Confirmed - The FULL Impact of Cuts Disabled People Fac

Since the coalition came to power, sick and disabled people have claimed we are being fundamentally harmed by the coalition welfare reforms. Not scroungers or skivers, but people living with long term serious illnesses like me, or who live with physical disabilities. Adults AND children. Young and old. People with terminal conditions, people with kidney or heart failure, people waiting for transplants and even people in comas. None have been spared. The government repeatedly assure you they have.

The government have of course denied that they are putting an unreasonable share of austerity cuts on us. Repeatedly and often aggressively. This is how they respond to the UN of all people :

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2681313/The-Brazil-Nut-strikes-IDS-anger-former-Marxist-Raquel-Rolnik-attacks-benefit-cuts.html

Since 2011, almost every main voice involved in the services and systems that support sick and disabled people have argued that we must know how all of the changes TOGETHER have affected us so particularly.

Everything we rely on has been cut severely - in some cases by up to 40%. Disability benefits, sickness benefits, social care services, housing support, legal aid for tribunals, respite care, the independent living fund, council tax relief, higher education funding, everything.

It is very possible that if you were affected by one of the changes, you were affected by several or even all of them.

Whilst the government paid lip service to assessing what impact their reforms would have on sick and disabled people, they only did so one by one. They always claimed it was impossible to assess them all together and specifically, how they would affect disabled people when combined.

It has been a long and dishonest journey. As with so many things, the government have done everything in their power to keep the figures from the public.

They said that it wasn't possible despite a petition gathering over 100,000 signatures calling for what they called a "cumulative impact assessment" or CIA.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/43154 (Scroll down for gov response)

The government treated the debate it generated in parliament - a debate sick and disabled people themselves worked so hard for - like a Punch and Judy show of partisan nonsense. You can watch it for yourself if you click on the following link :

http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/backbench-business-committee/news/mps-debate-welfare-reform-e-petition/

They said it wasn't "robust" when both the very well respected Dr Simon Duffy from the Centre for Welfare Reform and the equally well respected think tank Demos produced models they believed were viable.

And finally, just 2 days ago, Lord Freud, the failed millionaire ex-banker who re-designed our entire welfare system in just 3 weeks, wrote an official response to the SSAC, the government's own Social Security Advisory Committee, who alsocalled for a CIA relating to disability, confirming yet again, that he believed it was impossible to assess all of the changes sick and disabled people have faced and claiming that the IFS, the all powerful Institute for Fiscal Studies, agreed with him.

This was yet another lie from Freud - there is no other word for it. As the IFS have confirmed

“We can’t find anything we have written down saying we can’t do a CIA....We do think it is possible to do a CIA of tax and benefit changes for the disabled population as a whole."
http://disabilitynewsservice.com/2014/07/ministers-humiliated-over-cumulative-impact-assessment/

As it happens, they did one themselves for Wales

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/18405/2/120228reformsummaryen.pdf

Today, at the request of the European Human Rights Commission, (EHRC) NIESR, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research have produced a definitive CIA and it is shocking 

equalityhumanrights.com/commission-welcomes-report-financial-policy-making-and-modelling-cumulative-equality-impacts 

"Figure 4.9 shows that households with disabled children lose out by more in cash terms than households with disabled adults, with households with disabled children and adults losing out by more than either group – around £1,500 per household per year on average.
"Households with no disabled adults or disabled children in the 7th and 8th deciles [wealthier households] actually gainslightly from the reform package, whereas households with disabled adults or children (or both) lose out. At the bottom of the distribution, households with no disabled people, or with disabled adults, do not lose as much on average as households with disabled children, or both disabled adults and children. In percentage terms the distributional effects are fairly regressive across all four groups, with households with disabled adults and children doing worst of all up to the top decile."

 As one of the authors, Jonathan Portes says in an article for the Guardian today

"Modelling the cumulative impact is feasible and practicable – at least by gender, age, disability and ethnicity. Our model isn’t perfect and could be improved, but it can be done.....Families that have a disabled adult or child lose perhaps five times as much proportionally as better-off able-bodied families."

There is now absolutely no doubt at all that sick and disabled people have been hit over and over again by a barrage of cuts and the more vulnerable the family; the more disabled people within it; the more they have lost.

The DWP, Iain Duncan-Smith, Lord Freud and many right wing media outlets have kept this information from the public through every possible means. They will probably do so again today.

But over 100,000 people signed the WOW petition.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/43154

Think tanks and charities and many journalists know that this is hugely significant. And as ever, we can and will make our own news.

PLEASE, CROSS POST THIS IF YOU HAVE A BLOG, WRITE ABOUT IT IF YOU HAVE A COLUMN, FIND A SLOT FOR IT IF YOU ARE A PRESENTER, TWEET IT OR SHARE IT IF YOU ARE A SOCIAL MEDIA USER, SEND IT TO EVERYONE AND ANYONE YOU THINK MIGHT CARE OR WHO COULD HELP YOU GET IT TO A WIDER AUDIENCE.

YOU CAN USE THE BUTTONS BELOW THIS ARTICLE TO SHARE IT TOO.

We now know that this government have harmed the very people they promised us they would protect. They have harmed the very people that voters never wanted to be harmed. They have lied about the harm being done at every stage and have actively tried to keep it from both parliament and the media.

If ever a story needed to be seen and understood, it is this. If you never bothered to click on the links in an article for more information before, click on these. It is a shameful and repellant story and those responsible have no place whatsoever within 100 miles of Westminster. 

PIP judicial review: Court rules against us but vindicates our case

We lost. The judge ruled that in the end the consultation process for PIP was not unfair.

However that is not the whole story. You see, the judge found that it was the second consultation that made things right. The first consultation, he had some harsher words for. Words such as:

"Unfortunately mind-bogglingly opaque." (Paragraph 105 part ii)
"At best ambivalent" (Paragraph 105 part vii)
"Convoluted, inherently unclear, ambiguous and confusing.  No construction allows for full coherence." (Paragraph 106)

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the way the government chose to do things, I think you'll agree.  The government's legal team also agreed, and in fact they have accepted that they must share a portion of the costs of this judicial review in the face of evidence that it was indeed justified.

Not only that, but the government made it perfectly clear that they know exactly how much their policies will hurt people but want to do it anyway.

“… [T]his was recognised from the outset.  In developing the PIP assessment we were aware that the vast majority of recipients of DLA were individuals with genuine health conditions and disabilities and genuine need, and that removing or reducing that benefit may affect their daily lives.  However, we believe that these impacts can be justified as being a logical result of distributing limited resources in a different and more sustainable way…”.
(Paragraph 80)

Let's see that again:

"we were aware that the vast majority of recipients of DLA were individuals with genuine health conditions and disabilities and genuine need, and that removing or reducing that benefit may affect their daily lives."

And again:

"genuine need"

So we have the government's lawyers arguing that the DWP and the government ministers know full well that they are removing vital support from hundreds of thousands of people who have few other options and who will suffer as a result. And they are doing it to save money.

The judge agreed with the DWP that taking money from physically disabled people to allocate to other PIP claimants achieves "substantive equality between physically and non-physically disabled." I argue that this has reduced the equality of physically disabled people compared to not-yet-disabled people, purely because of budget.

This is Lowest common denominator equality.

This is your government. This is what the society that we live in is prepared to accept.

The court's findings and what's next

The judge was persuaded by Dr Bolton's evidence that the government could have changed their decision had they decided to listen to the overwhelming opposition to the 20m rule in the second consultation, and so it was not unfair. My legal team and I disagree. We still argue that the decision had long since been made and that the secretary of state had a closed mind by this point, and so the second consultation was not at a formative stage.

Although the judgment went against us I feel that the judge's analysis of the first consultation is vindication for our bringing this case to court. Don't forget that the second consultation only came about after this case was given permission to proceed and the DWP realised that they could not get away with such a shambles.

I hope that the admission by the government that they know exactly what they are doing will make people wake up to what is happening. Meanwhile, this is not the end. The legal team and I are considering our options to appeal this result.

Press Release from Public Law Solicitors

PIP Consultation Judicial Review Press Release

This article is crossposted from latentexistence.me.uk

#DisabilityConfident - a Wasted Year

It's coming up on a year since DWP launched Disability Confident, their campaign to try and get more disabled people into work by not challenging workplace disablism (yes, you read that right), and DWP are trying to drum up attention for the anniversary by organising a Twitter Thunderclap, which shows every sign of being more a drizzle in a teacup than a thunderclap as a day before it executes it only has 245 supporters, about half of whom are individual DWP Job Centres or government ministries. Which if you think about it means they can't even get a significant fraction of the people who have been through Disability Confident events in this last year to voice their support for it.

I've talked about my problems with Disability Confident in earlier blogs, about its deeply offensive focus on inspiration-porn and how the 'It's about Ability, not Disability' tagline sends entirely the wrong message in 'So What's Wrong With Disability Confident?' and about its failure to address workplace disablism, the root of the problem, in 'Disability Confident and the Elephant in the Corner', so with a year gone, how has Disability Confident performed?

The answer isn't a good one. Make no mistake, I agree with the stated aims of Disability Confident, because the difference in the rates of non-disabled and disabled employment is a national disgrace, but I think they've picked a godawful way of approaching the problem, and that that is a deliberate decision, as demonstrated by then Minister for Disabled People Esther McVey's statement at the launch that she wasn't comfortable with telling people what to do - unfortunately when she said 'telling people what to do' she actually meant enforcing our employment rights under the Equality Act, 2010. Rather than take on the actual problem of workplace disablism, Disability Confident tries to pretend that the problem is just that employers might be a bit 'embarrassed and uncomfortable' with disabled people, and tries to challenge that by painting us as 'inspiring'. The 'embarrassed and uncomfortable' message was handled far better by Scope's #EndTheAwkward campaign, which achieved greater penetration in a week with its three ads than Disability Confident has achieved in an entire year of events; meanwhile people, including keynote speakers, are still coming out of Disability Confident events and tweeting about how inspiring we all are - so that's another generation of managers and recruiters taught to objectify disabled people rather than treat us as normal, which actually pushes the workplace equality cause backwards rather than forwards.

Nor have the online Disability Confident materials been much better, not only do they try to avoid emphasising our legal rights as job applicants and employees under the Equality Act, 2010, but one so-called 'resource' for employers trumpeted by the #DisabilityConfident tweet stream of @DWPGovUK managed to classify Autism, which is a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (i.e. a developmental disability with general effects), in with the Specific Learning Difficulties such as Dyspraxia and Dyslexia (i.e. developmental disabilities with localised effects), this is about as correct as classifying a potato as a flower.... That entire 'Hidden Disabilities Toolkit' website has currently been taken down for rework, and the notice for that claims that the SpLDs are part of the Autism Spectrum, completely reversing their prior statement, and still getting it utterly wrong!

I'm trying to think of something Disability Confident actually gets right, I really am, but I'm coming up blank. We are faced with a chronically discriminatory jobs market, which has been resisting legislation to fix it since at least the Disabled Persons (Employment) Act 1944 (which created the old Registered Disabled system and employment quotas), together with rampant workplace disablism, and DWP are trying to fix it by saying the problem is that people are a little embarrassed by disability. I've been through the workplace disablism wringer, and my manager's problem wasn't that he was 'embarrassed' by me, it was that he openly stated all disabled people should be forcibly retired, and set out to make sure precisely that happened to me.

The first year of Disability Confident hasn't been the success DWP are trying to paint it, if anything the inspiration-porn focus of the campaign has worked to entrench the problem of disabled workers being perceived as the other, and until we are seen as no different to any other worker we will not make progress on disability employment. Of course the fact that every other mention of disability by DWP is aimed at portraying us as lazy, frauds and scroungers doesn't exactly enshrine us as ideal workers in the eyes of recruiters and managers.

Disability Confident is meant to run for another year, the only way that it will make progress, and counter the damage it has already done, is to actually get out there and challenge workplace disablism. The message disabled people need Disability Confident pushing isn't 'We took on X as a token and they're sooo inspiring', it's 'Company Y refuses to employ disabled people and we are therefore taking them to court for breaching the Equality Act 2010', because when you have been trying softly-softly for 70 years without progress, its probably a sign that it's long past time to start kicking butt and naming names, pour encourager les autres.

New Disability Minister, Same as the Old Disability Minister

In an utter farce during yesterday's Cabinet reshuffle, disabled people were left for several hours under the impression the post of Minister for Disabled People had been axed. Existing minister Mike Penning, no loss, had been moved off to become Minister for State for both Policing and Justice, the sort of authoritarian roles which will clearly suit him better, and the odious Esther 'they get better' McVey, his predecessor in the role before being promoted to Minister of State for Employment had had her government web page amended to say that, 'from July 2014' she was taking over the responsibilities for the Minister for Disabled People role. Then, much later, came the announcement, and via 'rumours from within DWP' to quote the Guardian's Politics Blog, rather than being announced via Cameron's twitter feed as with other appointments, that Mark Harper would be taking over as Minister for Disabled People. Clearly disabled people are beneath Cameron's dignity to address as he does for other ministerial posts.

So who is Mark Harper? Well, for a start he's the former Minister for Immigration who signed off on the 'Go Home' racist vans, and I say 'former Minister' because it then emerged he was employing an illegal immigrant as his cleaner and had to resign. But after a bare six months on the back benches his record has been washed clean and he's back in government. The question is whether he'll be any different to his three Tory predecessors: Miller, Miller, the Cripple Killer, the odious 'they get better' McVey, and Penning, all of whom have functioned more as Ministers against Disabled People than Ministers for Disabled People. Well the good news is he actually has some background with disability, having been Shadow Minister for Disabled People before he was elected, the bad news is that he has form for openly accusing disabled benefit claimants of being frauds and scroungers, and he did this while Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform in the Cabinet Office. Appearing on Any Questions on 10 September 2010, Harper stated: "There are definitely some people in our country, and everyone in every community knows who they are, who are able to work, and don't, and those people mustn't be given the option of staying on benefits when other people are going out and working incredibly hard to try and support their families" and then, when told by the original questioner that he should be condemned for his language: "I gave a very balanced answer, when I said there are some people, and it was very clear during the General Election campaign, because everybody sees them, able-bodied people who have no barriers to work who choose not to. And there's nothing that upsets people who work hard to take care of their families, who see other people living at least as good a life as they do, who don't work for a living. They find it outrageous and particularly when money is very tight, they want the government to do something about it." This is absolutely classic IDS-style demonization of disabled people with all the requisite buzz-words of 'hard-working people' and 'everybody sees them' to imply that the overwhelming majority of disabled people in receipt of disability benefits are frauds and scroungers, and that if you don't agree then you aren't one of the right-thinking people. Thrown into the middle of that there's also the gem of "the Work Programme... will be very personalized ... trying to fit the help that they get to the particular needs that they've got" - if anyone has come across the Work Programme doing that, let us know! You can listen to him saying all of this here, from 32:45.

So there we have it, the new Minister Against Disabled People, wielding the demonization brush with the best of them and clearly no more a friend and supporter of Disabled People than any of his predecessors.

PIP consultation judicial review starts today

Today a judge will consider whether the Department of Work and Pensions carried out a fair consultation when it decided that only people who could walk less than 20 metres would get the full amount of help for mobility.

Where with Disability Living Allowance claimants had to be able to walk less than 50 metres to qualify for the higher rate, under Personal Independence Payments the cut-off will be just 20 metres. People who fall between those two distances will receive the lower rate of £21.55 a week instead of the higher rate of £56.75. As a result they will no longer qualify to lease a car from the Motability scheme and if they currently have one it will be taken away. Other things that may be affected can include automatic entitlement to bus passes and local taxi or dial-a-ride schemes. The lower rate of £21.55 won't stretch much beyond one taxi trip to see a doctor or hospital in many areas.

Although three people initially pursued a judicial review, two cases were put on hold and my case was continued as representative of the others. The judicial review will examine the consultation about PIP that took place in early 2012 and the second consultation that focused on just the mobility component which took place in late 2013.

The main case is that the first consultation did not address the change to 20 metres while, by the time it got to the second consultation it was too late because there was no realistic possibility of change. The rest of the scheme had already been put in place and so money had already been allocated elsewhere.

In response to the second consultation the DWP unexpectedly claimed that the budget that in the past helped people with physical disabilities to get out and mobile had been reallocated to help people with learning disabilities and mental health problems. This pitting of one impairment against another is fundamentally unfair.. Rather than address inequality by bringing everyone up to the same mobility level, they have chosen to help one group by seriously disadvantaging another. It would seem that the government has seen the word equality but has not understood what it really means. If they had told us what was in their minds when they were consulting we might have had a chance to put them right.

The judicial review will be heard at the Adminstrative Court in Bull Street, Birmingham starting at 13:00 today and all day tomorrow. We don't yet know when we will hear the results. There will be a vigil outside the courts in Bull Street, Birmingham today at 13:00 which supporters may wish to attend. Please spread the word and tell your friends to look out for this story in the news.

Related blog posts

PIP 20 metre rule consultation response: “We’re not listening.”
Victory! DWP to launch PIP mobility consultation
PIP Judicial Review given the go ahead
Announcement: legal action against the DWP over the #PIP consultation
Why I am suing the government
If you can only walk twenty metres you’ll get no help
Replacement of disability living allowance headline news for hours
Two weeks until PIP Judicial Review – 20 metre limit in the dock