Get Better... Or Else?

Disabled people have precious few illusions left about how the DWP views us, but a new pilot programme is going to take that relationship into even more disturbing territory. Starting in November, 3000 disabled people in the Work Related Activity Group of Employment and Support Allowance will be forced, under threat of sanction, to attend medical interviews "to address barriers to work", or as DWP minister Mark Hoban put it in the press release "to address health problems". This is at best ethically dubious, forcing someone into a medical process without their consent and which is not with their own specialists, nor even necessarily with someone competent with their specific disability. The only other example of a compelled medical relationship* is for people sectioned under the Mental Health Act, and even they are at least guaranteed that the medical staff involved are mental health professionals and/or their own doctors, while the DWP merely state the meetings will be with "doctors, occupational health nurses and therapists".

Many of us who have dealt with corporate Occupational Health professionals will have encountered the situation where the opinion of the OH professional is at odds with that of our own specialists - in my case the OH professional actively tried to undermine a report by my own consultant and I had to exhaust the company grievance procedure before my then employers would back down and accept the opinion of the consultant who was actually treating me. Yet someone facing workplace OH processes does at least have resort to grievance procedures and the threat of an Employment Tribunal, with the right to withhold consent for the referral, or to withhold consent for a report they disagree with to be forwarded to their managers. Not stated in the DWP press release is whether the medical staff used will be feeding reports back to DWP, what data protection will be in place around that, and whether the disabled person will have the same medical protection in respect of having the right to view and potentially deny consent for release of the report as is currently the case for a workplace OH assessment.

Worryingly, the DWP press release leaves unstated what will happen if the appointment results in the patient being told to undertake treatment they disagree with, or which is even at odds with the appropriate treatment for their disability, worries that are doubled by the current hair-triggered sanction regime which DWP targets at disabled people. Many disabled people have related experiences with Atos-conducted WCAs in which the Atos 'Health Care Professionals' have proven to be utterly clueless on the specifics of the disability they are meant to be assessing, assuming they have even heard of it in the first place, and similar staff are now to be charged with "address(ing) barriers to work". There are a host of disabilities in which standard treatments for apparently similar disabilities may be contra-indicated, yet actively advocated by medical staff who don't specialise in that specific disability. If a patient, many of whom are experts in their own disability, finds a DWP OH professional pushing them towards a treatment they know their own consultants would not advocate, then what potential is there for them to say 'no' without triggering sanctions? Equally worryingly, the confrontational nature of DWP's relationship with disabled people (and claimants in general) may mean that the patient is too intimidated by the potential threat of sanctions to even think of objecting, which effectively removes any potential for the medically required 'informed consent'.

Dragging this process into even murkier ethical waters, the project is one of three trials, the others being additional support from JCP and additional support from a Work Programme provider, which are being conducted in order to determine which is most effective at getting disabled people back into work. However, a trial involving a medical process is arguably, if not by definition, a clinical trial and subject to additional ethical requirements, including further levels of informed consent, shared decision making, right to privacy, and a right to withdraw, all aspects that are likely to be extremely problematical in the process DWP appear to be proposing. Potentially any medical staff conducting these trials without ensuring these rights are in place could risk facing charges of serious professional misconduct.

This process further embeds into benefits practise and regulation DWP's belief that any disability can be recovered from if the patient really wants to ('they get better', Esther McVey, Minister for Disabled People), a consequence of the ideological indoctrination of DWP with the patient-blaming version of the 'BioPsychoSocial Model of Disability' created by American insurer Unum Provident - they of the infamous 'disability denial mills'. The problem for disabled people is that this model fails utterly to reflect the reality of disability, where many people are too disabled to work, are not sufficiently disabled to qualify for the ESA Support Group, yet have stable disabilities with little likelihood of getting either better enough to move into the workplace, or deteriorating to the point they move into the Support Group. This leaves only the ESA WRAG open to them, but WRAG assumes a person will 'get better' and pressures them to do so, pressure that will now be further increased by this new experimental regime.

A further concern is where the DWP expects to find staff for this new pseudo-medical aspect of ESA. Atos have been struggling to cope with the numbers requiring Work Capability Assessments, to the point that they have had their monopoly withdrawn and been ordered to retrain all of their staff. New competitors for WCA work are going to be appointed next year and will each require their own customer-facing medical professionals, together with other medical professionals to deliver training. At the same time Atos and Capita are creating new organisations to deliver PIP assessments, all requiring their own medical staffs, and there is little reason to doubt that the PIP assessment regime will both insist on more people being assessed and on their being reassessed on a much more frequent basis, needing a large increase in the number of medical staff required to deliver PIP assessments in comparison to DLA. And now this ESA 'initiative' is going to require yet more medical staff.  Where are they going to come from? There is a fixed pool of occupational health and rehabilitation oriented medical staff such as physiotherapists and OTs and any of us who have dealt with them on an ongoing basis will probably have encountered long waiting lists and rehab programmes that really aren't as comprehensive as even the staff would like. Trying to draw more and more staff into DWP pseudo-medical programmes is either going to put the existing pool of trained staff under ever increasing pressure, or see DWP relying on staff without appropriate training, or with inappropriate attitudes.

However this plays out, disabled people have good reason to be worried.

*Even in a workplace Occupational Health referral the assessment can only be done with the consent of the employee, and they must then consent to the release of the report to their employer. Based on my own experience I would advise that consent should only ever be given after viewing the report, a legal right, as even an apparently supportive assessment may turn out to be followed by an openly critical report.

Atos Slated by DWP...

... but is that good for us, or bad?

As the whole country, and media, descended into Royal Baby frenzy, the Department of Work and Pensions chose their moment to slip out the news that Atos had failed, catastrophically, an audit on the Work Capability Assessment, and that DWP would be removing their WCA monopoly in order to bring in competitors from next year.

The DWP press release states that in an audit of 400 WCA reports, from WCAs conducted between October 2012 and March 2013, itself sparked by failure in a smaller audit, 41% were graded at C, or unacceptable. The press release reports that reasons for an unacceptable grade could be a decision which explained in sufficient detail, and is at pains to emphasise that a failing grade doesn't mean the assessment is wrong. Well they would say that, wouldn't they.

As a consequence of the failure, Atos are required to bring in a Performance Improvement Plan, with every Atos 'Health Care Professional' required to undergo retraining,  and to pass a re-evaluation, with those failing the evaluation subjected to auditing of their reports until they do, or until they have their authority to conduct WCAs withdrawn.

Now on the face of it this is good news, the rate of successful appeals against Atos WCA decisions* has been clearly unacceptable for three years now, and clearly change was needed, but the devil may be in the details.

The Atos computer system is well known for being incapable of catching the nuance of how disability restricts our lives, and this is a point where an HCP who actually cares about doing the job in an equitable fashion could use his experience to override the straitjacket of the WCA rules in order to give an assessment that is morally and medically right, rather than strictly in accordance with procedures. In other words, they could, novel idea though it may be, base a decision on the medical evidence. But this would likely be more difficult to express in the approved fashion on the written report. So simply demanding that someone meets the WCA standards does not necessarily mean the situation will improve.

Equally, and as many of the leading campaigners on the WCA have repeatedly emphasised, Atos are only a part of the problem. Atos could have lost the entire WCA contract and the WCA would still have been fundamentally broken, because its descriptors fail to reflect the reality of either disability, or work, and these aspects are not being changed, while the changes may make it more difficult for HCPs to work around the descriptors to reflect the best interests of their patient. Bringing in a new company to challenge the Atos monopoly cannot make any difference if the procedures remain the same, and if they are drawing their own HCP staff from largely the same pool of personnel, many demonstrated time and again to be personally hostile towards disabled people.

Anything that emphasises the failure of Atos has points in its favour, but the unfortunate reality is that the audit failure, and the changes that result, are at least as likely to make things worse for us as they are to make them better.




*DWP continue to maintain that Atos do not make the ultimate decision on a WCA, but the Harrington reports demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of Atos decisions are passed on the nod, so Atos don't make the decisions in precisely the same way that they don't enforce targets for number of people failed.

Disability, The New Axis of Evil

The House of Commons debated an Opposition Day motion today calling for disability benefit cuts to be subjected to a cumulative impact assessment – the radical idea that if you subject someone to not one cut, but two, three or even six or more (DLA, ESA, ILF, Bedroom Tax, Benefits Cap, council care budget cuts, and the list goes on, and on, and on) you should actually add up everything they’re losing.

The standout contribution has to have been from (disabled) Tory MP Paul Maynard (Blackpool North and Cleveleys).

“dragged to this Chamber by Pat’s petition, We are Spartacus and other extremist disability groups that do not speak for the overall majority.”

Pat’s Petition, extremists? Spartacus, extremists? Damn, better hope the accessibility at Guantanamo Bay’s up to scratch for when they line all us uppity crips up for Extraordinary Rendition.

“The cumulative impact assessment is a very narrow tool by which to judge the contribution of the disabled community in this country, their potential and what they can achieve. I think that it borders on the offensive”

Actually I think we wanted to judge the Tory’s contribution to the disabled community, or more accurately what they’re taking away from our potential and what we can achieve - sort of an anti-contribution, but I can understand Paul Maynard misunderstanding it in his horror that we uppity crips have been refusing to properly tug our forelocks and say ‘Thank You, Master’ to that nice Mister Duncan Smith. He is right on one thing, there is definitely something offensive to disabled people at work here.

“We as a Government are seeking to edge towards greater recognition of the social model of disability, and that means not paying attention to the labels that too many want to hang around the necks of disabled people.”

That would be labels like ‘poverty stricken’ or ‘desperate’ then? As opposed to the ones favoured by IDS and his coterie at DWP, labels like ‘fraud’ and ‘shirker’.

“we help them to do that in my constituency surgeries. I hope that Labour Members do so, too, rather than store up a treasure trove of Atos scare stories”

So my Atos WCA didn’t really include the doctor fighting desperately to avoid having to record the piece of evidence that qualified me in its own right? Glad to have that cleared up, clearly as a poor, silly, extremist crip I must have misinterpreted what was happening to me.

“Page 34 states clearly: ‘Young people’s aspirations can decline in response to their growing understanding of the world’. Listening to Opposition Members, I am sure that young people’s aspirations will decline because of the negative messages they are getting.”

It seems Mr Maynard would prefer disabled people to behave as proper mindless sheep with no knowledge of, or concern for, the way the world regards us, sort of a messier, wobblier, dribblier version of H G Well’s Eloi from The Time Machine. God forbid that some dangerously radical extremists (like the Office of Disability Issues) should want to tell them they might face having only 53% the likelihood of non-disabled people of finding a full-time job, a 58% higher chance of unfair treatment if they do find a job, or anything up to a 39% higher chance of being a victim of crime.

“We are told that an increase in the reporting of hate crime is evidence of the Government’s war on the disabled. I find that disgusting. It is personally abhorrent that people should campaign in a partisan way on the backs of those in the most vulnerable section of our society”

Clearly I must have misheard the three complete strangers who screamed at me in the street. I could have sworn they yelled: “This is the DWP, we know you’re faking, we know where you live”. Silly me for thinking that someone must have taught them to see disabled people as 'skivers' and 'scroungers'.

What motion did the House finally vote in favour of? This:

This House welcomes the Government’s leadership in furthering the rights of disabled people; recognises the UK as a world leader in disability rights; notes that approximately £50 billion a year is spent on services for disabled people, including adult social services and including an investment of £3.8 billion in health and social care services in England to deliver more joined-up services to disabled people; further notes the £350 million allocated by the Government for programmes and support for disabled people to move into and stay in work; and acknowledges the Government’s collective determination to build upon the London 2012 Paralympic Games, and create a legacy which shines a light on the abilities and achievements of disabled people.

You really couldn’t make it up.

Update 17 July:

It seems Mr Maynard has realised he may have been a little extreme himself, as shown in this exchange of emails with the people behind Pat's Petition. On the other hand, I am still struggling to understand how any reasonable person could disagree so vehemently with a petition by disabled people and carers that simply asks for a cumulative impact assessment on disabled people hit by six or more separate cuts. If and when Mr Maynard does meet with Pat's Petition I hope they press him to explain exactly how that is unreasonable. Understanding the breakdowns in communication between two groups is after all vital if they are to be brought together, and there seem to be some gaping chasms in understanding between disabled people and carers, and the professional politicians of the Conservative Party.

PIP Consultation Update

The ‘Consultation on the PIP assessment Moving around activity’ (to give it its DWP title) is ongoing, with responses due by 5^th August 2013. What this consultation gives disabled people is the chance to tell DWP that the restriction of PIP’s Higher Mobility Component to only disabled people able to walk less than 20 metres does not adequately reflect the mobility restrictions we face in living our lives, in working, and in interacting with the wider community. The consultation itself can be downloaded here (other formats, including large print and easy read, are available, see the consultation page).

Since the release of the detailed consultation document there have been various responses from disability groups and this piece attempts to gather in one place links to all of those that go further than simply reporting its existence. If you are aware of responses not covered here, please post a link or other indication as to where they can be found in the comments section.

We Are Spartacus have a page covering the consultation, with a detailed briefing  (.pdf) on the background to the consultation and why it is important to disabled people with mobility impairments. Spartacus also have a survey to gather data from people affected to feed into their own response, which will be available until Monday 15^th July. They also request that individual responses to the consultation are copied to them at pip20m@janeyoung.me.uk (this is important because of past misrepresentation of disability consultation responses by DWP). 

Disability Rights UK have a brief discussion of the consultation which also asks for people affected to contact them. They also have a report on a relevant exchange between Lord Alton and DWP minister Lord Freud in the House of Lords in which Lord Freud stated that the government ‘has an open mind’, but that their ‘preferred option is not make any amendment to the current criteria’. Obviously this must reflect a slightly different definition of ‘an open mind’ than most people use.

Benefits and Work report on the consultation here, noting that ‘they (DWP) are preparing for the possibility of arguing that in spite of the overwhelming rejection of the new criteria, keeping the current 50 metre limit is not ‘affordable and sustainable’.’

A story at the Disability News Service reports ‘‘Worrying’consultation document brings new PIP concerns’.

Leonard Cheshire Disability have a survey which they would like those affected to complete.

The consultation is also reported by, amongst others, Action for ME, Ekklesia,  Contact a Family, the Papworth Trust, and Disability Wales. Several of these are looking for people to contact them to provide input to their responses. 

#PIP 20m Consultation: It's All About Cost

The new DWP Consultation on the restriction of PIP Higher Rate Mobility Component to people unable to walk 20m rather than unable to walk 50m is now available here with a closing date for responses of 5th August 2013.

Background to the need for a repeat of the consultation process and why 20m is completely inappropriate is available in our PIP: 20 Metre Primer.

As pointed out by Sue Marsh, and by Steven Sumpter who was responsible for bringing the Judicial Review of the original PIP consultation and which forced DWP into this new consultation, a particularly interesting aspect of the new consultation is that, while claiming the intention is to be completely open about whether 20m meets the needs of people with mobility disabilities, it then immediately contradicts itself by making clear that the deciding factors will be how many people will receive the Higher Rate Mobility Component under any revised criteria and the cost to the welfare budget. This confirms, as disabled people have alleged from the outset, that the sole driving force behind the replacement of DLA with PIP is reducing the welfare budget, not tailoring the benefit to the needs of disabled people as the Coalition has repeatedly claimed.

In fact the Consultation document includes the DWP's own modelling of the number of people who would be entitled to the Mobility Components of DLA, of PIP under the 2nd Draft (consulted on) and of PIP under the final regulations (not consulted on). This shows entitlement to the Higher Rate Mobility Component dropping from 1,030,000 under DLA to 652,000 under the PIP 2nd Draft and to 602,000 under the final PIP regulations. That means even the Coalition and the DWP admit that under the PIP regulations as they currently stand, 428,000 disabled people will lose Higher Rate Mobility Component, together with their eligibility for leasing a car or wheelchair under the Motability scheme. That means 428,000 disabled people who may no longer be able to engage with their local community, many of whom may well lose jobs as a result.

The impact of the PIP mobility changes will be devastating for hundreds of thousands of disabled people and it is vital that as many disabled people and groups as possible respond to the consultation and explain the impact of the 20m limit under the currently imposed regulations.

We Know Where You Live!

Is there any more chilling threat? It’s one I heard for real a couple of years ago, three men in their 50s yelling it across the high street at me as I walked to the bank one afternoon. “This is the DWP! We know where you live! We know that you’re faking!” As disabled people, this is a reality we have had to grow used to as the tabloids teach the public that every disabled person is really a conniving faker, intent on cheating them out of their hard-won pay. I am into double figures with incidents of verbal abuse, and the Scope surveys of disability hate crime suggest that my experience is the new norm for disabled people.

Yet in the Mail on Sunday this weekend, Mark Littlewood, Director of the Institute for Economic Affairs, authored a column calling for the names and addresses of every benefit recipient in the country, and how much of a ‘handout’ they receive, to be published online in a database accessible to everyone. Disingenuously he claims “The British are far too reasonable to start taking up pitchforks and burning torches and assaulting imagined benefit cheats.” As a disabled person I wish he was right about the British, but the two yobs who tried to assault me for walking while disabled didn’t seem too reluctant.

Two years on, I don’t know who it was who reported me to the DWP National Benefit Fraud Hotline, claiming I was working full time when I’m lucky to get out of the house for a couple of hours a week, but, like 96% of reports to the Benefit Fraud Hotline, that report was vindictive and completely false. Fortunately the DWP investigator accepted that the instant she laid eyes on me, but there was no comeback against my anonymous accuser, and, no matter my innocence, the consequences for me were a three month flare-up in my pain levels and I really, really don’t want to go back to my pain levels being so high that I’m lucky to get an hour’s sleep at a time. 

Nor were the consequences simply physical, when the time came to renew my ESA claim I found myself having panic attacks, something which had never happened before, and the thought of going through another Work Capability Assessment – my first had been utterly abusive – was just intolerable. So for the sake of my health I let myself be driven by the hate and the abuse out of claiming a benefit I was entitled to.

Friend, neighbour, casual acquaintance, someone who saw me speaking out against disability hate crimes in the media or online, I don’t know who it was who filed that malicious report against me, but a blunter term for ‘malicious’ might be conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, and, even without any basis in truth, the consequences of those allegations were serious.

Such on-street harassment, false accusations and outright assault are far from unusual for disabled people, but if my details, or the details of those even more vulnerable, are available online, then how much easier will it be for the thugs to track me down, or the poison-pen types to spew their bile to the Benefit Fraud Hotline?

Mark Littlewood, the Institute for Economic Affairs and the Mail on Sunday can make their pious pronouncements that they are sure no harm will come of their modest proposal, but the truth for disabled people and other benefit claimants is likely to be far harsher.

#PIP: A 20 Metre Primer

With DWP forced into a new consultation over limiting the PIP mobility component only to people unable to walk further than 20m (after carrying out a prior consultation in which every draft said 50m, as was the case with DLA), I thought I would put together a quick primer based on the PIP-related posts that have appeared on Where's the Benefit over the past few months. There is a lot wrong with PIP, but only the 20m mobility limit is up for consultation again, so the links will necessarily concentrate on that. We don't yet know when the consultation will open, DWP said 'late June', but we will bring you the details as soon as we have them. It's important that we get as many people as possible responding to it, and hopefully this list of articles will serve to get you started in your responses.

News Coverage of the New 20 Metre Consultation

Disability campaigners celebrate 'victory' after government rethink - The Independent

Here's a Chance to Fight for Disabled People's Mobility - Jane Young's (@theyoungjane) piece for Comment is Free in the Guardian.

PIP: A Step in the Right Direction - my (@WTBDavidG) piece here on Where's The Benefit on the new consultation.


Background to the Judicial Review

Legal Action Against the DWP over the PIP Consultation - Stephen Sumpter's (@LatentExistence) original WTB piece on why disabled people had to call for a Judicial Review of the 20m limit.

PIP Faces Legal Challenge - background piece by Sue Marsh (@Suey2y) on the PIP changes and why a Judicial Review of the 20m mobility limit was needed.

The Effects of PIP 20m Mobility and Why it Needs to Change

Well over 100,000 to lose Motability vehicles under draconian new rules - Jane Young on the drastic consequences of the PIP changes for disabled people.

If you can only walk 20m you'll get no help - Another piece by Stephen Sumpter for WTB on the effects of the PIP 20m limit.

20 Metres, Coming Up Short - WTB piece by me on how PIP 20m mobility limit meets the real world, and fails miserably.

PIP: A Step in the Right Direction

It isn't often we can say it, but the disability lobby has today forced the DWP to take a step backwards in their never-ending erosion of the rights of disabled people, by forcing them to go back to consultation on the 20m limit imposed in the Personal Independence Payment regulations (the replacement for DLA brought in by the Coalition with the intention of slashing eligibility for disabled people by at least 20%).

As WTB readers may know, one of our contributors, Latent Existence, has been in the process of taking the DWP to a Judicial Review in the High Court over their consultation/sleight-of-hand in respect to the PIP regulations, where every draft set of regs that was put out for consultation set the eligibility for the Higher Rate of the PIP Mobility Component at being unable to walk 50m (as with DLA), but where the version laid before Parliament suddenly reduced this to a nonsensical 20m. DWP explained that 20m had always been their intention and that they were only altering the wording in order to remove confusion. The only confusion apparent to most of us was in our mistaken belief that the DWP had actually engaged in a genuine consultation exercise.

DWP stated before the Select Committee on Work and Pensions that their intention with the shorter limit was that 20m was enough to get people from disabled parking to inside a supermarket, but as (wheelchair-using) Committee Chair Dame Anne Begg pointed out in reply, there's not much point in just getting as far as the doorway. Most drastically, this change would result in many disabled people currently in receipt of the Higher Rate Mobility Compenent of DLA and who can walk between 20m and 50m, a number likely in the tens of thousands range, losing their eligibility to lease a wheelchair or car under the Motability Scheme, and thereby being excluded from participation in their local community, and in many cases losing their ability to work.

Having had DWP inflict a ridiculous limit on us in a clearly underhanded fashion, consulting on one limit and then slashing it by more than in half in the actual legislation, there were clear grounds for challenging the legality of the consultation via a Judicial Review, a process which was set in motion through Jane Young of Spartacus, with Latent Existence as one of the three test cases put forward. Today, even before that Judicial Review reached court, DWP have backed down and stated that they will be holding a new consultation process on the final PIP regulations starting in late June (i.e. imminently).

As Latent Existence says in his own blog, this is not a final victory. DWP have been consistently duplicitous in their handling of consultations with disabled people over the past several years. It was their calculated misrepresentation of responses by disabled people to the 2011 consultation into DLA that led to the original Spartacus Report and several notable defeats for the government in the House of Lords (which were sadly overturned by the Coalition majority in the Commons). The fact that DWP are holding another consultation is a sign that they did not feel their original PIP consultation would stand up when taken before a judge, but holding a consultation and taking notice of it are two separate processes. What we now need to do is ensure that the new consultation process is conducted in a fair manner, that pressure is brought to change the 20m limit through the consultation process, through MPs, disabled peoples' organisations and disability charities, and that the final report of the consultation adequately reflects the views submitted by disabled people, rather than what DWP would like the tabloid media to believe we said. We may have won this round, but that just wins us the right to start the struggle for our rights all over again.

If it's not a bedroom tax then it's not a spare room subsidy policy either

The Six O'Clock News on Radio 4 today covered a story about a woman who killed herself and left a note blaming the government cuts to her housing benefit. I suppose I should be grateful that the BBC are reporting this story at all, because most people who get their news from the BBC would hardly know that cuts to welfare are even happening. However, I am furious about this story because of the way they phrased the report. Here's how they referred to the cuts:

"her benefits were being cut as a result of the coalition's spare room subsidy policy.
...she was facing financial difficulty because of what critics have called the bedroom tax"

This is repetition of government propaganda. True, the cut is not called the bedroom tax. Nor is it the removal of a spare room subsidy, because there never was any such thing, merely people receiving enough housing benefit to cover their rent in the available social housing. The official name of this cut in the legislation is the under-occupancy penalty. Because that's what it is - a penalty for having a spare room, even if you had no choice about the number of rooms in the home you were allocated or if you need that room for medical equipment or numerous other reasons. It was never, ever a subsidy in the first place to remove. "Removal of the spare room subsidy" was a name given to the cut by a panicking government because people were calling it a bedroom tax and that was too close to the truth.

That the BBC repeated the official government line and referred to a spare room subsidy when reporting a suicide is a serious problem. Of course I don't believe the BBC is unbiased any more; if anything the BBC follow a pro-government line no matter who is in power. But if the BBC won't call it a bedroom tax then they shouldn't call it a spare room subsidy either. They should use the official name of under-occupancy penalty, but they won't because the word penalty is too revealing about this government's actions when they are still claiming that this is not about money and that they are protecting the most vulnerable.

Labour's latest ad

"Made by the many." A many that apparently doesn't include disabled people.

Not the disabled people who used to be employed in Remploy factories who made everything from wheelchair to computers.

And certainly not a peep about disabled people being employers; using their direct payments to give someone a job.

Nothing about disabled people keeping the car industry in business during tight financial times through the Motability scheme.

Nothing about the DLA that gets poured into the local economy through takeaways when people are unable to cook. Or to local cab companies.

To Labour disabled people aren't part of the many that keep this country going. We don't even exist.

PIP faces Legal Challenge!

PIP faces Legal Challenge!

Thanks again to the impossibly passionate Jane Young, wearespartacus.org.uk have today announced they will be working with @DoughtyStPublic and @LeighDay_Law tochallenge changes to the new PIP (Personal Independence Payments replacing DLA or Disability Living Allowance) mobility criteria.

Campaigners like Steve Sumpter (@latentexistence), myself, Kaliya Franklin and Jane herself have been invited to explain on radio and TV today, just what the changes will mean.

As regular readers will know, the government have constantly misled the public over the new benefit, claiming a 35% rise when Spartacus Report showed clearly that the rise is only 13% for the working age group who will be affected. Physical conditions have remained totally stable, whilst the 13% rise is almost all due to a rise in mental health conditions and learning disabilities, a trend seen worldwide, not just in the UK.

The DWP misled the public over the first consultation, claiming broad support for the changes, when in fact there was almost none.

After a passionate journey through the House of Lords, the government simply overturned all of the amendments we'd won (amendments that were reasonable and could have made PIP safer and fairer) using an archaic 16th century law known as "financial privilege"

Even at that point, once the changes had become law, the government assured campaigners that once they announced the finer details of PIP, there would be no further policy changes, However, when "regulations" were finally announced just before Christmas, the criteria for claiming the most help with mobility problems had been slashed from 50 mtrs to 20 mtrs without consultation or warning.

This means that many of the most vulnerable claimants of all will no longer qualify. A whopping 600,000 of them. The ability to walk 50 mtrs might just get you to your car and out at the other end, to, say, get to a supermarket scooter. 20 mtrs will get few people from their homes to even their car, leaving over half a million sick or disabled people effectively housebound.

As we all rush from interview to interview, it's clear those put up to oppose us don't even understand DLA or what it does. With that in mind, I thought I'd lay out the key points here for any of you to use or pass on.

All we can do is set the record straight whenever we are given the chance, so do feel free to copy and paste the following and send to whoever you can.

1) DLA is a working benefit. It does not stop a sick or disabled person from working - quite the opposite in fact. It is often used for transport to and from a job if the recipient can't manage public transport, or for care at home, to enable the claimant to get up and dressed in the mornings just to get to work.

2) DLA HASN'T risen by 35%, for working age claimants (the only one's affected by PIP) the rise is 13%. There has been almost no rise at all in claims for physical conditions, the rise is almost entirely down to an increase in mental health and learning disability claims, a trend seen in every country of the developed world.
By far the biggest increases come from demographics, children or pensioners, groups the government aren't transferring to PIP.

3) There were always face to face assessments for DLA (Atos did those too) and claimantsalways had to support their claims with evidence from their own GP or consultant

4) The government claim DLA needs reform because so many get lifetime awards. However, they announced a few months ago that they won't even be testing those with indefinite claims at all until after the next election. Indefinite awards make up nearly 70% of all DLA awards and the government claim over and over that it is this group who have been "left to languish" yet they've decided to do nothing about it at all.

5) DLA does not act as a dis-incentive to work, far from it. 60% of disabled people in the UK work.

6) Fraud is just half of one percent as consistently proven by the DWPs own figures. Yet the George Osborne announced a 20% cut back in June 2010 before a single assessment had taken place.

7) DLA saves the taxpayer many times the amount it costs. Study after study shows that sick and disabled people spend their DLA with amazing efficiency. If DLA is withdrawn, the need doesn't just go away and costs are simply transferred to an already crumbling social care service or the NHS.

8) The higher rate mobility criteria was slashed from 50 mtrs to 20 mtrs without consultation or warning, meaning that over 600,000 people will no longer qualify for the benefit. These are people who can barely walk at all - the most vulnerable the government claim to be protecting.

Please join us in countering the propaganda and mis-information our government are churning out today. Every challenge shows a few more people what is really going on in their name.

Legal action against the DWP over the #PIP consultation

I am one of three people asking for a Judicial Review over the consultation for Personal Independence Payments.

The request for a judicial review is on the basis that the Department for Work and Pensions did not conduct a proper consultation for PIP and if we are successful then they will be ordered to start the consultation again. If a judicial review is granted than it should take place sometime in July.

The initial consultation for PIP used inability to walk 50 metres to define eligibility for the enhanced rate of mobility component. That is, anyone who could not walk 50 metres without the use of a wheelchair would get highest rate of the benefit. After the consultation ended it emerged that the goalposts had been moved, and that the cut-off point for high-rate mobility would be just 20 metres. Those who can walk more than 20 metres but less than 50 metres safely, reliably and repeatedly may qualify for a lower rate of the benefit.

We will be arguing that the DWP were required to consult on such a fundamental change  and that they did not provide adequate information during the consultation that did take place. We will also argue that the DWP failed in their duty under the Equality Act 2010 to assess the impact of the new regulations on disabled people.

This change will affect me personally, albeit probably not until 2015 when those whose DLA has not already run out will be transferred to PIP. Those who receive the high-rate of mobility allowance under DLA are eligible to lease a car from the Motability scheme. If this requirement is kept with PIP then as someone who can usually walk more then 20 metres but not 50 metres without pain pain and exhaustion I will lose the high-rate mobility component and will therefore lose the car that restores much of my freedom and independence.

Public Law Solicitors are taking action on my behalf while Leigh Day are representing the two others involved in this case.

Press are welcome to contact me by email on latentexistence at gmail dot com.

More information will be at www.wearespartacus.org.uk

Please sign WOWpetition to demand a cumulative impact assessment of welfare reform.

---

Press release from Public Law Solicitors / Leigh Day 08/04/2013

Lawyers have announced that they are taking legal action against the Government on behalf of three disabled clients who are challenging the decision by Ian Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and pensions, to bring in more stringent measures to qualify for the higher rate mobility benefit which the Government has estimated will result in 400,000 fewer people being eligible to claim.

The three clients currently receive disability living allowance (DLA) including the higher rate of the mobility component. This non-means-tested cash benefit has been available since 1992 and provides people with assistance towards the costs of an adapted car, powered wheelchair or scooter through the Motability scheme.

Under DLA a person is entitled to the higher rate of the mobility component if they are ‘unable or virtually unable to walk’. Usually claimants are considered to be ‘virtually unable to walk’ if they cannot walk more than around 50 metres.

The new Social Security (Personal Independence Payment) Regulations 2013 (PIP) have reduced this benchmark distance to 20m.

Kim Storr has rheumatoid arthritis and other severe progressive conditions and her mobility is affected by joint swelling and pain. She relies on crutches. She currently receives DLA including the higher rate of the mobility component. Ms Storr needs an adapted vehicle to enable her to go out independently.

Steven Sumpter has ME, which has caused him increasing mobility problems. He can walk short distances with a stick, but is otherwise dependent on a wheelchair.  He was assessed as eligible for the higher rate of the mobility component of DLA last year, which he has used to lease a Motability car.

The third claimant is protected by an anonymity order to protect their identity.

Law firms Leigh Day and Public Law Solicitors argue that a consultation process set up by the Government to reassess the benefit was flawed. The Secretary of State did not consult on the proposal that the limit would be reduced to 20 metres. This suggestion was only introduced after all the consultation stages had passed.

Consultees were therefore denied the opportunity to comment on the proposal or to explain to the Secretary of State how such a restriction to the benefit will affect them and their independence.

The 50 metres distance is widely recognised in relation to other disability benefits and in guidance on the built environment, to represent a minimum functional level of mobility.

Proceedings have been issued against the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Ian Duncan Smith, claiming that the new regulations regarding the PIP payment are flawed and unlawful. They argue the policy-making process failed to properly consider the practical impacts the withdrawal of the benefit will have on people with significant mobility impairments.

Rosa Curling, from the Human Rights team at Leigh Day who is representing two of the disabled clients said:

“We have advised our clients that the consultation undertaken by the Secretary of State was unlawful. People were not properly informed that the limit might be reduced to 20 metres and had no opportunity to provide the Secretary of State with their views on this proposal.

“Removing this vital benefit to disabled people will have a devastating effect on many people’s lives and their ability to access and be part of our communities. The Secretary of State has a legal obligation to consider such impacts before deciding whether to limit access to this benefit.”

Karen Ashton from Public Law Solicitors who represents Mr Sumpter, said:

“What is at the heart of this legal challenge is fairness.  The extra costs of getting out and about for those who have severe mobility problems can be huge. The higher rate mobility benefit can make the difference between being able to do everyday things that everyone else takes for granted  - such as doing your own shopping and visiting friends and relatives  -  and only leaving the house for absolutely essential appointments. But the Government failed to mention the reduction to the 20m threshold in their consultations with disabled people and so those who are potentially affected have not had the chance to explain how devastating the consequences will be.”

ENDS

For further information please contact:

David Standard – Head of Media Relations, Leigh Day 0844 800 4981 or 07540 332717

Karen Ashton -  Public Law Solicitors 0121 256 0327 or  07812 165090

Steven blogs at latentexistence.me.uk and tweets as @latentexistence

Overheard in the Waiting Room

This morning, I took a pair of gruesomely infected toes to the doctor's. During the long wait, I politely eavesdropped on a conversation between three friends who had bumped into each other (that is, they had met by accident; they weren't seeking medical help having violently collided). I would guess that they were around retirement age, or maybe a little younger, two women and a man; ordinary folks. They competed as to whose winter coat had lasted longest, discussed Strictly Come Dancing and expressed some nostalgia for The News of the World before it went trashy.

Then they had a conversation, which went something like this:

A: Of course, all these cuts have just come in, haven't they? A lot of people are going to be struggling.
B: Oh yes. It's not fair that the poorest people should have to pay when it's the bankers who got us into this mess.
C: I know. It's only going to cause the country trouble in the long run, making people so badly off.
A: But there are some people swinging the lead.
B: That's for sure. You hear a lot about disability fraud.
C: Yeah and everybody knows somebody, don't they? Someone who's working the system.
A: But there's a lot of propaganda about that, I think.
B: Of course, the government want you to think they're all the same.
C: You can't believe anything you hear, that's for sure - especially not from this lot!

It went round like this, several times, sometimes with specific anecdotes or particular stories they had seen on the television and in newspapers. At one point, there was a very nuanced discussion of workfare (although they didn't use that term), which talked about the difficulties someone might have if they had depression, would benefit from work and might sign up for one of these schemes, only to get in trouble when they struggled to get out of bed in the morning and were late for their placement. Because people with depression can have trouble getting out of bed in the morning, however hard working and enthusiastic they are.

But time and again the same sentiments were repeated:

1. Some people are on the scrounge for sure. 
2. Some people are really suffering.
3. You can't believe anything your hear.

This disbelief was extended across the board. At one point the conversation shifted from a discussion of just how difficult it was going to be for some people - just how little money people would be left to live on - to the "scare-mongering" about how difficult it was all going to be.

And this is the trouble we have; the position that ordinarily apolitical people who are not directly affected by the cuts have been placed in. They don't trust what they hear - least of all from politicians. They care about the fact that people are being left with little to live on, and the removal of crisis safety-nets like the Social Fund and Legal Aid for civil cases. But, weighing the balance of everything they've been told, they feel that there's a fair amount of cheating going on and that needs to be stopped.

Most people I speak to, outside of disabled, poor or otherwise politically active types, feel the same. They support Welfare Reform in principle (and why not? Few people feel there's no room for improvement), they are anxious about how this effects vulnerable people in practice (People like you). But they don't know what the answers are and they feel that everyone who has a voice in the public sphere is probably lying to them.

I don't know what the answers are, but I wonder if this conversation is about to change. Although there's more to come, a lot of the cuts which came into place on Monday have been a long time coming, and the real life consequences have been - while reasonably speculated about - as yet uncertain. Now it's happening. The poorest people are poorer than they've been for many years. There are many more of them.

And maybe there's some optimism to be taken from the fact that people are confused. A few years ago, when the scrounger rhetoric had just got underway, I think the friends' conversation would be less balanced. The deserving poor would have been spoken about as rare exceptions, as opposed to "many".

See Also: John Harris: We have to talk about why some people agree with benefit cuts.

Government doesn't want to know what Welfare Reform will do to people

WOW Petition - that's a petition to stop the War On Welfare - calls for the DWP to carry out a cumulative  impact assessment on all the welfare reforms together. It is obvious to most people that the impact of cutting many benefits all at once is more damaging than cutting just one. But the government claim that it is just too difficult to do a cumulative impact assessment, that the changes are too complicated. In reply to the petition (a reply that was long overdue, the petition having doubled the necessary 10,000 signatures to merit one) the government said:

"Cumulative impact analysis is not being withheld – it is very difficult to do accurately and external organisations have not produced this either.

The Government is limited in what cumulative analysis is possible because of the complexity of the modelling required and the amount of detailed information on individuals and families that is required to estimate the interactions of a number of different policy changes."

It is not that difficult though, and certainly within the means of a government department when millions of people will be negatively affected. To prove the point think tank Demos have had a go at it themselves. They estimate that the total loss over  five years will be £28.3bn. Let me spell that out: Twenty-eight billion pounds. That is not - as my MP told me - the vulnerable being protected. That is the vulnerable being mugged.

Writing in The Guardian, report author Claudia Wood said:

At one end of the cumulative impact scale, 88,000 disabled people currently claiming employment support allowance (ESA) will feel a double whammy of a 1% cap on uprating and a 12-month eligibility limit. At the other end of the scale, at least 1,000 disabled people (possibly up to 5,000) will face six separate cuts to their benefits income. By the time the next round of cuts are due in four years, they will be £23,300 worse off per person.

In between these two groups are about 120,000 disabled people facing a triple cut, and 99,000 a quadruple cut. These combinations represent at the very least a loss of £6,309 per person by 2017. The worst loss of £23,461 per person by 2017 will be experienced by those unfortunate enough to lose their eligibility for disability living allowance and ESA, and who are reliant on other benefits that will only increase by 1% because of the rating cap or by the consumer prices index (CPI) instead of inflation.

Wood points out that these figures are an underestimate,  cuts to child benefit, the independent living fund, social fund or council tax credit being just a few other factors. Underestimate this may be, but it seems that the DWP are refusing to calculate even the minimum impact because they can't work out what the maximum impact is. We don't need to work out the worst case to be able to see that even the best case is not good.

It doesn't really matter though, because the government are just making excuses. The fact is that they don't want to know what the impact will be because if they knew then they would have no excuse for continuing with these savage cuts. It's actually worse than that, because they must know, but they don't want to be seen to know. As we saw last week, government ministers don't actually want to talk to the people affected, making bizarre excuses to get out of talking to Spartacus. They don't want to hear anything that would contradict their rhetoric.

These cuts don't make economic sense either, even when you view them for what they are rather than "reform" aimed at helping anyone. Cutting DLA will leave people stranded at home where their health will deteriorate and lead to higher costs to the NHS. Cutting the Independent Living Fund will institutionalise people, sending them back to expensive care homes and preventing them from living and working alongside the rest of society. Cutting money that is spent by disabled people on care and travel will damage the car industry and cut jobs for carers. Welfare isn't money that disappears, it is money that is ploughed straight back into the economy and its loss will be noticed. Although possibly not by George Osborne.

The government are sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting "La la la I can't hear you" when it comes to welfare reform. Sign WOWpetition to tell them that we know they can hear us and we're on to them and we won't stand for it.

Demos - Destination Unknown: April 2013
The Guardian - Claudia Wood: The government has a duty to assess the impact of its benefit cuts
The Guardian - Welfare cuts will cost disabled people £28bn over five years

Is It Coz We Is Disabled?

This afternoon Labour MP Michael Meacher obtained an adjournment debate (limited to 30 minutes) to raise the fact that DWP Minister Mark Hoban had refused to meet with himself, fellow Labour MP Tom Greatrex and Sue Marsh (@suey2y) and Kaliya Franklin (@bendygirl) of the disabled people’s group Spartacus to discuss the Work Capability Assessment, the reasons for which he details in his blog here. 

The debate descended into farce when it became apparent that of the seven or so MPs in the chamber, Mark Hoban wasn’t one of them, having apparently been delayed at the airport, with DWP Minister Esther McVey, the Minister for Disabled People, deputised in his place.

Michael Meacher opened the debate by explaining the background to his request for a meeting was the ongoing issue of Atos and the Work Capability Assessment, and that in his 40 years of parliamentary experience it was unprecedented for a minister to refuse point blank to meet with a delegation of people directly affected by parliamentary measures. He said that the recent debate on Atos and the WCA was one of the best he had ever experienced with no cross-party rancour, just cross-party condemnation of Atos, and no defence of DWP.

This was the reason he had sought a meeting with the Minister. He had waited five weeks for a reply, and ultimately had to submit a Parliamentary Question in order to force a response, a response which he described as parliamentary language for a flat ‘no’. He then approached Hoban in the lobby, only to be told 'I'm not seeing you', a statement repeated another three times, and then was told 'I'm not seeing Spartacus', again repeated three times.

Meacher then went on to explain how Spartacus is a loose collective of thousands of disabled people whose initial, evidence-based report showed how DWP had systematically misled the public on the degree of support for disability benefit cuts. As he pointed out, the Spartacus Report had trended spectacularly on Twitter on the day of its release and had since gone on to be referenced in the House, and by several other governmental committees. He noted that Spartacus have gone on to produce other evidence-based reports and that DWP ministers have repeatedly met with Spartacus members Sue Marsh and Kaliya Franklin, at the Conservative Party Conference, at other events, and have regularly debated with them on the BBC.

He conclude by noting that he could not understand why Mark Hoban was refusing to engage, noting that Spartacus planned to move for the immediate implementation of all reforms from the DWP-sponsored Harrington reviews to the WCA, noting that trials have shown that while full implementation of Harrington will reduce the number of assessments an Atos ‘Health Care Professional’ can carry out daily, from around 11 down to 4 to 5, the result is near 100% accuracy. (Current WCA rates show around 1 assessment in 6 overturned at appeal).

Meacher concluded that he could leave out Spartacus from the delegation but he refused to do so because he does not believe ministers can pick and choose. He said that the minister was free to persist with his intransigence, but he would not back down because hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled people have been subjected to real hardship and fear.

Esther McVey opened the Coalition’s response by explaining that Mark Hoban’s plane from Scotland had suffered engine failure and been forced to turn back. She then tried to blame Michael Meacher for Hoban’s failure to appear, saying the government would have been willing to reschedule, glossing over the fact that Michael Meacher would have been unlikely to obtain another position in the parliamentary schedule for the debate.

McVey then listed a score of charities, and companies operating in the welfare industry, who Mark Hoban had met with. It was immediately obvious that none of these are Disabled People’s User Led Organisations, but unfortunately this is not the first time that Mcvey has appeared not to understand the difference between a disability charity and a DPULO, nor to be aware of ‘Nothing for us, without us.’

McVey then emphasized that ‘We are keen to maintain a constructive dialogue to improve the work capability assessment.’ This was a very specific choice of words for which the reason would later become clear.

Michael Meacher then secured an intervention to repeat his question, as McVey apparently had no intention of getting to an answer any time soon. In fact it was becoming rapidly apparent that McVey’s primary intent was to run down the clock on the debate, and with only 30 minutes allocated there wasn’t a great deal of clock she needed to run down.

McVey then launched into a prolonged explanation of how Labour were to blame for the WCA (which both disabled people and MPs are well aware of), and how the Coalition have improved the WCA (which disabled people would dispute). She was again challenged to get to the answer, and after a further batch of playground politics – “They did it, Miss” – which she categorized as ‘essential context’ finally touched on something almost related to the issue.

This wasn’t to actually answer the question, of course, now she denied that the DWP ministerial office had failed to answer Michael Meacher within the required 20 working days. Michael Meacher responded by holding up the letter in question and reading out the dates, which were indeed more than 20 working days apart. McVey tried to claim that this was not the case, but then appeared to realise the futility of trying to shout down a man actually holding the evidence to prove her false.

With around 25 minutes of the debate gone, McVey then finally got to the point of her answer. That Mark Hoban would not meet with Spartacus, because Spartacus were unwilling to be reasonable. And DWP’s evidence for this was the language used in part of the foreword to the Spartacus produced 'People's Review of the WCA' (i.e. one paragraph in a one hundred page report). She seemed to be a little confused over what Spartacus had actually said, so for accuracy here is the original paragraph from the foreword:

"The WCA is a statement of political desperation. The process is reminiscent of the medical tribunals that returned shell shocked and badly wounded soldiers to duty in the first world war or the ‘KV-machine’, the medical commission the Nazis used in the second world war to play down wounds so that soldiers could be reclassified ‘fit for the Eastern front"

That quote was not by either Sue Marsh or Kaliya Franklin, the two Spartacus representatives who Mark Hoban had been asked to meet with, nor by any of the principal authors of the Spartacus reports, but was in fact by the author of the foreword to the People's Review, Professor Peter Beresford OBE, BA Hons, PhD, AcSS, FRSA Dip WP Professor of Social Policy Brunel University.

McVey then tried to mousetrap Michael Meacher by insisting that surely he would join her in condemning Spartacus for such outrageous language, making it clear that this would be a prerequisite for any meeting. With her careful eye on the clock McVey then sat, leaving Michael Meacher with little chance to say more than the parliamentary equivalent of “What?!” before the debate reached its deadline and the House rose, but it would be fair to say that the disabled twittersphere (which had either been watching the live web feed or following the people like me who were live tweeting it) exploded in outrage.

What makes McVey’s claims about Spartacus being unreasonable so utterly ludicrous was that the debate was chaired by the Deputy Speaker, Nigel Evans MP, and Kaliya Franklin, one of the two Spartacus representatives in question, had spent the previous week working in the Deputy Speaker’s office as a form of political work-experience, an internship arranged by none other than Minister of Work and Pensions Ian Duncan Smith (Hoban and McVey’s boss) and in part by Esther McVey herself.  

As Kaliya noted on Twitter: “Oo yes, I do believe I've also found the email's to Mark Hoban's secretary where I politely request a constructive meeting on #wca” and “ Hmm. I've just found an email I sent to Esther McVey in October 2012 where I made several constructive suggestions re #wca”

Clearly utterly unreasonable….

#BedroomTax: When 'Exempt' Means Nothing of the Sort

It was widely publicised today that, being the caring, sharing, thoroughly Christian minister he is, IDS had made a bunch of concessions on the Bedroom Tax - or 'the Spare Room Subsidy' as IDS prefers it be called in an attempt to convince Daily Mail readers that even our bedrooms are scroungers.

There was a concession on severely disabled children yesterday, followed by another  three concessions today: that bedrooms used for foster care would not be taxed, that bedrooms used by service personnel still living with their families would not be taxed, and that households with disability issues should be considered for exemption (note the lesser treatment of disability). But then you dig past the headlines and into the details and the exemptions turn out to be nothing of the sort. Taking them in turn:

For foster carers, the exemption only applies to a single room, so forget fostering a brother and sister, and only if the foster parents have fostered a child, or been approved to foster, within the last year. There is no guarantee this will be applied to people who become fosterers in future, and a vile comment a couple of weeks ago by Jacob ‘Where’s Nanny?’ Rees-Mogg shows the real Tory attitudes towards people who rely on Social Housing: “If fostering had a general exemption, everybody in receipt of social housing benefit would suddenly go off to the council and say that they wanted to be on the fostering lists, so that they would not have to give up their extra bedroom, but would then refuse any child who was sent to them.” So basically all plebs are lying scroungers, then, Jake?

Meanwhile for serving armed forces personnel still living with their parents (and remember that many front-line troops are still teenagers), the devil is again in the details; their bedrooms will be exempt as long as they are on operations and intend to return home. It’s the‘on operations’ that matters here, you’re only ‘on operations’ if you’re on the front-line in Afghanistan, Mali or the like. If you’re posted to Catterick for training, and live in Cornwall, or garrisoned in Colchester but live in Newcastle, tough, that doesn’t count as ‘on operations’.

It was so obvious that these two provisions would be extremely unpopular that you have to wonder if they weren’t a calculated and pre-planned sacrifice to grease the passage of the other provisions of the Bedroom Tax, which is a pattern of behaviour we’ve seen from IDS before, such as with the threat in the Welfare Reform Bill to remove DLA Mobility Component from people in residential care that was withdrawn at the last moment as a concession by the caring, sharing Tories.

But getting back to the disability-specific changes, this is where we see the true calculation. The exemption announced by IDS yesterday was that:

“where a local authority agrees that a family needs an extra bedroom because their child’s disability means they are unable to share, the family can be entitled to the spare room subsidy in respect of that extra bedroom.

“As with the housing benefit claim, the determination as to whether their disability requires them to have an extra bedroom is a matter for the local authority to decide with the help of Department for Work and Pension guidance and medical evidence.

“We will be issuing final guidance to local authorities on a number of areas this one also this week” 

In other words we’re now going to have disabled children (but not disabled adults, because clearly all the problems of disability disappear the moment you turn 18) facing an ATOS-like process to determine if their disability is severe enough for an exemption, and we all know how well the Work Capability Assessment has worked…. More subtly, the whole responsibility for deciding whether to exempt a disabled child has been pushed down onto local authorities, so that DWP will now be able to say “We don’t make the decisions,” words which have become ATOS’s standard excuse for the failings of the WCA. And all of this in an atmosphere of catastrophic cuts, where councils are looking to save every penny they can, not to be proactive in making sure disabled people don’t face being driven from their homes by the Bedroom Tax.

Today IDS added to that ‘exemption’ with a written statement claiming:

“I am also issuing guidance to local authorities emphasising that Discretionary

Housing Payments remain available for other priority groups including the needs of people whose homes have had significant disability adaptations and those with longterm medical conditions that create difficulties in sharing a bedroom.”

That sounds good, on the surface, but the Discretionary Housing Payments are even worse than a maybe-chance of an exemption. DHP is a solely temporary measure with limited funding, only £25m across the entire country, that has to be shared between every household facing problems with the transition to the Bedroom Tax, whether the issues relate to disability, finances, or whatever. And DHP is very specifically a payment to help with the transition costs of Bedroom Tax only, but not the ongoing year-on-year costs. The average impact of the Bedroom Tax is estimated at £14/week per household, the National Housing Federation has calculated that if the entire DHP fund was spread solely over affected DLA recipients it would amount to only £2.51/week per household. Worse, all DHP payments are at the discretion of the council, and (as was pointed out to me by @theyoungjane) discretionary decisions aren’t subject to appeal, no matter how daft they are. And there are some very daft Tory councils out there.

And all of these changes, some of them requiring very carefully written guidance and that people be trained to apply them with intelligence, compassion, and a deep understanding of disability, are being made three weeks before the Bedroom Tax goes live (which is incidentally the same day 13,000 millionaires get their £100,000 tax cut).

I'll close with a quote from @BendyGirl today that eloquently sums the entire situation up: "Bedroom tax? Stupidest idea evah!"

Update: It turns out that DWP have also dropped an appeal to the Supreme Court today, where they had been trying to overturn a decision by the Court of Appeal in the Gorry case that they must recognise the additional housing needs of a family with one child with Spina Bifida and another with Downs Syndrome. It is good that the action has been withdrawn, but the fact that they ever brought it, in effect seeking legal approval to insist that two very significantly disabled children must share a bedroom, is symptomatic of the true attitudes to disability within DWP. Details here.

ESA SOS - The Starting Gun #ESAendgame

Though I'm posting it here, this post was actually written by Sue and originally appeared on her own blog. Please post any comments there.

In a few weeks, I'm going to arrange for some very significant stories to break in the very mainstream press about ESA.

I've been collecting them for about 6 months and if there's any justice left at all, they will kill ESA once and for all.

They will totally change your perception of ESA and WCAs

We need a Spartacus 2 and as you all know, I've been sick as a dog.

Today is stage one. If you're in, please leave your Name and user name on twitter or Facebook (Feel free to only provide the latter if you like to keep your anonymity a little) and Constituency

There will be a task most days, so please keep watching my blog.

Today, I would like something very specific. What is the worst thing, for you about ESA/WCAs? I need you to simply leave a one line answer if possible, ie "1 Year Time Limit - It totally undermines any contributory principle"

The most popular of these "subjects" will make up every short section of the new report.

Share this post everywhere you can. This will be the start of our biggest fightback. EVERYONE will have to give this everything if it is to work. We need hundreds of responses to every request to make this a truly representative report from disabled people, by disabled people. The more join, the more powerful our voice and the more impact any final work will have.

What's more, by crowdsourcing our information and skills, believe me, we have 100 times the resources and ability of the DWP.

I have an awesome team in place - they produced #esaSOS in just 4 days. Hard though it will be, PLEASE, I'm still very weak and CAN'T read endless comments or pages and pages of Hansard or reports. Make this easy for me by keeping as close to the brief each day as you possibly can. I WILL cover everything, nothing will get missed. I'll ask the question you're itching to comment on, honest, but if we do it this way, I can delegate very much and empower you all to know exactly what we need.

Even a shadow of division will see us fail. This will need every group, every campaigner, every supporter, no matter how radical or moderate, how powerful or unknown, every journalist that has supported us, every politician who is fully signed up to our arguments.

If you have a prominent welfare/disability/political voice, website or other outlet, please cross post this from me.

So today, in the comment thread below please leave :

Name and social media name/s (or just the latter if more comfortable)
Constituency
The WORST thing for you about ESA/WCAs in one line.


****ESA is the most terrible failure of any developed nation for a very long time. The reasons are numerous and utterly undeniable. The government has failed to implement Harrington with any commitment and is actively increasing the rate at which vulnerable people face a failing and unfair test. We have engaged with a democratic process that has failed us at every stage. We have no choice left but to stop this ourselves. Over 100,000 people now face some kind of ESA assessment every MONTH. We can't afford to wait. ****

Enough is Enough.

From today, please use the hashtag #ESAendgame in all your tweets. We must build awareness and create an army or support and dissemination.

"Alone we Whisper, Together we Shout"


http://wowpetition.com/

A monumental day for equality #equalmarriage #pip

You'd have to be stranded on the island from Lost to not know that MPs were debating marriage equality in the House of Commons today.

But what might have escaped your attention was the Select Committee debate discussing the descriptors for Personal Independence Payment (PIP). It only affects us poxy disableds, of course. Someone questioned whether the scheduling was intentional; to sweep PIP changes through when all eyes were on equal marriage. But I doubt it. Everyone would have ignored PIP even on a day where there was no other news whatsoever and the press were reduced to reporting on toasted sandwiches that looked a bit like Jesus if you squinted in the right way.

They voted 10 - 7 to remove any help with mobility for disabled people who can walk more than 20 metres. So if you can walk 21 metres - which is probably the distance from your bed to your front door going via the bathroom for a wee then the kitchen for some breakfast - you can no longer get financial help towards a car or wheelchair that would allow you to get out of the front door to go to work.

I'd love the right to legally get married, I really would. But it all seems a bit pointless to me right now. Maybe that's because I'm feeling low having spent the afternoon alternately listening to disablist MPs talking about why they hate me and homophobic MPs talking about why they hate me. But I think mainly it feels pointless because with the move from DLA to PIP probably leaving me housebound I'm never actually going to be able to go out and meet a potential wife.

20 Metres, Coming Up Short

The Coalition are proposing to replace Disability Living Allowance (DLA) with Personal Independence Payments, or PIP, and as part of the change, they are proposing to ‘clarify’ how much difficulty in walking you must have to qualify for the PIP version of what was the Higher Rate of Mobility Component of DLA. The previous level was that you had to have significant difficulty in walking 50m, this has now been ‘clarified’ to 20m, a 60% cut, or rather less than the distance between the stumps on a cricket pitch. In the shambolic performance by Minister for(?) Disabled People Esther McVey and her advisors before the Select Committee on Work and Pensions on Monday 21^st January it became clear that the cut to 20m had been intended from the outset, and that references to 50m in all published drafts of the PIP descriptors except for the final one had been ‘inadvertently misleading’. The DWP’s Chief Medical Officer stated that 20m had been ‘intended to get someone from their car to the door of the supermarket’, only for (disabled) committee chair Anne Begg MP to ask him, ‘So it gets me to the door, what about getting me around the aisles?’ 

Taking advantage of Google Earth, I thought I would look at exactly how useful 20m is in the real world, by zooming in on the disabled parking in my local town centres, Rochester and Chatham, which should be fairly typical, and significantly better than many. In each case the yellow line on the image marks 20m from the nearest disabled bay towards the shops, banks and other facilities a disabled person might need to access, the arrow pointing towards where you would want to go.

Rochester

First the major carpark (it isn’t normally used as a market as it was in the Google Earth picture), which only has six disabled bays near the High Street. As the High Street is up a small bank there is an accessible ramp, and 20m will barely get you to the top of it. Double it and a bit more and you might make it to the door of the local chemist/post office. (Town Centre redevelopment plans propose turning this car park into a square and relocating parking several hundred metres away).

Next the other group of disabled parking bays in the same car park, which are hidden away around its furthest corner, between the A2 dual carriageway and a bit of the old city wall (you really couldn’t make this up). 20m won’t even get you into the main carpark and there is quite literally nowhere else to go (and special kudos to Mr White-Van-Man for parking over 3 disabled bays).

Moving on we have the small disabled car park at the other end of the High Street, just four bays in this one, I think I have managed to park in it once in a decade. The line shows you that again 20m won’t get you on to the High Street, never mind to any of the shops or other facilities (the vehicle apparently parked closer is using a turning space).

Finally for Rochester, the spot I normally have to park in, because by the time I get over to Rochester, every disabled bay has inevitably long since been occupied. This is the closest legal on-street parking spot to the High Street on a Saturday, and 20m doesn’t get you remotely near it.

Chatham

Chatham is perhaps an even more important test for disabled bays and 20m, because not only do we have the normal range of shops and banks, but also DWP’s Jobcentre Plus, and the Atos Assessment Centre.

The first of two large disabled parking areas is behind the theatre, less than ideally it is situated up a relatively steep bank. As can be seen, 20m will barely get you to the top of the ramp down to the High Street.

The second large disabled car park is tucked away at the back of the shopping centre (servant’s entrance yet again!), there are three potential directions out of this one, so I have combined the results from Google Earth onto one image. Heading out of the car park to top right takes you into the shopping centre, but only onto a corridor, barring a single café it is another 100m to get to any shops and several hundred metres to the only post office in Chatham. To bottom left you have the choice of a rather icky alleyway towards the High Street, or a longer route that takes you to the High Street along the road, but the first half of that road has no footpath. Unfortunately 20m barely gets you out of the car park. And tucked away at the bottom left of the picture, 150m from the car park, is the Atos assessment centre (marked ‘A’) and another 20m beyond it the closest bank to any of Chatham’s disabled parking. To bottom right of the carpark is a pathway around the edge of the shopping centre, 20m will barely get you started on that route, but 200m away, across the dual carriageway, is the Jobcentre Plus (marked ‘J’).

There is one further car park with a couple of disabled bays, and a couple of on-street disabled bays next to it, 20m from that will get you to the 1^st floor back door of one of the department stores, but not actually into it.

And that is it for Chatham Town Centre, as the High Street is surrounded by bypasses, there is no on-street parking that can usefully supplement the disabled bays.

And finally my local out of town supermarket. 20m will actually get you through the doors, but as Anne Begg pointed out, just getting in the door doesn’t actually do you much good.

Remember, in all of these cases I have measured from the closest disabled bay towards the nearest useful destination. In almost every case 20m from the furthest bay won’t even get you out of the disabled car park, and if you want to get to something other than the nearest destination, such as to any bank in either of the two town centres, and likely in the whole of the 265,000 population Medway Towns, then you are looking at considerably further. The last bank even remotely close to 50m from any of these disabled bays closed a few months ago, and you are now looking at significantly more than 100m to get to one. And demand for these disabled parking bays massively exceeds provision, the Chatham situation is so bad I go into the town centre about once a year, yet live less than 5 minutes drive away.

So there we have it, 20m may be the Coalition’s chosen mark for what constitutes a major mobility impairment, but it is so short a distance, less than the length of the floor of the Commons, that it is functionally useless, even with the help of a blue badge. So if 20m is so short that it can’t get you anywhere, why is 21m long enough that it no longer qualifies as a significant impairment?