#BigBenefitsRow

On Monday night, Peter Stringfellow pointed to Mik, MJ and me on live TV and said:

I'm looking at people over there who obviously deserve everything they can get.

Apparently what we didn't deserve was a place at the grown up table to discuss the issues that affect us. Sue has blogged about how she was pulled from the line up with 2 hours notice. meaning there were no benefit-claiming disabled experts to talk about the cuts. People have pointed out that White Dee claims ESA for depression; so there was at least one disabled person on the panel. But firstly, we don't know if she identifiess as "disabled". It's possible she doesn't because so many people view being disabled as such an horrific and revolting thing. Secondly she claims benefits; but she's not an expert on them. People like Sue and me are. We can tell you the fraud rates for disability benefits off the top of our heads. We can gives you names of people who died from their conditions while supposedly "fit for work".

(OK, I know I'd never get invited to be on the panel if there was literally anybody else available. Media types only call me when their first choice is unavailable. I know I'm not cool or popular or particularly liked among the prominent left. And that's OK; I've never been popular and I'm used to it.)

But given that disabled people are more hit by the cuts than any other group of people; they shouldn't have just kept Sue and Dee in the line-up: They should have had additional disabled people up there too. There's a saying among disability rights activists that's been around as long as I can remember; it's possible the statement is older than I am. That saying is "nothing about us without us". And Monday night's debate was almost exclusively about us, but apart from Dee (and Mik managing to get about 3 seconds of soundbite out) it was definitely without us.

But I want to go back to Stringfellow's comments about what we "deserve" and what we "get".

When he said it; I laughed. Loudly. But then I always laugh loudly. My laugh carries for miles; just ask most of this country's comedians. I laughed so loudly that it was my only verbal ejaculation of the evening that was picked up by the microphones. (And I really put effort into heckling in an attempt to be heard; the laugh was just my normal laugh.)

I laughed because the support we get is being cut to the bone. Employment and Support Allowance cuts, Disability Living Allowance cuts, council tax benefit cuts, the bedroom tax, severe disability premium cuts, social care cuts, NHS cuts. Do we deserve that?

What we do currently get - and what we get an increase in every time papers run front pages calling us "scroungers" - is hate.

Disabled people get called "scrounging cunt" in the street for going out while visibly disabled. WtB's Pippa got followed home by someone shouting "fucking DLA stick.". I've been told that I should have been killed at birth to save the taxpayer money.

What we get is told that we're not allowed nice things. When I first got an iPhone I sustained abuse for it. The person abusing me didn't care that it was a Christmas present to replace my broken CrapBerry; disabled people are simply not allowed to own nice things. The media has an obsession with benefit claimants and the size of our TVs. Last autumn I had a TV crew in my living room. Before I was willing to start talking to camera I made them show me the shot so I was sure my telly couldn't be seen. My TV is shit: You can't have the aerial cable and an HDMI cable plugged in at the same time or they cause each other interference. But you can't see the fault from just looking at it (unless you're trying to watch a DVD with the aerial cable plugged in), so if my telly had been shown during my 4thought; the next day the Daily Mail's front page would've said "outrage as benefit claimant owns flat screen TV." Poor people owning stuff really seems to get under people's skin; no matter the circumstances in which they acquired said things.

There have even been cases of people who don't claim a penny in benefits getting abuse for being "scroungers" for merely looking disabled.

Do we deserve that?

Do we deserve to never be able to afford holidays? To only be able to afford Primark clothes? To not be able to upgrade to a TV without a fault? To know that this financial struggle is going to last your whole life because you're an "incurable"?

Katie Hopkins kept claiming that she was there to represent "hard working Britain". What about the 58 year old with cancer who has been working hard and paying National Insurance premiums for 40 years, but has just been refused ESA? That is the whole point of National Insurance. Because disabled people weren't allowed to be part of the debate; no-one pointed out that the system is there precisely to protect hard working Britons.

Hopkins also brought up the number of people being found "fit for work": Because there were no experts on disability benefits on the panel; no-one pointed out that that includes fatally ill people like Larry Newman or Cecilia Burns. I tried heckling "that includes terminally ill people!" But when I watched the show back, I realised that I hadn't been picked up by any of the mics around the room.

She then went on to claim that chancers are pulling out of the ESA process before being assessed by Atos because they're frightened of being caught out. There are all sorts of reasons people stop their claims, including dying. Again I tried heckling "that includes people who've died!" But again went unheard by the audience at home.

Coming from a stand up background, I hate hecklers. I hated having to heckle. But seeing as the producers wouldn't let any disabled people up on the stage to rebut these distorted claims, I was left with no choice but to try shouting.

Before the cameras started rolling, the floor manager told us that if we had something to say; we should say it. She said she didn't want people to leave feeling that they'd not had their voices heard. The lack of disabled people's representation up on that stage meant that voices like mine weren't heard. With the exception of Dee, Jack Monroe and Annabel Giles; the voices we heard from were people who have no idea how miserable life on benefits is, and how cruel people can be to those perceived as "scroungers". Yes, a couple of other people said that they know people on benefits and are aware of their struggles; but trust me: Unless you've lived this, you really don't know just how horrific it feels.

Benefits Street might have made this country obsessed with talking about benefits. It might have made benefits issues a guaranteed ratings winner. But unless you let the people affected by these issues use their own voices in these debates; you've just got people pointlessly arguing for an hour. 'Nothing about us without us' my backside.

Guest post: Disability benefits and the self-made mouth #badd2012

This is a guest post from @indigojo_uk that originally appeared here. It is reproduced here as part of Blogging Against Disablism Day 2012 as it's a write up about a disablist appearing on the radio decrying benefit claimants.

Last Saturday night, there was a debate on the Stephen Nolan show, a late-night phone-in on the BBC station Radio 5 Live, in which the former Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins, who styles herself “the only candidate to say ‘no’ to Sir Alan” [Alan Sugar of Amstrad, who runs the TV series, The Apprentice], defended the government’s cuts to disability and housing benefits and Lisa “Lisybabe” Egan and one of the other callers tried to oppose her. Hopkins is clearly of the opinion that disability benefits are given out to an awful lot of people who aren’t really disabled or don’t deserve them, as shown by this tweet:

If people's disability benefit was handed out from the top rung of a ladder I reckon most would climb the ladder to get it.

— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) April 25, 2012

Her stance was that people need to rely on their own resources rather than the state as we live in “austere” times, a line that she trotted out again when Lisa reminded her that people had paid National Insurance and that the whole idea of an insurance scheme is that it pays out when things go wrong. As for housing benefit, she said she did not see why the state should pay for people to live in the south-east, without apparently realising that the majority of housing benefit recipients are actually in work. She also posted this rant about child benefits on her blog, claiming (without the slightest evidence, of course) that “for so many of our poorer families in this country the child does not benefit at all – but rather the overweight mother guzzling McDonalds with her large brown Primark bag bulging at her feet”. You can listen to the show here for the next week. (For non-British readers: a Primark bag does not signify affluence.)

The issue of housing benefit is not the main concern here, except to state that the majority of recipients are in fact in work, and much of it pays for the shortage of affordable housing stock, the political decision to sell off council houses, and the runaway house price inflation caused by the credit boom which ended in 2008. Disability benefits are a burden society has always had in one form or another, because there have always been people whose physical or mental condition, whether temporary or permanent, either does not allow them to work, or makes them a less attractive proposition to employers for one reason or another. There are two separate categories of disability benefit: the Disability Living Allowance, which covers the cost of being disabled (such as for care and mobility aids) and is paid regardless of whether the recipient is working — indeed, it may help them remain in work — and the former Incapacity Benefit, which supported people who were unable to work, whether due to illness or a complication of their disability. Many of those who currently receive DLA would previously have been institutionalised, a practice which ended because the public realised that there were rampant abuses, the care was often impersonal, taking no account of people’s needs and abilities, and there was little dignity or privacy in many of them, besides the fact that the vast majority of people do not need to be housed apart from their families and the community. They were paid for out of state expense as well, and the land they stood on is now in many cases prime real estate and the grand buildings have been demolished or converted into luxury flats, so a return to that is going to be extremely expensive as well as unsatisfactory for all concerned.

Hopkins introduced herself by saying that “as a taxpayer” it had become obvious to her that people could live where they choose, have as many children as they choose, and smoke if they choose and have the state pay for the consequences of that, and that benefits should be a privilege and that people should “look to themselves” rather than the state to provide for them. She also invited the others to come with her on “claimants’ day” to the benefit office to see people collecting their benefits in their pyjamas. (I was on Job Seekers’ Allowance for two years and I almost never saw people in the Job Centre in their pyjamas.) Lisa asked her if, in the event of her getting cancer or having an accident, she would try to use the national insurance contributions she had paid, and Hopkins replied no, that she had savings that would provide for her family in such circumstances, money she had made by “grafting” and getting up at 5:30am every morning to provide for her family. Further enquiries reveal that Hopkins has epilepsy, and if she expects everyone to rely on themselves rather than the state, she should explain whether she has used the NHS to provide either the medication or the care she needs such as consultations to decide which medications to take and so on, and hospitalisation in the event of a severe seizure. In any case, she is not the only one who gets up at that time or earlier, and the majority of us do not make a lot of money because our jobs do not pay us that much. Hopkins got lucky; she does not mention on her website that she invented anything or has actually run a business doing anything other than selling advice to other businesspeople and public speaking. She is, in other words, a professional mouth, someone with opinions who gets paid for them.

When Egan asked her if she really was so cruel as to insist that people with cancer not receive help from the state, she fell back on her claim that the benefit system was too generous. She claimed that the people she “accosts” in their pyjamas get “home allowance” of up to £400, job seekers’ allowance, disability allowance “although they’ve managed to walk very well to the job centre”, and that it makes it not worth your while to work part-time. In fact, having been on JSA, the last time I received it, it was about £65 per week, which is about a day and a half’s average pay and just enough to buy the bare essentials for a week with. The reason it is “not worth your while to work” is because the money is deducted from your allowance and the allowance is stopped if you have two days’ work that week, even if it is a one-off booking through an agency during a slump, so unless you get a permanent job or a prospect of a lot of casual work, accepting a work booking could well leave you worse off. This is simply a consequence of the version of means testing that is used for JSA, and it is one of a number of circumstances in which means testing is a proven disincentive to work.

Nobody really confronted Hopkins with why some benefits need to be paid, and disability benefits in particular. We either pay for people with disabilities to live at home, and for the necessary adaptations and home care arrangements, or we pay for them to live in a care facility, when the land is bought, and they’re built, and all the cooks, cleaners, nurses, managers and others are hired, at huge expense — there is no third option, unless you count leaving them to die or leaving them to beg on the streets. Some people with disabilities can work, and others can if they are provided with some assistance, or if people help them to find a niche they can cope with working in, or helps them through (or past) the interview process, and the benefits made to these people may be more than recouped in the taxes they pay because they are then able to work. Others cannot, either because they do not have the intellectual capacity, or because their physical limitations make it impractical, or because their health complications or mental health problems mean they will not be able to work reliably, or because prejudice or inconvenience means people will not hire them. Of course, some people with disabilities are very wealthy and can afford to pay for care themselves, and some can run their own business, but this is not the majority and the costs of being disabled or of having a long-term medical condition add considerably to the cost of living, which is why we have a health service and a welfare system.

Hopkins clearly does not know much about what she is talking about here, only that she doesn’t want to pay to finance anyone else’s lifestyle. She promotes herself as some sort of “self-made”, self-employed person who “tells it like it is” as a social commentator and public speaker (reinforcing her “tough” image by boasting that she went to the Sandhurst military officers’ academy), but on this evidence that seems to consist of making bigoted and ill-informed comments that might go down well with all the well-paid drunks at a corporate party but do not add much to this discussion. There is a lot of talk about scroungers in pyjamas claiming benefits that were enough to live on comfortably without working, yet no solution has been given as to how to get the idlers off benefits without impoverishing people who are in real need and are unable to work; the government did not come up with one and neither has she. Yet again, British talk radio allows a serious and important debate to descend into a slanging match by giving undue prominence to an opinionated but uninformed guest — at the expense of the licence fee payer!

Image source: The Sun.

Shocked headline as fat disabled woman has fun

Obese woman demanding 50 hours care a week 'went to pop concert', screams the Telegraph. Obese? Disabled? Had a night out? This is surely an outrage to all common decency! Nobody who is fat should have fun, especially not if they are mentally ill and fat. Never mind that a good night out could have made this woman feel a bit better. Never mind that it might have been her first night out in years. Her weight and her mental illness make it an indisputably horrifying thing to have done, according to the paper.

When the paper reports that she is 'demanding 50 hours a week care', what it means is that she previously received care through Direct Payments, which has now been withdrawn and she is appealing for it to be reinstated.

Reading the article, despite the numerous mentions of her 'morbid obesity', none of her reported care needs relate to her weight at all. All of these references serve simply to stir up prejudiced feelings about this woman, to build up the readers' outrage.

The paper reports that she has been diagnosed with a personality disorder, following traumas and bereavements, and her psychiatrist has decided that she should 'break her reliance on the support of others'. This happens to a lot of people with personality disorders, in particular female survivors diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Mental health services commonly do not like treating people diagnosed with BPD, or services diagnose people with BPD when they do not like them - either or both are commonly true. It is not known as the 'wastebucket diagnosis' for nothing.

This does not mean that people with personality disorders do not require support. The council, in court, argued that because she can play computer games, buy cigarettes and go to a pop concert, she should have all her care withdrawn, despite evidence that in the past she went for months on end without washing, due to a massive fear about bathing without somebody there.

The Telegraph then offers a poll. A poll! So that readers can vote on whether they think this woman's care needs should be provided for.

As if constant, irrelevant references to this woman's weight, and scare quotes when describing things like her "extreme paranoia" and "lack of motivation", mocking her all the way through - a woman who already has mental health problems - as if all of that was not enough, let's allow the public to vote on what they think her future should be.

The Daily Telegraph have humiliated a vulnerable woman for committing the sins of being fat (many people on certain psychiatric drugs are, it's a significant side-effect), for having suffered trauma in her past, and for going to see The Wanted in concert, whoever they are. Their ridiculous poll adds insult to injury, and I just hope the woman in question never reads it.

This post originally appeared at The F-Word

[The image is a photograph of a warning sign reading "Caution Do not play on, in, or around this container". It was taken by Brittney Bush Bollay and is used under a Creative Commons Licence]

Rod Liddle is an Arse

Something weird and kinda wonderful happened today: A right-wing tabloid published some vile disablist propaganda, and the internet gave a crap.

There's nothing wonderful about vile disablist propaganda, obviously. But we've been seeing it for a couple of years now and usually there's no backlash against it. When Melanie Phillips writes a hideously homophobic piece or when Liz Jones writes a bizarre article about semen theft; Twitter gets on its moral high-horse (rightly, of course). But when the Daily Mail claims that only 1 in 14 IB claimants is genuine, or when The Sun state that in 3 years time one in every 17 people will be claiming DLA as if this is some kind of outrage (and without qualifying that, actually, one in every 5 people have some kind of impairment) no-one usually bats an eyelid at the press abuse of disabled people. In fact, people who would like to consider themselves as "decent" start moaning about all the fakers and scroungers because the official fraud figures of around 0.5% are hidden away on the Society pages of The Guardian rather than splashed across the front of The Sun.

This week we've reached a turning point: People objecting to propaganda, 38 Degrees pulling their finger out, UK Uncut organising a protest against the WRB (even if they did forget to make it accessible...). Shame it's all a bit too late and this time next week the bill will be a done deal.

The Good, the Bad and the unnecessarily expensive

A new Comment is Free piece by former Tory MP Paul Goodman appeared online this evening, in which he tried to justify taking money from disabled people and giving it to a company like Atos instead.

He starts out pretending that he might actually live up to his surname and feigning concern for his old constituents. In paragraph number 5 he even uses some actual facts:

The problem with DLA isn't that it traps disabled people on benefits – its purpose is to support the care and mobility needs of disabled people, whether they work or not. Nor is the key issue fraud – which is proportionately tiny: a mere 0.5%.

You can tell he's no longer in office, can't you? If a current MP told the truth about benefits so brazenly Cameron would probably have him bent over his lap, bullwhip in hand, faster than one can say "calm down dear".

The article was clearly an attempt at something of a con. Obviously his thought process was "if you start with the facts people will think you're an honest writer. So then when you slip some bullcrap in 2 thirds of the way through, they'll have built the perception that you're an honest kinda guy and won't bother checking any more."

That's when it goes to shit.

But there is a real problem, and that is error. More than 70% of the current DLA caseload has an indefinite award. There is no effective means of ensuring these payments remain correct. Ministers claim there are hundreds of millions of pounds of overpayments.

You know what, I'm gonna take this one sentence at a time.

But there is a real problem, and that is error.

This is actually pretty true. The fraud rate for DLA is, as he has already pointed out, 0.5%. The rate of customer error is 0.6% and the rate of DWP error is 0.8% (see table on page 12 of this DWP report), so it is the DWP doing the bulk of the ballsing up.

More than 70% of the current DLA caseload has an indefinite award.

This could possibly be true too. Haven't got the figures to hand, it's gone midnight and I want to go to bed at some point tonight so I'll just give him the benefit of the doubt. Next!

There is no effective means of ensuring these payments remain correct.

Here's where he tried to resort to a bit of semantic trickery. You see; if an award was made correctly at the time it was awarded, it's not error. If the recipient's circumstances change and they fail to notify the DWP then that's fraud. He is trying to imply that the fraud rate is greater than it is by trying to paint it as appearing in the "error" column.

Ministers claim there are hundreds of millions of pounds of overpayments.

If you go back to the document I linked to already you'll see that, actually, it's 2.2 hundreds of millions of pounds. The DLA spend is £12bn meaning the overall overpayment rate is 1.9%

He claims that regular reviews would stop people from getting overpaid if they get better. Apparently no-one told him that an incurable condition is for life, not just for Christmas. Do you think he knows many people with cerebral palsy who got miraculously cured? I wonder if his social circle is full of war veterans who lost limbs which then grew back? I know he sat on the opposite side of the house to them, but he must have crossed paths with them sometimes: Do you think he asks David Blunkett and Gordon Brown if their eyesight is getting better? And as it's something I have I'd be very curious to meet someone with magically vanishing osteogenesis imperfecta. One can only assume that Goodman believes that Lourdes actually works.

While the absence of regular reviews might result in a few people getting overpaid, it ultimately works out to the benefit of the taxpayer: You see, most people become more impaired over time; rather than less. But where progression is gradual people don't often notice it quite so keenly. And then there are those who did notice they'd gotten worse but are too scared to call the DWP in case an overzealous Atos assessor comes and takes all their DLA despite them being eligible for an even higher rate.

Today @spoonydoc tweeted the following (and she's proper clever, she wrote the Spartacus Report):

DLA fraud:0.5% at £60mill PIP reassessments £300-500mill over 3 yrs. Cost saving or ideology?

So not only would the government find themselves shelling out more on people that had become more impaired but wouldn't have reported it, they'll also be haemorrhaging money to pay for these new reviews. Mr Badman says "but ducking decisions simply because constituents won't like them is scarcely a noble motive." I concur: But I also think that wanting to stump up more money for no other reason than to persecute disabled people is a rather overpriced way of proving that he is an odious little man.

Crimestoppers

This week Crimestoppers launched a new campaign to "fight benefit fraud". They say this is in response to benefit fraud being deemed the third "most worried about" type of crime in a poll they ran this year. (Hat tip to @Debbiegeorge65 for pointing out the link.)

This is despite the fact that there is already channel for reporting benefit fraud. And despite the fact that 96% of calls to the National Benefit Fraud Hotline are malicious or timewasting. David wrote a bit about what it was like to be falsely accused of fraud back in January.

It's worth reading the official fraud stats on page 12 of this latest report to compare fraud to error and also to see how much is actually lost to fraud. But here are the fraud rates:

• Income Support: 2.4%
• JobSeeker's Allowance: 4.1%
• Pension Credit: 2.3%
• Housing Benefit: 1.3%
• Incapacity Benefit: 0.3%
• Disability Living Allowance: 0.5%
• Retirement Pension: 0.0%
• Carer's Allowance: 3.9%

The benefit with the highest rate of fraud is JSA at 4.1%. Certainly a far cry from the lies in the Daily Mail that 94% of IB claimants are fakers.

But it's because of these lies that the voters in the Crimestoppers poll would think that benefit fraud is so prevalent. And these lies go totally unchallenged in the mainstream press. This week on Question Time judge Constance Briscoe claimed there were vast swathes of fakers out there, but when asked how many she, unsurprisingly, didn't know. Next boss Lord Wolfson then claimed that JSA wasn't the benefit with the fraud problem, but disability benefits. The same disability benefits whose fraud figures I've italicised so you can clearly see just how low those fraud rates are. No-one corrected him. (Mehdi Hasan has written a blog post correcting some flawed statements from the episode, but not the disability benefits one.)

According to those same DWP figures, the overall cost to the country of benefit fraud is £1.2bn. About a fifth of tax avoided by just one company: Vodafone. It's certainly a far cry from the £35bn to £70bn avoided in tax in total. So why aren't Crimestoppers campaigning against tax issues rather than pouring fuel on to the already raging fires of hate?

It's worth noting that while researching for this post I Googled "tax fraud facts," the top (non-sponsored) result isn't actually anything to do with tax fraud: It's the HMRC page about tax credit fraud. Which says everything you need to know about how our society prioritises those wildly differing amounts of cash lost to fraud on the basis of the perceived social status of those committing the crimes.

Call for #myDLA podcast submissions

You may remember that 6 months ago (wow, it's been a long time!) we briefly had a WtB podcast (can be found in iTunes here or on Feedburner here). It floundered because most of us have been too ill to run with it.

Today there are a couple of DLA hate stories in the right wing press. Tweeters have started using the hashtag #myDLA to share in a sentence or two how important their DLA is an how they use it.

I think it would be awesome of we could do an audio version of this; especially as - of course - not everyone uses Twitter but might want to tell their story.

How to submit:

Record your submission as an audio file. You can use your laptop's built in mic, the "voice notes" function on your iPhone, or your digital dictaphone if you have one.

Ideally we'd only want your submission to be a sentence or 2 long. The shorter they are the more we'll be able to cram in. You don't have to speak in perfect Queen's English, it doesn't matter if you say "erm". You can mention your name or you can be anonymous; it's totally your call.

You can talk about your trials claiming DLA to counter stories about people filling in a form. You can talk about what you spend it on. Anything that conveys how important it is to you.

Once you've recorded your brief submission then Email it to wheresthebenefit *at* gmail *dot* com. I'll try and put it together ASAP.

I can't promise that all submissions will be included; it will depend on how many I get. I'll reiterate the point from above: The shorter the submissions are the more I'll be able to squeeze in.

Thanks all for your contributions. The end result can be found here.

Guest post: BBC bashes benefit claimants two weeks running

This is a guest post by @indigojo_uk and originally appeared here.

I’m a little late writing about this, but I watched John Humphrys’ programme on BBC2, The Future State of Welfare, a few days after it was broadcast (I was working a night shift the actual night), and last week the BBC broadcast a Panorama programme, Britain on the Fiddle, which exposed people claiming benefits while driving Bentleys, owning yachts and houses in France, and running pubs. In between the “damning exposé” of the wealthy benefit cheats, they also showed people being caught using blue (disability parking) badges illegally (in one case, when the disabled person was not present). This was obviously done to make it look like the programme was defending the interests of “the little people” against the cheats, but it was entirely irrelevant to the rest of the programme.

Humphrys’ programme started by interviewing various people who were claiming benefits and giving some recollections about “his day” when he was growing up in Splott in Cardiff. Apparently back then, not working carried some degree of stigma, and there was one man in the neighbourhood who did not work, for some unspecified reason, and he was shunned by the community for that. The reason could, of course, have been quite genuine — he may well have had a disability or some health problem that he did not feel comfortable discussing with all and sundry. He interviewed various benefit claimants, including a family of several children with a single mother, a long-term unemployed family in an ex-industrial northern town where the father had calculated that working would not make him much better off than staying on benefits, a family from Spain who were on housing benefit so they could live in Islington, and a woman with ME who had been failed by her ATOS assessment (although she easily won on appeal).

The whole thrust of Humphrys’ argument was the need to cut the benefits bill, ignoring the issue of whether what the bill pays for is worth paying for or necessary. The reason why a modest flat in a district close to central London, where the work is, costs so much was conveniently glossed over (it was nothing like that expensive twenty years ago, before prices and rents became inflated by the sale of council properties and buy-to-let mortgages). Why a man in a northern town regards the work that is available as not worth doing was not asked (the fact is that there were serious jobs in the north until the factories and mines were closed down, and a large town like Middlesbrough cannot survive with just supermarkets and council jobs). The history of unemployment and benefits in the UK is a history of political decisions — unemployment figures (derived from numbers of dole claimants) used to threaten workers not to go on strike or demand rights, incapacity benefits later used to artificially reduce unemployment numbers, and so on. None of this is of the current claimants’ making, so we saw someone who had never had to worry about finding a job, not for a good few decades at least, making someone from a community which had been deliberately impoverished look like a scrounger. If you have ever had the notion to tell someone, “I’ve worked hard all my life”, you should consider yourself lucky that you had the opportunity to do that. Some people do not.

Humphrys also travels to New York to interview officials and charity workers involved with the “workfare” scheme there, and those dealing with its fallout. Early on, he presents it as a system whereby benefits are delivered only to those who prove that they are looking for work — the same is true of Jobseekers’ Allowance in the UK, in which claimants are required to keep a diary of their ongoing search for work, and are given jobs to apply for. Towards the end, he showed some of the soup kitchens and charity food outlets that have appeared in New York to serve people who are unable to receive welfare as their two-year allowance has run out with no work in sight. He also interviewed two women who had been in white-collar jobs and made redundant, and were afraid for the future as they had found themselves unable to get any more work. This provided some counter-balancing to the sermons from middle-class men in suits about personal responsibility (one of them claimed that people went back on welfare because they lacked the personal organisation to keep a job. But it did not seriously examine why people lost jobs and could not find anything else: people will not employ them, often because they are “overqualified”, and it might be assumed that they will not stay if employed, or they do not have experience, or the social skills the human resources department decrees that the job requires.

Last week’s Panorama really did bring the programme to a new low — the 30-minute format is something I have criticised again and again (such as here) as it lends itself to sensationalism rather than to serious investigation, but this just was not Panorama — it was more like a cheap prime-time infotainment piece, a bit like Saints and Scroungers without the “saints” (who were often people who helped the poor and disabled find benefits they were entitled to). The aim was obviously to show that the benefit bill was as high as it was because of fraud, and that “fraud costs all of us”, but the over-investigation of fraud can sometimes detract from the purpose of the benefit and make life very difficult for real claimants, so as to satisfy the mid-market tabloids. Nobody would object to someone who had been found out claiming benefits when they are not living in the country, or were perfectly well-off in their own right, or not as disabled as they claim to be, being punished or having their benefits cut, but some benefits are in fact not means-tested and the programme did not make that clear. It also did not mention that the rate of disability benefit fraud is extremely low, and therefore the cost of welfare is not being significantly inflated by fraud; it is just high because there is a lot of disability, and some people’s needs are severe and complex.

What makes this all the more disgusting is that excuses are being manufactured to “cut the benefits bill” at a time of scarcity when many people are falling into poverty. The same cannot be said of the introduction of Jobseekers’ Allowance under John Major — that happened in 1996, after the early 1990s recession had ended, although with much the same media baiting of the “workshy”. This time round, it is benefits as a whole that are being attacked, with the media — not just the newspapers which support the Tories because their wealthy owners tell them to, but the BBC which is paid for by public subscription — joining in the chorus. We have a welfare system partly to make sure people do not fall into destitution, partly to make sure that people with disabilities and other complex needs can live dignified and productive lives, and partly to pay for the costs of ideological trends (such as globalisation) and political decisions. If we wish to cut the benefits bill, we need to get people working, and that means reducing our reliance on imported manufactured goods, for a start. People who can work, and are offered a serious job (that is, one with prospects), will do so. Those who cannot, because of their own or a dependent’s disability (or because of prejudice, or some other genuine reason), must be supported. The alternative is to lose our status as a civilised country.

"Swimmer admits benefit fraud charge"

"Luckily I broke a rib so I won't be going swimming for a couple of weeks," is possibly one of the stranger sentences I have ever uttered. How could hearing a rib go "snap" upon bending down resulting in me being unable to partake of an activity that's good for me possibly be considered "lucky"?

This is how:

A benefits cheat who fraudulently claimed £25,000 in disability payments was caught out after being spotted going swimming on holiday.

I explored a lot of the issues in this post a few months ago, but in short: Swimming is good for me, it's good for keeping my skeleton as strong as possible and helps prevent things like ribs going snap when I bend down. And news stories like this make getting that vital exercise a terrifying prospect because they fuel vigilantism and make it likely that I'll get reported to the DWP accused of "faking" because I can swim a bit.*

I concluded that post in April with the paragraph:

Next year will the DWP be reviewing the entire Paralympic team using the television footage as "evidence" that the athletes are too fit to be disabled?

When actually what happened was something far more bizarre than that, something that I couldn't possibly have imagined: Atos will be designing and building the Paralympic website, as well as providing technology support during the games. As @SaliWho put it "satire is cancelled."

* = Emphasis retrospectively added as I'm gathering from the comments I wasn't sufficiently clear as to the main problem with this case. It's not about whether or not she was actually guilty, it's about the media convincing the general public that ill/disabled people who can swim must be faking. Apologies for my initial lack of clarity; I was a bit of a zombie yesterday after the aforementioned broken rib prevented me from finding a comfortable sleep position the night before so I was trying to function on only a couple of hours sleep.

Repeat

(Originally posted at This Is My Blog.)

I know this is ground we've covered before, but a look at today's front pages makes it necessary to go over it again.

In the UK, we have a welfare system. The disability benefit side of it has been being overhauled for the last few years. Labour started it, the Coalition are continuing it, they're using the same company (Atos) to execute it and the same advisor (Lord Freud) to justify it. This is not a party-political issue - red, blue or yellow, to borrow a phrase, they're all in it together.

In summary:

• If you have a doctor's note stating that you are unable to work because of illness, injury or impairment, you apply for Employment Support Allowance (ESA). For the first 13 weeks of your claim you are paid the "assessment phase" rate of up to £67.50 per week.


• If the assessment classifies you as entirely unable to work, and unlikely to ever be able to work, for instance because you are bedbound and terminally ill with a life expectancy of less than a year, you are granted unconditional ESA at the "support" rate of up to £99.85 per week.


• If the assessment decides that, although your disabilities are substantial, you would be able to do *some* work at *some* point in the future with the right conditions/support/equipment/adjustments, then you are awarded ESA at the "work-related activity" rate of up to £94.25 per week. To continue to receive this you must attend regular work-related activities.


• If the assessment determines that your NHS-diagnosed conditions are not severe enough to substantially impair your ability to work in an office environment, or that you would only require minor adjustments, you are deemed "fit to work". You don't get ESA at all, and are placed on Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) which is a smaller amount of money with much higher conditionality attached. If you are fortunate, there may be a note on your jobseeking file excusing you from mandatory application for specific jobs that would aggravate or be incompatible with your condition (for instance someone with speech and hearing difficulties may be "fit to work" but excused from mandatory application for call-centre jobs).

Leaving aside all the arguments about whether the system is fair, how their fitness-to-work tests relate to what is required to perform a job in the real world, and so on... the Department for Work and Pensions released these statistics yesterday, about ESA applicants over the last two years:

• 7% were incapable of any work (Support group)


• 17% were able to do some sort of work given the correct support (Work-related activity group)


• 39% were deemed to be fit for work and were moved onto jobseeker's allowance


• 36% dropped out of the application process


• 1% of applications were still in progress

Today, the Express have taken these numbers and decided that 1% (still in assessment phase) plus 7% (Support group ESA) plus 17% (WRA group ESA) equals 25% of applicants approved to receive some form of ESA. So far, so true. However, their headline screams that therefore the remaining 75% - those moved onto JSA, and those who drop out of the system entirely - are "faking".

This is simply not true.

The fact that a person has failed to score enough points to get ESA (yes, it really is a points-based computer system) does not mean that they scored no points whatsoever, or even that they're not disabled, just that they're not quite disabled enough to be Officially unfit for work. That's why we have the assessment process! To assess people!

To apply to be assessed is not "faking".

To have a level of impairment that falls just short of the ESA bar is not "faking".

There will also be quite a few applicants who suffered an acute injury or illness (for instance, they were in a car accident) and were advised to apply for ESA as a temporary or worst case scenario - but in the 13-week assessment period, they have recovered well so they have been moved to JSA or have returned to work.

To recover from an illness or injury does not mean that the illness or injury was "faked".

There are also the people who get placed onto Jobseeker's Allowance, and go to appeal, and win. The rate of people winning their appeals is around 40% and this increases to 70% where the appellant has someone to represent them. Regrettably, there are also a number of genuinely disabled people who simply don't have the wherewithal to fight an appeal, and have to attempt to survive without the benefits they need. I myself have been in this situation.

To be too ill to fight is not "faking".

There are people who, during their assessment period, are fortunate to find a suitable job which is prepared to make the necessary adjustments, or who, like myself, have enough personal support around them to enable them to be self-employed.

To return to the taxpaying workforce is not "faking".

A very few people will be fortunate enough to have other resources to fall back on. Perhaps an insurance payout of some kind, or a lottery win, or the sale of assets, will save them from the indignity of having to complete a process that treats them as the worst kind of fraudster from beginning to end.

To have alternative resources is not "faking".

Most significantly, there are those who die before the assessment phase is complete.

To die of a condition is perhaps the strongest possible indicator that the condition was not "faked".


I'd provide more concrete statistics, but we don't have them. Once you leave ESA, you're not monitored. We don't know how many of these people have got jobs, have died, have killed themselves, have left the country... no one cares. The Express just goes ahead and calls them all "fakers".

Observing mistakes

The Guardian have been pretty great about representing the recent government and media attacks on benefit claimants. They were one of the few news outlets that devoted more than a "blink and you'll miss it" amount of coverage to the Hardest Hit march on Wednesday. Society Guardian have been particularly good to us at WtB.

So it was quite disappointing to need to send the following Email to reader@observer.co.uk this morning:

I was going to complain about http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/15/disability-living-allowance-scope-cuts erroneously claiming that DLA is “the benefit now given to 1.9 million people deemed physically unable to work.” But you corrected while I was in the middle of typing.

However, I’m not satisfied with your correction. The correction says:

“The original conflated the number of people on disability living allowance and the incapacity benefit. This has been corrected.”

That’s not true. “DLA is given to people physically unable to work” is not a conflation of figures, it’s an outright untruth.

As a DLA claimant I would appreciate greatly if you corrected your correction.

Additionally an older version of the article with a different URL, title, photo and byline here http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/14/disabled-face-increasing-hostility-strangers still contains the inaccurate “disability living allowance, the benefit now given to 1.9 million people deemed physically unable to work.”

DLA is not an out of work benefit. DLA is to cover the extra costs of being disabled regardless of your employment status. If a wheelchair user finds a job, does their need to buy a new wheelchair every few years disappear? No.

If someone who needs help getting out of bed in the morning gets a job, does that assistance need disappear? No.

So DLA, the benefit to help pay for those things, doesn’t disappear when you get a job either.

Ironically the article is about the hostility towards disabled people since welfare reform began. Articles like this only fuel that hatred by making readers think there are more “fakers” than there are. By stating that DLA is an out of work benefit you’re feeding people the lie that there are numerous workers fraudulently claiming out of work benefits. Because there are many people on DLA that do work legitimately.

Lisa Egan
http://wheresthebenefit.blogspot.com

Edit 24/5/11: Happy to report that the article published on Saturday May 14th has now been corrected. However the article posted on Sunday 15th May still has the inadequate amendment.

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.

News, Numbers and Nonsense

The news that mental health conditions are now the most common reason for somebody to be on incapacity benefits is only the latest in a great slew of statistics published lately about disability benefit which are being used to imply something far beyond their significance. Statistics only become news when they are seen to be interesting - usually when something is going dramatically up, or down.

In this case, the real story here is that the numbers of people with chronic back pain on Incapacity Benefit dropped by 50% between 1997 and 2007 - that's the newsworthy bit, that should be the headline. Not because it's good news, but because it indicates an actual change. And whilst the Occupational Therapists looking at the data couldn't see why they could be responsible for this change, I think it says positive things about workplace conditions - both that workers have been made less vulnerable to back injury and strain at work and after the introduction of DDA, workers with chronic back pain have rights to accommodation so many can carry on working. I'm sure there's also better advice from GPs, maybe other improvements in medical treatment too.

But no, the story is about mental illness, to imply that it is remarkable so many people should be incapacity benefit with mental illness. Only it's not very many at all.

One in four people in the UK will experience mental illness at some point in their lives. According to the article's statitistics (once we do some maths of our own) about one in two hundred and fifty of the country's population is currently incapacitated due to mental ill health.

The same sum is useful to apply to that obesity statistic published a few weeks back. The headline was that 80,000 people are on incapacity benefits because of alcoholism, drug addiction or obesity, but it was the smallest proportion of this group, people with obesity, that gained the attention. My Dad had heard the news and declared that 80,000 people incapacitated by obesity. The Mirror delighted in the imagery, “People who are too fat to work are biting a huge hole in the country’s finances, figures revealed yesterday.”

In fact, it was more like 1800 who were obese. Almost one in four of us is obese, but these figures mean that only one in thirty-five-thousand of us are actually incapacitated by obesity, making the “Loads of people are too fat to work” trope rather moot.

These statistics demonstrate that it is very rare for mental illness or obesity to lead to incapacity. Given that these conditions, along with chronic back pain (usually reported as “a bad back” in the press and usually in inverted commas), are common*, this should lead to empathy as opposed to dismissal.

I have had chronic back pain and mental illness and I have been obese. Had I not been chronically ill as it was, the back pain and mental illness would have lead to significant time off work but neither would have been bad enough for long enough to take me out of work. Despite that, my mental health experiences have been by far the worst experiences of my life, far worse than any level of pain I have experienced. My back pain was intensely painful, tremendously frustrating, very sensitive to emotional tension and presented a constant battle between the need for rest and the need for movement. So when I hear about people being incapacitated by mental ill health or “a bad back”, I have great sympathy – they have what I had but probably worse and definitely for much longer.

The obesity was only a problem to me because I had put on weight very quickly and felt very self-conscious about it, so goodness knows how much more severe a person's condition has to be before it stops them working. People who are incapacitated with obesity are significantly unwell. To carry that kind of weight in the first place, there must be an underlying physical or mental health problem - if someone actually eats their way to that size, they have an eating disorder as serious and dangerous as anorexia or bulimia.

But my sympathy is utterly irrelevant. The point is that someone has to experience a significant level of functional impairment in order to qualify for any disability benefits. Just because a condition is common doesn't mean that a minority of people don't get it very bad. Almost everyone has had the flu at some point in their lives, but that doesn't make it remarkable that a few thousand people who die of it each winter.

* Mental illness can of course be a hundred different things, including relatively rare conditions, but for these purposes all these mental ill health is lumped in together. I'm not going to go to great pains to make this clear because the whole matter of diagnostic labels and incapacity is problematic and plays into a hierarchy of disability.

Press request

I received this Email from journalist Amandine Alexandre:

I work as a journalist in London for French media.

I am looking for testimonies on the Work Capacity Assessment for a piece which will be broadcasted on the French radio-station Europe 1 (www.europe1.fr) on Wednesday morning.

The idea is to talk to someone who has been put through this test and was found fit for work when, in reality, he/she is not capable of working.

I am looking for people based in London or not far from London.

If you are in or near London, have been through the WCA and deemed "fit for work" and would be willing to talk to Amandine her Email address is amandine.london@gmail.com.

Democracy, but only if you pay for it

Today The Telegraph's Ian Cowie has stooped to a spectacular low that makes the Daily Mail look all sunshine and rainbows. He proposed that only those who pay a minimum of £100 a year in income tax be allowed to vote.

Clearly the motivation behind this is to destroy the left wing vote. It will mean that those who typically vote left would be excluded from voting: The unemployed, the low-waged, full-time students, etc.

Of course, it would have a massive effect on us disabled people. Though Incapacity Benefit and ESA are "taxable" benefits, they're not enough per annum to pay income tax on!

He says:

Restoring the link between contributing to society and voting about how it is run would be a sensible first step.

So he thinks disabled people who volunteer for their local youth work charity aren't contributing to society? That people who care for a disabled loved one aren't giving back to the country they're claiming benefits from; despite saving the state £87bn a year? That the unemployed person who runs a Brownie pack is just scrounging and providing nothing in return?

Possibly his sickest claim of all is:

This modest proposal would, however, exclude large numbers of people who have no ‘skin in the game’ and who may even comprise the majority of voters in some metropolitan areas today. Their contribution is not just negative in financial terms – they take out more than they put in – but likely to be damaging to the decisions taken by democracies.

I compromise the majority of voters? What, by contributing to a site like this which exposes just how shafted disabled people are?

I have no "skin in the game"? Right, cos it's not like disabled people are dying because they lost their benefits; and who knows if at some point in the near-ish future that I'll lose my piddling income and find myself as one of them?

I'm damaging the decisions taken by democracies? What? By making sure people are aware of how those decisions will affect disabled people?

We have been voting ourselves better benefits than we have earned for decades and – sooner than later – that has got to stop.

On a micro scale; I'm sorry Mr Cowie that I was only able to pay income tax for 3 and a half years between starting work a week after finishing university in 2003 and becoming too ill to work at the end of 2006. No-one is sorrier than me because I miss the life I had back then. Having been on benefits now for 4 and a half years I've claimed back way more than I paid in. But that's the whole point of "national insurance". It's an insurance against life going tits up for you.

On a macro scale; Better benefits than we earn? Have you seen the rates of benefits? Imagine you became too ill to work. Permanently, not something that's only temporary until you have an operation. You apply for ESA and get turned down and shunted onto JSA. Could you, Mr Cowie, really live on £67.50 a week for life?

That’s how non-contributory democracy led to the credit crisis in a nutshell.

Really? As the "finance editor" for a national newspaper one would expect you to do a little more research than that, rather than just reading Iain Dickhead Smith's claims that benefit claimants caused the deficit. I think you'll find it was the bankers that crashed the economy and not us non-workers living on a pittance.

It’s time to restore the link between paying something into society and voting on decisions about how it is run.

No thanks Mr Cowie. I'd rather live in a country where the human right to be part of the decision-making process about what affects us is upheld. Even us filthy scum that can't pay income tax.

Amateur Atos Assessors

Please note that this post isn't meant to be a dig at any of the individual people I've had this conversation with, it's a comment on the social situation when everybody feels the conversation is appropriate. So if you know me IRL and have had this conversation with me: I'm not being mean about you personally; I promise.

I've had a bit of a weird weekend. Quite impressively my health held up for 3 consecutive days; usually a sure fire way to guarantee to be ill on any particular day is to make plans to do something. I've had a lovely time, I've hung out with old friends, met some excellent new people, and consumed more cream cakes than I can count.

The weird bit about the weekend was the number of people that called me "intelligent". It's a little bit weird because I'm really not that smart. I think I just talk a lot and with that many words coming out some of them are bound to be a bit clever; and people remember the smart stuff and not "I just spilt orange juice down my own back." (A tip for the hypermobiles: Just because you're flexible enough to pick up the glass of orange juice on the shelf behind you without turning round to look at it doesn't mean it's a good idea.)

The other weird thing about being repeatedly called "intelligent" this weekend is that in daily life I constantly have it implied that I'm not at all. I'm not talking about that common stereotype that people with physical impairments must also have a cognitive impairment, I'm talking about something much more specific than that: I'm talking about the people that keep suggesting ideas for how I might be able to manage to work, as if I'm so stupid that I haven't thought through even the most glaringly obvious of options.

As I've mentioned before, I used to be a stand-up comic. Three and a half years ago - figuring my health problems were only temporary and that shortly down the line there'd be some treatment for me - I made the decision to quit before I pissed off every promoter in the country. On average I'm too ill to function around 2 days every fortnight, which would result in me having to cancel a hell of a lot of gigs at the last minute. It doesn't matter if you have a legitimate medical reason for dropping out; if you put a promoter in a tight spot by leaving them with a gap in their bill they're going to deem you "unreliable" and never book you again. And they'll probably bad mouth you to every promoter they meet.

So figuring my health was just a temporary glitch I made the decision to quit before I alienated all promoters, with the hopes that when I got better I'd be able to return and have people willing to book me. Except I haven't got better so if I were to return now I'd very swiftly find myself unbookable.

But people seem to think I'm an idiot who hasn't thought about (and doesn't think daily about) this and they come out with lines like "but surely you could just book a few gigs here and there?" (I refer you to my statement in my opening paragraph about how making plans is basically an illness guarantor.)

I also get people who seem to think that quitting stand up was a crisis of confidence, or at least that's what I derive from the statement "you should go back to it! You're really funny!"

The next question again assumes I'm stupid; the next question is always, always, "well why don't you write?"

"Because editors expect you to be able to meet deadlines..."

"Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought of that."

So do these people really, honestly, think that I'm smart enough to write but too stupid for the idea of writing for a living to have occurred to me? Or is there something else going on? I think it's the latter.

The current government and media campaign to demonise those claiming benefits seems to have turned everyone into an amateur Atos assessor. The "they're all fakers" propaganda is so pervasive that even people who'd like to think of themselves as left of centre (and, you know, not a cunt) feel qualified to make judgements on a person's fitness to manage to work because they're constantly being told that everyone can manage some kind of work if they really try.

These are people who (I hope!) don't deliberately and consciously think "Lisa's not really ill, she's just lazy," but because of the daily news stories and government briefings about how we're all skivers find themselves thinking it subconsciously. And this rhetoric is so dominant that a couple of months ago I was having a conversation with one of the most leftie and politically aware people in the country who said "now, Incapacity Benefit. That's the one with the huge fraud problem, right?" Despite the fact that the official fraud rate for IB is around 1% (see page 8 of this DWP report). That's just how ubiquitous the bullshit is.

Having to deal with actual Atos assessors is stressful and worrying enough without our friends and acquaintances thinking that they have the right to judge our fitness for work and make assessments about the kind of work we could be doing. Just because you read in the Daily Mail that we're all fakers doesn't mean it's true...

How do you spend yours?

There's a striking slideshow on the Society Guardian website in which a number of disabled people explain how they spend their DLA.

But, for me, the most striking bit of all is how many of the people photographed need to spend their DLA on essentials. Mahri says she needs to spend her DLA on toiletries and deodorant, Johnny says he spends his on clothing, food, toiletries and hair cuts. Kofi says he spends his DLA on his shopping, Lorraine spends hers on clothes and Rubina says she worries about how she'll afford clothes without it. Tony says he needs his DLA to buy food.

DLA is supposed to be for the extra costs associated with being disabled and is not classed as "income". Your Incapacity Benefit or ESA or JSA or wages if you work should be enough for you to pay for life's essentials leaving you to spend your DLA on the costs you have that a non-disabled person doesn't incur.

That disabled people are living on so little that they need to spend their DLA on the basics is scandalous. Or it should be.

Of course, sometimes disabled people need to spend more on the basics. One example is people who need to buy ready meals and takeaway instead of ingredients to prepare our own food, because we can't prepare our own food. One friend of mine who has what she describes as a "freestyle" walking technique spends a fortune on shoes because she wears them out so quickly; another "basic" that's more expensive for us. So using your DLA to pay the difference between what a non-disabled person would spend and what you need to spend is absolutely logical. But we shouldn't be so impoverished that we can't meet normal expenses at all without our DLA.

Research by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found that in 2010 a single person needed £14,400 a year to reach a minimum standard of living. This equates to £277 a week. That’s just your average single person, not a disabled person who needs to fund the extra costs of being disabled.

If you disregard my DLA (because it's supposed to only cover the extra costs of being disabled and not everyday things) but include my housing benefit (which I don't see a penny of because it gets transferred straight from the HB department at the council into the council's rent collection department) then my income falls short of that £277 by £67.

You may think "well, she gets more than she'd get if she was on Job Seekers Allowance." But you have to remember that JSA is intended to only be a short term measure until you find a job (and I agree it's a paltry amount). My incapacitation has lasted 4 years so far and there's no end in sight. I actually have to live my life in the long term with monies falling short of the minimum income needed. There's no "we'll just pay you a poxy amount until a job comes up."

So it's not really any wonder disabled people end up using their DLA to pay for food and clothes, because if we're living on benefits we don't have enough money to actually live. And the government want to cut it back even further.

ADHD and DLA fraud

There's an article on the BBC News website is entitled Unscrupulous parents seek ADHD diagnosis for benefits

The evidence for this assertion is that two anonymous headteachers claim this to be the case.

"Susan" has asked to remain anonymous, because she knows what she says is controversial and does not want to stigmatise the parents of every child with a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

Not sure how anonymous sources make any difference to the stigmatising effect of the article. ADHD is already a massively stigmatised condition. Many people, including teachers, are sceptical as to whether the condition isn't simply a way for bad parents to excuse the bad behaviour of their children. I have heard it theorised that ADHD is a problem caused by middle class parents who aren't prepared to smack their children and demand a label when their children struggle at school, or that ADHD is a problem caused by working class parents who feed their children junk food and abandon them to the television. Bringing benefit fraud into this can only add to the stigma.

Psychiatric diagnoses with subjective criteria are always tricky and identifying abnormality in children's behaviour is particularly fraught, so there are bound to be misdiagnoses. But for children with these impairments, attempting to navigate the world and an inflexible education system, a diagnosis of ADHD can be a tremendous gateway, not to extra cash for their parents, but to proper treatment and the help they need to succeed. DLA can be used to buy time, peace, practical adjustments and special arrangments so that these children and their families can have as full and normal life as possible. Which in turn promotes normal development.

Their anonymous source continues

"Every child I have on medication, we are asked to fill part of the forms that they [parents] submit as benefit claimants, to verify they have ADHD, so it goes hand-in-hand."

As the article later points out, both NICE and the Royal College of Psychiatrist believe that Ritalin should only be prescribed to chlidren with severe behavioural problems. Therefore, it follows, those families whose children are actually prescribed Ritalin are likely to be in greastest need for help.

Only of course, there are only 328,000 people on DLA under the age of 16, including all those with mobility and special care needs, whereas there are many more children taking Ritalin (I can't find a figure that agrees, but somewhere past half a million). Ritalin prescription and DLA do not go hand in hand.

Then finally,

Abuse of the Disability Living Allowance by parents is one reason the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is discussing reform.

No, it's not. It has been said before, but it has to be said again and again, DLA fraud is reckoned to stand at 0.5%. There are only 328,000 people under 16 claiming DLA, including all those children with mobility and special care needs. Presuming that fraud is as common amongst parents and guardians claiming for their children than amongst adults claiming for themselves – which seems extremely unlikely given the much stricter criteria for under 16s – then that's about 1600 cases in the country. The DWP are not reforming anything for the sake of 1600 fraudulent parents.

This article rattled me because it is such weak reporting and by the BBC, from whom I'd expect better. Disability fraud and the urgent need for reform has become a bandwagon, where an argument is built up around the word of anonymous sources who have no expertise beyond their anecdotal experience. Because there must be fraud. There must be massive fraud or else the government wouldn't be able to justify the cuts and increased stress and scrutiny in store for everyone on disability benefits.

The website article relates to a radio piece on this matter at 9pm tonight (Sunday, 6 February) on BBC Radio 5 Live. No, me neither.

Absolutely Outrageous!

Or not...

I'm feeling quite sad this week that the general public, and more specifically anti-cuts campaigners, all consider books and trees to be far more important in the grand scheme of things than I - a human being - am.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of libraries and trees. As a child I always had my nose in a book. Always. And that was partly a disability-related thing: I couldn't run around or ride a bike, I spent a lot of time in bed with broken bones. Reading was something I could do and could do well. Very well. I could read books by myself before I started school and had a reading age far advanced of my chronological age.

The library was a huge part of my life. I couldn't possibly own all the books I read, if I did my mum and I would've had no room to move our wheelchairs around because there would just be piles of books everywhere. My local library used to have competitions in the summer holidays to see who could read the most books and it was genuinely gutting that I never won (I suspect the kids who beat me must've cheated and not read the books they claimed to have read).

Libraries don't just loan out books, they also loan CDs and DVDs. In the days before sites like Spotify allowed you to listen to an album before you bought it I'd often get CDs out of the library to try before buying. And obviously as a film geek I've taken hundreds of videos and DVDs out of the library. As a teenager I recall hunting high and low for a film I wanted to see that had been deleted on video and eventually stumbling across it on the World Cinema shelf of Cambridge's Central Library.

At this point it's almost impossible to live a life completely free from the internet. There are people who can't afford to have internet at home, or their computer broke and they can't afford to fix it, and so have to go to the library to access information that people reading this blog can probably find out sat in their pyjamas in their living room. And I think we've all experienced moving house and not being able to get the new broadband set up for a fortnight so we've had to go to the library in the interim period.

Then there's forests. I have to confess wandering around a forest of a Saturday afternoon doesn't hold much allure for me because such spaces are often not the most wheelchair accessible of places. But trees turn carbon dioxide into oxygen and I'm a big, big, fan of breathing. Certainly when I've had allergic reactions which have resulted in asthma attacks I've been quite distressed by not being able to breathe. So yay trees!

Despite my passion for libraries and my need for oxygen-producing trees I'm not sure I'd prioritise books and greenery over human lives. Yet that's what's currently happening in the anti-cuts movement. I want to make it absolutely clear that I do not support the closure of libraries or the sale of the forests. I am not suggesting that we close libraries and sell forests to save benefits. I am opposed to all the government's cuts.¹

Loss of benefits kills people. People like Paul Reekie and Christelle Pardo. A blogger called Aliquant has expressed her plan to kill herself if her transition from IB to ESA doesn't go smoothly. Here on WtB we've had plenty of people express their intention to kill themselves if they lose their benefits. Some of the examples are here and here.

I've written in the past on my own blog about how disabled people are seen as the lowest of the low, and that's still going on. Last week Melanie Phillips wrote a homophobic article in the Daily Mail. There was an outcry. Her name was a trending topic on Twitter and I must've read several hundred "gay agenda" jokes at her expense. As a lesbian I was among the horrified many (though part of me was looking forward to homosexuality becoming mandatory as she promised; I might get laid occasionally...) and shared in the collective outrage.

The following day the Mail published this article full of inaccuracies about the number of Incapacity Benefit claimants found fit for work. The outrage was limited to a tiny handful of disabled people. There were no trending topics and no jokes at the expense of Gerri Peev (the article's author) for being a disablist arse. In fact because there's been such prevalence of these misleading articles a lot of people of an anti-cuts bent probably believed it to be true rather than accepting the reality that it's just designed to incite hatred against disabled people. (In case you're wondering the fraud rate for Incapacity Benefit - according to the DWP's own figures - is 1%. See the table on page 8 of this report.)

The contrast in response to these two articles in the space of two days really made me feel like less of a human being because no-one's willing to speak out against this disablist prejudice. I speak out against racism, plenty of heterosexuals spoke out against Melanie Phillips' homophobia, but where were the non-disabled people speaking out against this disablist bile?

The issue is on my mind today because today there has been a national day of action to save libraries. It's been all over the news and twitter. That we as a culture value books more than disabled people is clear when you contrast today to the day of action against benefits cuts a fortnight ago.

457,500 people signed the save forests petition. Only 4000 and change have signed the save DLA petition. Really puts into perspective how much the general public prefers trees to disabled people.

I realise that most people support causes they understand. The campaign to save libraries will attract high-profile figures like authors because libraries introduce readers to their books. So famous people offer their endorsement to the "save libraries" campaign which has a top down effect; their fans become involved in saving libraries, which means there's enough people campaigning to get the story in the news, which means even more people campaign.

The same goes for forests. Most people off the telly will have enjoyed a walk through some trees with their dog at some point. So they tweet their support for the "save forests" campaign. Their fans then sign petitions and spread the word, which again results in newsworthyness so the campaign spreads like headlice in Downing Street.

Between health problems and discrimination limiting career options there aren't that many famous disabled people to set the snowball rolling down the hill. I explained in this post how we need non-disabled people to stand beside us and why it's important insurance for their own futures to do so. But still non-disabled people choose to prioritise libraries and trees over their fellow human beings whose lives are at risk from benefits cuts.

First They Came - Pastor Martin Niemöller

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialist
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

It'd make me happy beyond anything if this post could be seen as a 'call to arms' (not least because if the anti-benefits-cuts movement gained momentum it might save some lives), so please pass it on. Don't just dismiss me as a moaning scrounger but remember I could be your neighbour, your sister's friend, the customer in your café, the person you smile at on the bus every morning: We are real people being attacked by these cuts with no-one standing up for us.

"A call to arms? What do you expect me to do?" The Broken of Britain always have campaigns on the go that you can participate in from your desk. They've currently got details of several motions you can ask your MP/MSP/AM to sign. Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) are where to look for information on getting out in the streets and protesting. Then there's us: We'll always have news and intelligent comment to keep you informed, and if you follow us on Twitter you'll be kept up to date on all news, petitions, protests and motions around disability benefits issues.

I want some outrage, dammit!

---

¹ Retrospectively emboldened for emphasis because people were still accusing me of being in favour of closing libraries and selling forests to save benefits.

More Mail Lies

Not contented with their hugely untrue story about Incapacity Benefit last week (see Sue's analysis on her own blog), today the Mail are going after DLA claimants with a story massively deficient in facts.

Half the 3.2million people on disability benefit have never been asked for evidence to back their claims, it emerged last night.

The DLA application form (link at the bottom of this page) is 39 pages long. The DWP ask your GP for info, your "carer" (if you have one) for info and many people add supplemental information from consultants. A hell of a lot of people are called in for a medical carried out by Atos. And, of course, many cases go to a tribunal in which case reams and reams of supporting evidence is required.

In addition, nearly a million people have been on disability living allowance for at least 14 years, a Government analysis of claims for the benefit revealed.

That's incredibly surprising. Surprising because I'd have expected it to be slightly more. Most impairments don't just vanish. Amputated limbs don't grow back. Snapped spinal cords don't heal. My own Osteogenesis Imperfecta has been present since I was conceived and will never go away. In fact as I smash up more bones and joints I'll only become more impaired. I would hazard a guess that the majority of DLA claimants who cease needing DLA do so because they died.

Cuts to DLA, which is meant to help people who have specific mobility or care needs and cannot do things such as walk or wash and dress themselves, have been criticised by charities and Labour MPs.

However, ministers say figures showing how the benefit ballooned under Labour – and has been paid to people for years with no checks – demonstrate an urgent need for reform.

Since DLA was introduced in 1992, and since Labour came to power in '97 there have been massive medical advances. These 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 people survive horrific accidents and illnesses like cancer, but are left permanently ill or impaired and require help with getting around or personal care. We should take pride in our great health service that the number of disabled people is increasing because people can survive things that were previously fatal.

Of those, 31 per cent – almost a million – have been claiming for 14 years or more, while 46 per cent have been on the benefit for more for ten years.

I've been on DLA since it's inception in 1992. No-one told my genes that the Daily Mail thinks there should be a 14 year limit on being disabled.

The problem is there is no system of review. People can be given the benefit and no one checks if they still need it.'

More than two million people on DLA have been given indefinite awards, which means they have no further contact with officials about whether they still need the benefit.

What part of "a disability is for life, not just for Christmas" do the Mail not understand? Oh, that's right. It's not about facts, it's about whipping up disablist harassment (which the Mail will then report in a faux horrified manner).

I have an indefinite award. My bones will never stop being brittle. My bones will never stop hurting. My smashed up joints will never become unsmashed. My tendons and ligaments will never stop being like overstretched elastic bands which fail to support my joints while Mail journos will continue to have steady tendons and ligaments like sturdy pieces of string. Why waste DWP time and money having officials contact me to see if anything's changed?

Some people do have conditions that might improve, for example mental health problems which may respond to drugs and/or talking therapies. Such people are not given indefinite awards, they're given awards for limited periods e.g. 3 years or 5 years. Indefinite awards only go to those of us who have no chance of ever improving.

The Government now wants all claimants to undergo periodic medical tests to justify the payments. Ministers propose to end the automatic right to DLA, worth up to £70 a week for care and up to £50 a week for travel.

What a brilliant idea! Why not waste more money on bureaucracy? According to this source DLA medicals cost the government either £51.37 or £77.33. The government actually wants to throw away that money every year or three years just for a doctor to look at me and say "her skeleton is still crap"? Less than a hundred pounds to declare someone as having not got any better may not seem like much money, but if they're spending £77.33 annually on the 3.2 million claimants of DLA? That's a cost of £247,456,000.

As for automatic entitlements, there are only 6. One of the entitlements is "terminally ill and not expected to live more than a further 6 months." Once that automatic entitlement has ended you can be sure the Mail will be outraged at dying people not getting benefits.

And it's not up to £50 a week for "travel;" it's either £18.95 or £49.85 for "help with getting around." I'm sure the Mail wouldn't consider getting from bed to toilet as an exotic adventure but if someone needs to use their £49.85 to fund a wheelchair then that might be the extent of the travelling they're doing.

The article finishes off by inaccurately talking about the removal of the mobility component of DLA from people resident in care homes:

A group of 27 organisations for the disabled has warned against plans to axe the mobility part of DLA, which it says will hit 80,000 care home residents unfairly.

Which makes it sound like the mobility component of DLA is being removed, full stop, but that care home residents will be the most severely affected. That is not the case; people like me living in our own homes will get to keep our mobility component (for now, anyway).

Care homes are pretty bleak places, just have a read of this article by Johann Hari about his experiences with his grandmother while she lived in a home. At the time of the announcement in the CSR @beccaviola tweeted that having her Motability vehicle while she was stuck in a care home was the thing that stopped her killing herself.

Jen from Aylesbury has commented at the bottom of the article that:

I am afraid its the scumbags and scroungers that make things bad for everyone

There are almost no scumbags scrounging DLA. Have a look at the DWP's official figures for DLA fraud on page 8 of this document. The fraud rate for DLA is 0.5% and the only benefit with a lower fraud rate is retirement pension. There's only the perception of a massive rate of fraud because of rags like the Mail printing inaccurate articles like today's.

Last year a study found that those who watch Fox News are the most misinformed Americans. It'd be really nice if I could sit here and say that Mail readers like Jen are the most misinformed Brits but, sadly, the idea that benefit fraud is a massive problem has even been fed into the minds of people who really, really, REALLY should know better.

Edit: Rhydian at the Broken of Britain has put together a template message to send to the Press Complaints Commission about today's Mail article.

Edit 2: The folks at fullfact.org have taken apart the stats used in the Mail article