Emergency Meeting: Organising Against the Welfare Reform Bill

Via Claire from Winvisible:

Monday 20 Feb 5pm-6.30pm at Tent City University, Occupy London, St Paul’s
London EC4M 8AD
All welcome
Buses 4, 11, 15, 23, 25, 26, 100, 242
Tube: St Paul’s, Central Line
Overground: City Thameslink

This is outdoors, so dress warm. Hot drinks available and accessible loos nearby.
For more info: Global Women’s Strike gws@globalwomenstrike.net
020 7482 2496 , 07904 255 145

Models of Disability

As it has come up in the Welfare Reform Bill debate, and people are asking, here is a quick starter on models of disability.

The Medical Model of Disability

This is the classical view of disability, disabled people are broken and need to be fixed. Most of society and a lot of doctors still stick to this model.

The Social Model of Disability

This is a model created by disabled people themselves, and is very popular with disabled people. It says that the problems we face largely result from the failure of society to adapt to our needs and treat us as equals. We aren’t broken, we don’t need fixing, we’re just people like anyone else. Adapting to our needs can mean everything from replacing steps with a ramp, to acknowledging that mental illness does not make people an axe-murderer and that it is not better to be dead than use a wheelchair, to recognising that someone may need a different pattern of work to accommodate their disability. It really just comes down to treating disabled people as equals,

The Bio-Psycho-Social Model of Disability

The Bio-Psycho-Social Model is a perversion of the Social Model, intended to allow organisations such as large insurers and governments to limit support to people with long term disabilities. It pretends to adopt the Social Model, but then claims that because it acknowledges the need for ramps and so forth, any remaining disability is solely due to the disabled person failing to work hard enough at adapting to their disability, and that therefore they don’t deserve support. So I’ll just wish all my dodgy connective tissue to start working properly, my DNA to magically rewrite itself and ignore the fact that, even through Class 1 opiates, it frequently feels like I have burns across significant parts of my body.

The Bio-Psycho-Social Model of Disability was created by academics at the University of Cardiff sponsored by Unum, an American insurance multi-national that was branded ‘an outlaw company’ and subject to huge class action losses for running ‘disability denial factories’. Guess which American insurance multi-national advises the Department of Work and Pensions on disability benefit policy.

ESA amendments success in Lords

Yesterday the Welfare Reform Bill (WRB) was debated in the House of Lords. Specifically three amendments that relate to Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).

These amendments were to keep the automatic entitlement to ESA for young disabled people. In order to qualify for the contribution based ESA a person must have made a certain level of NI contributions in the two years before the claim. Previously people such as myself who had never been able to work were given an exemption from this requirement if their disability started before age 20. A kind of levelling of the playing field for those of us who've never had the chance to earn and make NI contributions. If I hadn't had that automatic entitlement to Incapacity Benefit (one of the benefits ESA is replacing) I wouldn't have been able to leave home and go to university. My parents would still be my carers and my mum wouldn't be running her own business.

The government had intended to remove this aspect under the WRB. The amendment called for it to be kept.It was believed that this would be a "too close to call" vote but the Government were defeated with 260 votes for the amendment and 216 against.

The second and third amendments related to the plans to limit entitlement to contribution based ESA to just one year. Some claimants would then be able to go on to claim income based ESA if this time limit did come in in the WRB. But those who had a partner who was working would lose out entirely even if their income is as little as £16K a year. This is likely to lead to increased poverty and knock on affects such as worsening health. Campaigner Sue Marsh has shared how if she lost her ESA the only way they could cope would be if her husband gave up his job to become her carer.

So the second amendment called for the time limit to be increased to two years. This was passed with 234 voting for the amendment and 186 against.

The third amendment called for cancer patients to be exempted from ESA time. In this vote 222 lords voted for the amendment and 166 voting against. This meant an unprecedented third defeat in a row for the government and a much needed boost for campaigners after the work that had gone into promoting The Spartacus Report etc. We haven't won and we can't rest yet but we have achieved something.

Unfortunately however later that evening after most of the Lords had left Lord Freud proposed another amendment to take out the entitlement to ESA for young people. This was passed 132 for, 49 against. At the point this happened the WRB debate had ended. It was restarted for this. As Steven Sumpter explains this is against usual parliamentary procedure and I for one would like to know about the legality of what happened.

The Guardian and The BBC have good coverage of the debates although neither of them cover the sneaky fourth amendment of Lord Freud. The results of the votes are also available.

You Couldn't Make it Up...

We already knew that the Welfare Reform Bill was making some creative interpretations of standard parliamentary behaviour - such as putting a controversial bill into Grand Committee, but the nuance I found out about a couple of hours ago had me picking my jaw up from where it had hit the floor.

I was already aware that Clause 102 of the WRB was going to introduce measures to allow DWP to recover overpayments made through its own errors, which may seem obvious and reasonable, but is more of a problem than most people will realise. The problem is that errors in payments may go on for a period of years before errors are noticed (a friend of mine had underpayments stretching back a significant number of years before DWP admitted there was an error), and by the time the error is realised we may be talking about a very substantial amount of money, particularly for someone living far below the poverty line on benefits. Equally that overpayment will have led people completely innocently into expenditure that they wouldn't have made if they had been budgeting for the amount DWP should have been paying them. They may not have been entitled to the money, but in a very real sense they will be the ones punished for the DWP's error.

Lord Freud insists that the DWP will be understanding about repayment rates, but frankly their reputation for being understanding about anything isn't good. As I say, I knew about this provision, but what had my jaw bouncing off the carpet was learning that it is going to be retroactive, an ex post facto law is the technical term. Why is it going to be retroactive? Because DWP have been forcing people to pay back overpayments for a while now, and have just realised it might not actually have been legal.

Now a normal person would expect the reaction to be a bunch of red faces, and then a quiet apology and re-payment of the sums involved to people who have bullied into repayments they couldn't afford and weren't legally obliged to make. But that isn't how DWP-think works. If DWP has broken the law, then the best way to react isn't to make amends, it is to change the law retroactively so that what they did is now legal, even if it wasn't at the time they did it, and that is what clause 102 of the Welfare Reform Bill does. Many countries (such as the US, and Iran) outlaw ex post facto laws, and the UK is theoretically forbidden from ex post facto criminal law by the European Convention on Human Rights, but there's no exclusion from passing ex post facto civil law, and apparently we have something of a tradition of it. I think that's something that will shock people, I know that it is something that has shocked me, and isn't it reasonable that we should expect government to obey the laws of the land as they stood at that time, not gerrymander the law to retroactively legalise their illegal cockups?

DWP, The Dodgy Figures Come Home to Roost

The Welfare Reform Bill is the Department of Work and Pension’s flagship benefit reform, a major part of which is the axing of Disability Living Allowance in favour of Personal Independence Payment in order to allow a politically-mandated 20% plus cut in the number of people receiving it (as a historical parallel/reminder, ESA was originally supposed to generate an even smaller cut). The justification of the change was supposedly the 30% increase in people claiming DLA, a rise DWP ‘sources’ described as ‘inexplicable’. The Broken of Britain were challenging these figures as soon as they appeared last year, pointing out ‘The claim is made that DLA claims have risen by 30% in eight years – without accounting for population growth of 5% in this period, a pronounced demographic shift, and increased awareness of DLA.” Their protests, and those of others, were ignored, and the 30% growth was part of the justification used to convince MPs to vote for the Welfare Reform Bill as it passed through Parliament.

In February of this year, Declan Gaffney wrote an article for the prominent political blog Left Foot Forward entitled ‘The ‘inexplicable’ rise in Disability Living Allowance explained’ In this article he points out that 36% of the growth (246,000 of 680,000) comes from people over retirement age, which is actually explained entirely by existing DLA recipients reaching retirement age as it isn’t possible to start a new DLA claim after retiring. And as DLA was only introduced in 1992 the number of people claiming it and then retiring will continue to grow for a number of years yet. So 36% of the ‘inexplicable’ increase is immediately explained by simple logic. He then points out that demographic change, the growth in the population and other related changes -- more simple logic, absolutely basic stuff for this kind of analysis, accounts for another 125,000, meaning we have now explained over half of the supposedly ‘inexplicable’ growth. The remainder does represent an increase in the rate at which DLA is received, but Gaffney goes further, noting that increases in the receipt of DLA by children are related primarily to Learning Disabilities and Mental Health, and can likely be explained by greater awareness, and now 71% of the ‘inexplicable’ growth has been explained. That leaves 199,000 cases to be explained, these are the working age cases which are actually relevant to the government’s argument, but, rather than 30%, they now represent 8%. Gaffney notes that the rate of new claims has actually dropped slightly, and the rate of claims ending has increased slightly, and speculates that this may relate to a historical rise in rates of disability in the ‘90s and that the figures are playing ‘catch up’. He also notes that the wording in the report is ‘almost designed to foster misinterpretation’, talking about the ‘subjectivity and complexity’ of claims, which is interesting wording indeed when you remember that ministers have been continually pushing the line that DLA is too ‘complex’.

Despite all of the arguments against it from Disabled People, groups such as Broken of Britain and Where’s the Benefit, and from disability charities and anti-cuts groups the Welfare Reform Bill has ground its way through the Commons and was all set to head into the Lords in July when at the last minute it was postponed until September. And then last week, on Monday, at the peak of the national crisis over the rioting, DWP released a new report, which Declan Gaffney has again dissected in an article for Left Foot Forward, DWP admits disability reform based on dodgy figures, as reported by Left Foot Forward He notes the growth figure has now dropped to 29%, while DWP now admit that the figures for recipients over 65 “distorts the overall picture of growth”. Correcting for that drops the growth to 23%, demographic changes drop that figure to 16%, Yet even as it admitted comprehensively screwing up the original figures, DWP was briefing its tame tabloid attack hacks, leading to the Daily Express claiming that ‘Handouts for Disability Soar by 185%’, as reported by the TUC’s Touchstone Blog which also notes that the population has aged as it increases, yet another reason for DLA claims to have increased, and that the increases are concentrated in the early years of the benefit, which was to be expected as DLA Lower Rate was a new benefit rather than a replacement for an existing one, and therefore would be expected to bring in a new population of claimants over a period of years, while also noting that what the tabloids reported as an incomprehensible rise in the number of young men in receipt of DLA was actually simply a rise in people first receiving it as children. In fact, the Touchstone article notes, the DLA statistics figures show a steadily declining rate of increase, with the latest figures representing the lowest rate of increase since the benefit was introduced.

So DWP has been caught using dodgy figures and logic and has owned up to it, problem solved? Not exactly, because the government has used that now unsupportable 30% figure as a substantial part of its justification for getting the Welfare Reform Bill through the House of Commons. MPs have been convinced that the Welfare Reform Bill was needed to stop an out-of-control disability benefit by that 30% figure, and it turns out that not only wasn’t 30% even the right figure, but the growth was built into DLA by the way it was designed and would have petered out in a few more years. Those MPs have taken that false argument and used it to justify their votes for the Welfare Reform Bill, and those votes can’t be taken back. In fact, but for the postponement of its date in the Lords, it wouldn’t just be MPs voting for the Bill based on dodgy figures, but Lords as well. And, as Declan Gaffney goes on to note, not only does that dodgy figure mean MPs have been misled, but it means the whole basis for replacing DLA with PIP has to be called into question, because if DWP hadn’t identified blatantly obvious reasons for the increase like people retiring, then it probably didn’t understand anything else about DLA, or the impact of the changes it proposed to make.

And then things turned even more dodgy. The regular Left Foot Forward commenter ‘Mason Dixon, Autistic’ was reading through the new report and noticed something odd about the dates, it was published on Monday 8^th August, but it was signed off in May 2011. And of course May was when MPs were voting on the second reading of the Welfare Reform Bill based on the 30% figure, while July, but for the postponement, was when the Lords would have voted on it, also based on the 30% figure, and now it has finally been released, three months late, and buried on the worst Bad News Day in recent memory. Left Foot Forward picked up his point and ran with it in a third story, Why did DWP delay releasing new data until after welfare reform bill cleared Commons? analysing the last quarter’s comparable releases from DWP and finding that with only one exception they are released in the same month they are signed off, and that exception is the one in which the DWP shows itself using dodgy figures to support a Bill passing through parliament. There is a very real suspicion that DWP have hidden figures that would have undermined the case for the Welfare Reform Bill and cast major questions over the preparation behind the Bill; while hiding those figures amounts to DWP having deliberately and consciously misled Parliament. Left Foot Forward have presented DWP with a string of questions over the delayed report, the preparation behind the changes to DLA and how Parliament was kept informed. The answers should be fascinating, if for nothing else than for watching DWP squirm, but potentially for so much more.

Nor is this the only problem the DWP is having with statistics. Having been savaged in a report by the Select Committee on Work and Pensions over its reporting of ESA related statistics and the headlines they relate to in the press, the DWP have this week been hauled before the government’s statistical headmaster and told that they had better pull their socks up. The chairman of the UK Statistics Authority has written to the chair of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, telling them that, in his opinion as the official watchdog on government use of statistics, DWP have failed to reach an acceptable level of clarity in their reporting of ESA statistics. He specifically draws attention to the failure to make clear that people in the ESA Work Related Activity Group are not fit for work, and the similar failure to show the effect of the rate of successful appeals on the overall figures, and states that he is therefore invoking his statutory powers to require DWP to conform to the Code of Practice for Official Statistics in regard to reporting of these figures (astoundingly government statistics are not required to follow this code unless they are designated 'National Statistics' or UK Statistics Authority has exercised their authority to require it under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, which is what they are doing here). His statement in the letter that ‘The presentation of statistical releases is the responsibility of departmental statisticians, not their Ministers.’ appears to be a direct message that ministers, and the political ‘Departmental Special Advisers’ (aka SPADs) should keep their political fingers out of DWP’s statistical reporting.

So not remotely a good week for DWP, but the question I’m personally starting to wonder about is at what point sheer incompetence, or politically directed misreporting, crosses the borders of legality to become subject to criminal charges of Misfeasance in Public Office.