replacing it — would receive it for a time-limited period of six months to a year. After this, those on higher incomes — generally those with working partners — would lose the benefit, and those on lower incomes would lose part of it. Those on the lowest incomes would still receive income support.

Mrs Royston argued that people would lose all entitlement to incapacity benefit if their partner had an income of about £8,000 a year or had savings of more than £16,000, if the present rules for other means-tested benefits were applied.

“This is causing enormous concern,” she said. “If someone who has worked for years became seriously ill and his partner earned over £150 a week, he would get nothing, despite his contributions.”

Treasury officials believe that many people remain on sickness benefits until they retire even if they could do some type of work.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics, published this week, show that in more than 840,000 households all members of the household over 16 are too sick to work. In a further 612,000 households, at least one member is too sick to work.

The Government is already clamping down on payments to the disabled and has pledged to introduce more rigorous medical tests for all incapacity benefit claimants by next March, but the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is already having trouble finding enough doctors to carry out the checks.

The severely disabled, who receive disability living allowance to help to pay for carers, are also facing medical tests for the first time.

Sources at the DWP yesterday made it clear that negotiations were still going on but did not rule out reducing or scrapping benefits for those on higher incomes. “We are presently looking at a range of options for welfare reform and any decisions will be made in the context of the spending review,” a spokesman said. “Our reforms will ensure that the most vulnerable in our society are protected.”

Richard Hawkes, the chief executive of Scope, the disability charity, condemned the plans to means-test incapacity benefit, claiming that people would be denied the support they had paid for.

“People will effectively be penalised for working hard, saving and contributing to society,” Mr Hawkes said. “The Government has made much of its commitment to ensuring that the impact of cost savings is spread fairly, but this feels like another example of disabled people bearing the brunt of cuts.”

*No link provided as The Times is now behind a paywall.

The Report

Radio 4's The Report this Thursday Aug 12th was about ATOS, IB, ESA and the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).

Something that caught my attention was this at the 9min 40sec mark:

If we roll back 30-odd years the number of people on incapacity-related benefits was quite small, less than three quarters of a million.

And then started banging on about how it was the recessions that drove people onto IB. The presenter never gave the name of the person who said this but in his preamble prior to it he hinted that the next person to speak would be something to do with the government. Genius. We're in a country being run by people who aren't intelligent enough to understand that we've seen major medical advances in the last 30 years so we will have a lot more people unable to work. People are surviving cancers they wouldn't have done 30 years ago, but are left too ill to work. We've got people surviving accidents that couldn't be survived 30 years ago but the survivors are left too impaired to work.

There are chunks of the show that are aware of the reality of the current harsh climate, like when they interview a few severely ill people who were deemed fit to work by the WCA. There are also a few quotes from ATOS employees repeated from the BBC Scotland investigation. But for the most part the programme supports the assumption held by our government and our tabloids that most people on IB are there because they're non-disabled/healthy but they've never worked and they don't know how to work. There's also a chunk explaining that ESA is widely appealed and a significant number of the appeals are successful, but it doesn't explore that these appeals are expensive to the taxpayer and it'd be cheaper overall if the need for so many appeals was cut by making the WCA more realistic. Incredibly disappointing from Radio 4.

Link round up

Some of these links range from a few weeks to a few months old. But I think they're important to post here to give a bit of background as to what's been going on in the War on Welfare Claimants thus far, which prompted us to create this blog.

In May this year BBC Scotland took a look at ESA and its failings. I think the most pertinent element of the piece is the hypocrisy in how Vicki Bell was "assessed" by ATOS. (Incurable Hippie posted a similar case on here yesterday.)

One of the readers of Iain Dale's Diary wrote to him and expressed their concerns about DLA reform. The point the reader emphasised was that they're more financially valuable to Osbourne claiming DLA than not. Of course, that's not true for all of us: Some of us, even on DLA, remain unable to work so offer no financial value to Osbourne despite being rich in human value. But it's excellent news that this reader convinced Iain Dale that we do have some value to society because his is a well respected voice in the Tory party. (This year's Pink List described him as "More influential outside politics than in.")

Anne Begg MP talked to Disability Now about the attack on DLA. Quite worryingly she seems to be under the impression that "The one benefit which we have in this country which actually operates on the social model of disability is DLA," which demonstrates a gross misunderstanding of the social model. Yes the DLA assessment currently focusses on what you can and can't do, rather than on diagnosis alone, but that does not make it a social model assessment. It appears that Begg has misunderstood what the medical model actually means, and in turn assumes that the social model must be the opposite. This fab post by Lady Bracknell explains why the term "medical model" can be a bit of a misnomer and might shed some light on how Anne Begg got confused. Misunderstandings of a sociological construct aside, it's good to see that someone in parliament is fighting our corner.

Comment is Free on guardian.co.uk have been great ambassadors for our cause. Articles they've published recently on the subject of disability benefits includes: Disability allowance exists for a reason by Anne Wollenberg, Cutting disability benefits is not 'fair' by Jackie Ashley, Why should I again prove my disability to satisfy George Osborne? By Rhydian Fôn James, and Disabled people are not scroungers by Emmanuel Smith. Especially important is Anne Wollenberg's piece which explains that DLA is not an out-of-work benefit something our government keeps forgetting.

Having been called a scrounger by our press and politicians so many times I felt compelled to write a blog post explaining exactly why I get the benefits I do. It seems particularly relevant today seeing as how this morning I received a letter telling me I'm being summonsed to a Pathways to Work interview next week and if I don't show up my benefits will probably be stopped.

The ever fierce Disability Bitch accepted responsibility for the recession and has agreed to make some cuts to save the government some money.

Spoof news website Newsarse.com published a piece titled "Osborne to put coma patients to work as draft excluders". Sad thing is that given the current climate it wouldn't be too surprising to see that as a genuine headline on a real news site.

Bitch and Newsarse may be humorous sites but for my money, the funniest thing I've read since these attacks began was this piece quoting Yvette Cooper on the Tories' plans to cut DLA. Why is that so hilarious? Because the two-faced woman was a vociferous advocate of ESA, the problems with ESA having been established in my first link.