Yesterday's budget contained a kick in the teeth for disabled people, quickly followed by a punch in the face.
The Chancellor's retreat on child benefit, moving the threshold for ineligibility from those earning over £43,000 to those earning over £60,000, was a bare-faced example of the Government looking after its own voters. When the planned benefit cut was announced last year there were howls of outrage amongst higher rate earners, and the Tories, mindful an election has to be fought in perhaps two years time, decided to try and save their own skins.
How is this relevant to disabled people?
When the recent Welfare reform Bill passed through the House of Lords, three defeats were enacted on the Government as the Lords chose to make changes that they believed would safe-guard some of the most sick and disabled in the country. One of those changes was to extend the length of time that people on contributory-based Employment Support Allowance could claim the benefit. The Government proposed that those people place in the Working Capability Group of ESA (so claimants who are too ill to work but should be able to in the future) could only claim the benefit for a year. The Lords voted to extend this to two years to ensure that people had enough time to get better before being forced into work. Macmillan cancer support for example argued that annually 7.000 cancer patients, routinely placed in the Working group of ESA, take longer than 12 months to recover.
Although the Lords followed due democratic process to enact these changes, they have not come into force. The Government used 'financial privilege' to block these amendments. In short, MPs cried "Sorry, no money!" and did so in a way that has seen no precedent.
But suddenly come budget day, the Government discovered a stash of cash to save the child benefit of higher rate tax-payers, those who are doing ok in life, and yet still no money to extend ESA for those who are too sick to work through no fault of their own. More worryingly for democracy, the Government places greater value on the opinion of its voters then on the democratic process of a Bill being passed into law.
The second fear hidden in the budget was Osborne's casual mention that Ian Duncan Smith would have to find a further £10 billion of welfare cuts on top of the £18 billion already slashed from these bills. The biggest slice of welfare is spent on old age - with today's vicious headlines about a granny tax I can't see the Government making any further cuts to pensioners. Child benefit cuts now seem completely off the table, a decision that Ian Duncan Smith may come to resent Osborne for as he frantically tries to cut £10 billion.
So where can more cuts be found? Housing benefit perhaps, childcare credits even, but a clear forerunner would be disability benefits. Disability Living Allowance is already scheduled to be scrapped next year, and replaced by Personal Independence Payments (PIP). In the Government's last spending review it arbitrarily decided to cut recipients of PIP by 20%, before it had even decided the criteria for eligibility or assessed the needs of a single disabled person.
What's the betting that in the next spending review the Government decides to save 25% or even 30% from the PIP bill? I, for one, am very worried.
As first published on nhsbuff
Campaigning against the government's distressing war on disabled benefit claimants. All posts represent the opinions of their respective authors and not WtB as a whole.
Friday, 23 March 2012
Monday, 19 March 2012
The Government’s disability strategy out of touch with the reality of cuts
Earlier this month the Government ended its consultation period asking disabled people to help develop its disability strategy. Maria Miller, minister for disabled people, has said that: “The Government is committed to enabling disabled people to fulfil their potential and have the opportunity to play a full role in their community”. But in reality it is clear that the Government lacks any cohesive policy that will enable this to happen.
In the last three years 31 people have died while awaiting appeals against Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) medicals that had found them fit to work. At their most vulnerable, the sick and disabled were left worrying to the day they died about how they and their family would cope financially while their illness was slowly killing them. Society should be in uproar that people in dire need turned to the state for help and were failed by it, but instead media and Government debate focuses on disabled ‘scroungers’, further isolating the disabled from their communities.
Yet while it could be argued in the case of ESA that Government incompetence is forcing disabled people into hardship, the same cannot be said for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), the new benefit that is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Under PIP eligibility rules, even if you cannot walk more than 50 metres and need a wheelchair to get about for any longer distances, a disabled person still won’t be eligible for higher rate mobility – which in short means they will most likely lose access to a car through the motability scheme and the freedom such a vehicle gives them that their body cannot.
By cold-hearted design, these ‘independence payments’ will in fact take independence away from severely disabled people and force them to remain in their homes. No wonder Lady Grey-Thompson, speaking to the Guardian last month, said: “I worry that it is going to become the way it was when I was young where you just didn’t see disabled people on the street because they were locked away.”
These aren’t the only cuts aimed at disabled people. The Department of Work and Pensions’ own analysis into the housing benefit reforms states that 450,000 disabled people will face cuts to their allowance under new rules. 78,000 disabled people who use legal aid to appeal against decisions to deny them benefit will lose this support under Ken Clarke’s reforms. The Independent Living Fund (ILF) has been entirely closed to new claimants and by 2015 payments to the 21,000 severely disabled people it helps will cease. Tax credits to help with the extra costs of raising a disabled child will be cut from a maximum of £54 a week to £27 a week under Ian Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit changes – cuts that the Children’s Society says will see some families with disabled offspring £1,400 worse off a year. According to a Government Select Committee on Health, nearly two thirds of local authorities in England have reduced their disabled and adult social care budgets. As such councils have drastically altered their criteria for providing care to disabled adults, leaving many people unable to wash and dress themselves properly isolated in their own filth as they are not disabled enough to qualify for care.
These cuts will severely curtail disabled people’s ability to “fulfil their potential”. PIP will actually remove independence from disabled people, the scrapping of ILF will see disabled people condemned to care homes, decisions to limit ESA to one year, leaving 7000 cancer patients without any financial support while they are still too unwell to work, will only help in moving disabled people into poverty, not into the workplace. Cuts to legal aid will take away their voice, housing benefit remove them from often supportive communities and homes that are specially adapted for their needs. Harsh reductions in social care budgets will see people stuck in hospital for longer periods of time as they cannot be discharged into communities because they lack provision for their basic care. Disabled people were already twice as likely to be living in poverty than others before these cuts were imposed: no wonder disabled people up and down the country are scared stiff of these ‘reforms’.
The Government’s consultation document, entitled ‘Fulfilling potential’, makes specific mention of “tackling discrimination” towards disabled people and “promoting positive attitudes”. Yet charities have directly linked a rise in disabled abuse with the increasing rhetoric from Government ministers that disabled people are scrounging off society.
So bad has the Government’s attitude become that disability groups are now questioning whether they can continue to work with it on shaping further welfare reforms.
By the end of this parliament, if all these cuts are implemented, far from disabled people fulfilling their potential, the Coalition would instead have successfully reversed twenty years of advances made in helping the disabled play a valued and active part in society. Shame on all MPs if that is their intention. And if it isn’t, then the Government must wake up to the impact of these cuts, ban negative ministerial rhetoric linking the disabled with ‘scroungers’ and honour its supposed desire to develop policies that give back respect and support to some of the most vulnerable people in society.
Previously published on the blog nhsbuff (apologies for the slow cross posting - illness took my eye off the ball)
In the last three years 31 people have died while awaiting appeals against Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) medicals that had found them fit to work. At their most vulnerable, the sick and disabled were left worrying to the day they died about how they and their family would cope financially while their illness was slowly killing them. Society should be in uproar that people in dire need turned to the state for help and were failed by it, but instead media and Government debate focuses on disabled ‘scroungers’, further isolating the disabled from their communities.
Yet while it could be argued in the case of ESA that Government incompetence is forcing disabled people into hardship, the same cannot be said for Personal Independence Payments (PIP), the new benefit that is replacing Disability Living Allowance (DLA). Under PIP eligibility rules, even if you cannot walk more than 50 metres and need a wheelchair to get about for any longer distances, a disabled person still won’t be eligible for higher rate mobility – which in short means they will most likely lose access to a car through the motability scheme and the freedom such a vehicle gives them that their body cannot.
By cold-hearted design, these ‘independence payments’ will in fact take independence away from severely disabled people and force them to remain in their homes. No wonder Lady Grey-Thompson, speaking to the Guardian last month, said: “I worry that it is going to become the way it was when I was young where you just didn’t see disabled people on the street because they were locked away.”
These aren’t the only cuts aimed at disabled people. The Department of Work and Pensions’ own analysis into the housing benefit reforms states that 450,000 disabled people will face cuts to their allowance under new rules. 78,000 disabled people who use legal aid to appeal against decisions to deny them benefit will lose this support under Ken Clarke’s reforms. The Independent Living Fund (ILF) has been entirely closed to new claimants and by 2015 payments to the 21,000 severely disabled people it helps will cease. Tax credits to help with the extra costs of raising a disabled child will be cut from a maximum of £54 a week to £27 a week under Ian Duncan Smith’s Universal Credit changes – cuts that the Children’s Society says will see some families with disabled offspring £1,400 worse off a year. According to a Government Select Committee on Health, nearly two thirds of local authorities in England have reduced their disabled and adult social care budgets. As such councils have drastically altered their criteria for providing care to disabled adults, leaving many people unable to wash and dress themselves properly isolated in their own filth as they are not disabled enough to qualify for care.
These cuts will severely curtail disabled people’s ability to “fulfil their potential”. PIP will actually remove independence from disabled people, the scrapping of ILF will see disabled people condemned to care homes, decisions to limit ESA to one year, leaving 7000 cancer patients without any financial support while they are still too unwell to work, will only help in moving disabled people into poverty, not into the workplace. Cuts to legal aid will take away their voice, housing benefit remove them from often supportive communities and homes that are specially adapted for their needs. Harsh reductions in social care budgets will see people stuck in hospital for longer periods of time as they cannot be discharged into communities because they lack provision for their basic care. Disabled people were already twice as likely to be living in poverty than others before these cuts were imposed: no wonder disabled people up and down the country are scared stiff of these ‘reforms’.
The Government’s consultation document, entitled ‘Fulfilling potential’, makes specific mention of “tackling discrimination” towards disabled people and “promoting positive attitudes”. Yet charities have directly linked a rise in disabled abuse with the increasing rhetoric from Government ministers that disabled people are scrounging off society.
So bad has the Government’s attitude become that disability groups are now questioning whether they can continue to work with it on shaping further welfare reforms.
By the end of this parliament, if all these cuts are implemented, far from disabled people fulfilling their potential, the Coalition would instead have successfully reversed twenty years of advances made in helping the disabled play a valued and active part in society. Shame on all MPs if that is their intention. And if it isn’t, then the Government must wake up to the impact of these cuts, ban negative ministerial rhetoric linking the disabled with ‘scroungers’ and honour its supposed desire to develop policies that give back respect and support to some of the most vulnerable people in society.
Previously published on the blog nhsbuff (apologies for the slow cross posting - illness took my eye off the ball)
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Happy Mother's Day
"Another Brown Envelope arrived today. It's clearly marked from the Department. My neighbours might have seen, but I think I got it in time. It told me I cost too much. They're stopping my money next month. I am a Useless Eater. What will become of me?
They "assessed" me. Forced me to strip, made me touch my toes. It hurt, pain ripping through me. He never looked at me, said the pain didn't matter. He asked if I ever watched the TV. I didn't know how to answer? Was this a new trick? There have been so many. I nodded. He spat the question again "Answer me please". I said I did. The room was small, airless, cameras watched from every angle, moving as I tried to move. Grills at the windows. Grills at the doors. One time, I had to climb a flight of stairs. When I couldn't they stopped my money.
That brown envelope said I could work. They have work programmes now. We work for free, they make us. I don't know when it will end - perhaps it won't You can see my ribs, count them as I bend to reach the lowest shelves. I ate on Monday. Or was it Tuesday? I forget. The Minister said work frees us.
The letters. The endless brown envelopes, The logo makes my heart beat faster. I feel sick, terrified to open each one. The lawyers write to me, the advisers, the courts, the Department, the Providers. I don't understand them all but they never stop, they keep writing until you give up, until you are too worn down.
I saw a paper today. I didn't mean to. There, on the front page, the Department caught someone like me Outside. What was she thinking? Fool. She must have got the new directive? She must know we are not welcome Outside now? Perhaps she stopped opening the Brown Envelopes. I tried that once, but they sent someone to my house. Said I'd get no money at all for 2 weeks. The food ran out after 4 days. I always open the Brown Envelopes now. Eventually.
The paper called us cheats again. Scroungers, shirkers, we are "mugging the state". Every day, there on the front page. They print a telephone number. They get people to call it if they suspect a Useless Eater. Neighbours must report us now. The Department can follow you, take pictures, go through your bins. Check your bank accounts.
They say we're getting ID cards now. They'll list our defects. We must produce them if anyone asks. If a snarling, sneering bulldog of a man attacks me in the street, I must show him my card. The Department said it would make them stop, but sometimes it just makes the beating worse. Sometimes more join in when they see my Useless Eater ID. Another reason not to risk Outside.
I used to use a wheelchair, but it broke and the Department said I couldn't have another. Just as well I suppose. It makes things Outside worse. They said we couldn't afford it. I have to use nappies if I can't get to the toilet now, now one comes to help me get there any more. I live in one room now, use the walls and furniture to get about. It's easier, and saves on heating. The pills are in the drawer. I pretended to take them, but saved them up. The woman who came to change my bed and give me a bath used to make sure I took them, but she doesn't come any more. The Department say I don't need to wash below my waist. I've got lots of pills now. I think I've got enough.
The Department say I have to move. Well, I only use one room now anyway. There aren't many places Useless Eaters like me can go these days. Just the area beyond the river, on the edge of town, where it's cheaper. There are lots of us there. You can tell, because the curtains stay drawn. There is no bus. Another Department stopped them. It's far from the hospital now they've closed the one I used to go to. They stopped my drugs too, but it's OK, because I've got mine, safe in the drawer. They said it wouldn't apply to us, but it does.
I wonder where it will all end? I can't possibly imagine. Can't imagine things getting worse than they are now. I heard that some tried to protest, took to the streets! Outside! All around the world, they say! The police sprayed gas in their faces, hurled them back withwater cannon. Closed their internet sites down so they couldn't tell anyone. Arrested some. One got dragged backwards, tipped out of his wheelchair . I suppose that's why no-one really knows what is happening to us. I suppose they couldn't do all this if they did? Could they?
Where will it end? Will it end?
Monday, 12 March 2012
Workfare: Privacy? What Right to Privacy?
One of the comments on my piece on Workfare, the DWP and Duty of Care raised a further alarming prospect, that DWP believe their right to impose Workfare takes precedence over a disabled person's legal right to privacy regarding their medical records.
The comment pointed out that a FOI request at the 'What do they Know' site contains the following statement by DWP:
Section 3 of the Social Security Act 1998 allows DWP to reuse personal information relating to social security and employment and training for another social security function. This includes reuse by persons providing services to DWP, such as Work Programme providers, where acting as the DWP's data processor.
In addition, in order to carry out their functions under the Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme, the Work Programme provider may need additional personal information from the claimant. If the claimant does not wish to provide this information it may be the case that, with the provider, they can investigate ways in which they can still participate in the Scheme, without the additional information being provided.
However, there may come a point when the Work Programme provider becomes concerned that the claimant’s withholding of information potentially amounts to non-participation in the Scheme. If this is the case, they will refer the matter to a decision maker who will consider all the facts of the case, including any good cause issues the claimant wishes to raise, and determine whether the claimant has failed to participate. If the decision maker considers that the claimant has failed to participate, their benefit will be sanctioned.
Now the first paragraph is disturbing enough, but clearly falls within the legal powers granted to DWP, however the second and third paragraphs are particularly troubling, both in general and specifically for disabled people, as they seem to show the DWP taking the position that they can insist that any information they feel relevant is provided under threat of sanction, even where that insistence is counter to a disabled person's rights under the Equality and Data Protection Acts..
A disabled person when considering an employment position is forced into the iniquitous position of having to decide whether or not to reveal their disability. Declare your disability and you have the protection of the Equality Act when requesting a reasonable adjustment, but declaring your disability also opens you to the threat of discrimination. Equally there may be considerable privacy issues wrapped up in information that could be relevant to Duty of Care issues, as examples mental health issues, continence and epilepsy all draw considerable negative opinions, if not outright discrimination, in contemporary society.
When we face a new job, disabled people face a whole additional set of decisions over and above non-disabled people: do we declare, if we do declare, then how much of the extent of our disability do we declare, and how widely do we allow that knowledge to be spread. The Equality Act and the Disability Discrimination Act before it provide specific protections for disabled people, we cannot be penalised for not declaring (though we have to declare to make the reasonable adjustment provisions enforceable) and we can insist that the details of our disability are not spread to people other than those we declare to. So for instance, I could declare my disability to HR, but insist that my line managers are told nothing more than that I am disabled and can legally request reasonable adjustments. If those provisions are breached. particularly in instances where that data is passed to other organisations entirely, then I can bring legal action against my employer for violations of both the Equality Act and the Data Protection Act.
The DWP statement above appears to attempt to subvert those rights, by stating that they can insist that information is provided to the Workfare provider, no matter that the Equality Act gives disabled people a right in law to insist that it is not, no matter that the Workfare provider is not an employer in any normal sense. Given the overwhelming disablism in recruitment decisions that disabled people face, forcing people to reveal details of their disabilities is actually going to undermine any chance of them getting a job out of the mandated assignment, the overwhelming advice from recruitment consultants is not to reveal disability until you have the written offer of a full time job in your hand. So DWP are actually shooting the whole point of the exercise in the foot by forcing declaration of disability. Worse than this, however, is the way it tramples over the right of disabled people to maintain privacy around the details of their disability. If I am being forced against my will into some utterly inappropriate position, with an utterly inappropriate company, a company whose data protection measures I have no confidence in and with whom I have no hope of a job at the end of it (and we've seen plenty of those reportedly involved with Workfare), then there is no way that I am willing to provide them with the full details of my disability, and I will be far from the only disabled person to feel that way. It will particularly be a problem for people with Mental Health issues, who are likely to be particularly frightened of being forced to declare details of their disability, and where there is already considerable evidence of them being deliberately targeted as 'an easy mark' for sanctions by JCP staff.
Workfare alone is bad enough, but to combine it with an contempt for the right to privacy of the people with most to lose from privacy and data protection violations, and to do so in apparent contempt for the protections granted by the Equality Act and the Data Protection Act, suggests that this is just one more piece of evidence that DWP consider themselves above such menial issues as the law, particularly laws relating to equality and discrimination.
The comment pointed out that a FOI request at the 'What do they Know' site contains the following statement by DWP:
Section 3 of the Social Security Act 1998 allows DWP to reuse personal information relating to social security and employment and training for another social security function. This includes reuse by persons providing services to DWP, such as Work Programme providers, where acting as the DWP's data processor.
In addition, in order to carry out their functions under the Employment, Skills and Enterprise Scheme, the Work Programme provider may need additional personal information from the claimant. If the claimant does not wish to provide this information it may be the case that, with the provider, they can investigate ways in which they can still participate in the Scheme, without the additional information being provided.
However, there may come a point when the Work Programme provider becomes concerned that the claimant’s withholding of information potentially amounts to non-participation in the Scheme. If this is the case, they will refer the matter to a decision maker who will consider all the facts of the case, including any good cause issues the claimant wishes to raise, and determine whether the claimant has failed to participate. If the decision maker considers that the claimant has failed to participate, their benefit will be sanctioned.
Now the first paragraph is disturbing enough, but clearly falls within the legal powers granted to DWP, however the second and third paragraphs are particularly troubling, both in general and specifically for disabled people, as they seem to show the DWP taking the position that they can insist that any information they feel relevant is provided under threat of sanction, even where that insistence is counter to a disabled person's rights under the Equality and Data Protection Acts..
A disabled person when considering an employment position is forced into the iniquitous position of having to decide whether or not to reveal their disability. Declare your disability and you have the protection of the Equality Act when requesting a reasonable adjustment, but declaring your disability also opens you to the threat of discrimination. Equally there may be considerable privacy issues wrapped up in information that could be relevant to Duty of Care issues, as examples mental health issues, continence and epilepsy all draw considerable negative opinions, if not outright discrimination, in contemporary society.
When we face a new job, disabled people face a whole additional set of decisions over and above non-disabled people: do we declare, if we do declare, then how much of the extent of our disability do we declare, and how widely do we allow that knowledge to be spread. The Equality Act and the Disability Discrimination Act before it provide specific protections for disabled people, we cannot be penalised for not declaring (though we have to declare to make the reasonable adjustment provisions enforceable) and we can insist that the details of our disability are not spread to people other than those we declare to. So for instance, I could declare my disability to HR, but insist that my line managers are told nothing more than that I am disabled and can legally request reasonable adjustments. If those provisions are breached. particularly in instances where that data is passed to other organisations entirely, then I can bring legal action against my employer for violations of both the Equality Act and the Data Protection Act.
The DWP statement above appears to attempt to subvert those rights, by stating that they can insist that information is provided to the Workfare provider, no matter that the Equality Act gives disabled people a right in law to insist that it is not, no matter that the Workfare provider is not an employer in any normal sense. Given the overwhelming disablism in recruitment decisions that disabled people face, forcing people to reveal details of their disabilities is actually going to undermine any chance of them getting a job out of the mandated assignment, the overwhelming advice from recruitment consultants is not to reveal disability until you have the written offer of a full time job in your hand. So DWP are actually shooting the whole point of the exercise in the foot by forcing declaration of disability. Worse than this, however, is the way it tramples over the right of disabled people to maintain privacy around the details of their disability. If I am being forced against my will into some utterly inappropriate position, with an utterly inappropriate company, a company whose data protection measures I have no confidence in and with whom I have no hope of a job at the end of it (and we've seen plenty of those reportedly involved with Workfare), then there is no way that I am willing to provide them with the full details of my disability, and I will be far from the only disabled person to feel that way. It will particularly be a problem for people with Mental Health issues, who are likely to be particularly frightened of being forced to declare details of their disability, and where there is already considerable evidence of them being deliberately targeted as 'an easy mark' for sanctions by JCP staff.
Workfare alone is bad enough, but to combine it with an contempt for the right to privacy of the people with most to lose from privacy and data protection violations, and to do so in apparent contempt for the protections granted by the Equality Act and the Data Protection Act, suggests that this is just one more piece of evidence that DWP consider themselves above such menial issues as the law, particularly laws relating to equality and discrimination.
Friday, 9 March 2012
Workfare: DWP Don't Care....
A recent Freedom of Information request seems to raise huge concerns over whether the Department of Work and Pensions accept that they have a legal Duty of Care with respect to benefit claimants forced onto mandatory Workfare placements. With DWP intent on implementing new policies which will see disabled people in the ESA WRAG being forced onto indefinite mandatory Workfare placements under threat of sanctions, never mind all of the complexity, risk and privacy concerns that disability adds to the existing Workfare farrago, this is obviously hugely concerning.
The DWP have apparently stated "If however, a work placement is considered appropriate then the responsibilities of the individual, the provider and the organisation accepting the placement must be discussed and made clear (including liability)." and pointed their respondent at the generic guidelines for workfare, which state "All participants involved in any way with DWP Provision are entitled to train and work in a healthy and safe environment with due regard to their welfare. Under Health and Safety Law they are regarded as your employees, whether they are paid by you or not. You must, therefore, comply with your Duty of Care under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Act’s associated regulations in the same way as you would do for any other member of your workforce"
This may seem quite responsible on the surface, however the implications are anything but. The Workfare situation is an unusual one, in which people are being forced to work by (or is it 'for'?) a government agency, the DWP, at a private contractors, while the DWP pay them benefits - which of course amounts to people being forced, under threat of having their benefits stopped entirely for anything up to three years, to work for less than the national minimum wage. Under normal circumstances the person paying your wages would be considered your employer, no matter where you were working. So if I work for Company A, but they send me to work at Company B, then both Company A and Company B would have a Duty of Care towards me, Company A because I am their employee and they have a legal responsibility to ensure that I am not exposed to unnecessary risk wherever I am, and Company B because they have a similar responsibility towards anyone on their premises. Yet DWP seem to be denying that they have the Duty of Care towards me that would normally descend from me being their employee. They also seem to be insisting on a process which would require the disabled person to fully reveal details of their disability to a company they are being forced to work for, in order to allow a risk assessment, no matter the privacy concerns of forcing someone to reveal full details of disability to an organisation for whom they not an employee.
This would be worrying enough for anyone in any circumstances, but for a disabled person dealing with the DWP it is a recipe ripe for disaster. The Workfare process involves someone, either from Job Centre Plus or one of their providers, such as the much castigated A4e (facing two more probes for fraud just this week), deciding that the benefit claimant would be helped by a work placement - or at least that is the spin on it, there is a considerable body of evidence pointing at JCP and contractors like A4e being very heavily target-driven, with JCP employees under massive pressure from management to hit targets such as number of people sanctioned per week, which whistleblowers have revealed means they are driven to target people with intellectual and mental disabilities as 'easy marks'. Now extend that pattern of behaviour to Workfare, and we will undoubtedly see large numbers of disabled people being forced onto Workfare not because it is in their interest, or appropriate for their disability, but because the JCP employee will be bawled out by their manager if she doesn't mandate another dozen crips before the end of the week, or because the training agency employee will miss a bonus if their figures aren't better than the rest of the office's...
I've dealt with JCP Disability Employment Advisors and training agency employees from the benefit claimant's position, a more clueless bunch of people about disability employment it would be difficult to imagine. The JCP staff persistently pushed the boundaries of what my disability allowed me to do, if I could do something for 10 minutes, they would write down 30, and then persistently try to undermine that at every other meeting. The training agency people (once I'd climbed the rickety outside staircase to their office - god help me if I'd arrived with a wheelchair not crutches....) knew so little about privacy and data protection that they saw nothing wrong in asking me to discuss the intimitate details of my disability while the gentleman sat immediately behind me was discussing his drug problem. Do either of these sound like organisations likely to give the necessary weight to the complexities of disability, or to their Duty of Care - especially if they seem to believe that Duty of Care doesn't apply in the first place?
When I was working I regularly ended up curled up in pain on the office floor because of my inability to sit for extended periods, Duty of Care can potentially be something as basic as recognising that someone cannot even sit at a desk, but how much recognition and understanding are we going to see when showing those may mean a bollocking in the manager's office, or a missed bonus? And if basic physical constraints are so readily targetted for undermining, what chance does someone with complex mental health issues have.
I thought this was scary when it was just the prospect of DEAs or A4e employees mandating disabled people onto indefinite Workfare assignments under threat of sanction, but if they don't even think they have a Duty of Care towards us....
The DWP have apparently stated "If however, a work placement is considered appropriate then the responsibilities of the individual, the provider and the organisation accepting the placement must be discussed and made clear (including liability)." and pointed their respondent at the generic guidelines for workfare, which state "All participants involved in any way with DWP Provision are entitled to train and work in a healthy and safe environment with due regard to their welfare. Under Health and Safety Law they are regarded as your employees, whether they are paid by you or not. You must, therefore, comply with your Duty of Care under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the Act’s associated regulations in the same way as you would do for any other member of your workforce"
This may seem quite responsible on the surface, however the implications are anything but. The Workfare situation is an unusual one, in which people are being forced to work by (or is it 'for'?) a government agency, the DWP, at a private contractors, while the DWP pay them benefits - which of course amounts to people being forced, under threat of having their benefits stopped entirely for anything up to three years, to work for less than the national minimum wage. Under normal circumstances the person paying your wages would be considered your employer, no matter where you were working. So if I work for Company A, but they send me to work at Company B, then both Company A and Company B would have a Duty of Care towards me, Company A because I am their employee and they have a legal responsibility to ensure that I am not exposed to unnecessary risk wherever I am, and Company B because they have a similar responsibility towards anyone on their premises. Yet DWP seem to be denying that they have the Duty of Care towards me that would normally descend from me being their employee. They also seem to be insisting on a process which would require the disabled person to fully reveal details of their disability to a company they are being forced to work for, in order to allow a risk assessment, no matter the privacy concerns of forcing someone to reveal full details of disability to an organisation for whom they not an employee.
This would be worrying enough for anyone in any circumstances, but for a disabled person dealing with the DWP it is a recipe ripe for disaster. The Workfare process involves someone, either from Job Centre Plus or one of their providers, such as the much castigated A4e (facing two more probes for fraud just this week), deciding that the benefit claimant would be helped by a work placement - or at least that is the spin on it, there is a considerable body of evidence pointing at JCP and contractors like A4e being very heavily target-driven, with JCP employees under massive pressure from management to hit targets such as number of people sanctioned per week, which whistleblowers have revealed means they are driven to target people with intellectual and mental disabilities as 'easy marks'. Now extend that pattern of behaviour to Workfare, and we will undoubtedly see large numbers of disabled people being forced onto Workfare not because it is in their interest, or appropriate for their disability, but because the JCP employee will be bawled out by their manager if she doesn't mandate another dozen crips before the end of the week, or because the training agency employee will miss a bonus if their figures aren't better than the rest of the office's...
I've dealt with JCP Disability Employment Advisors and training agency employees from the benefit claimant's position, a more clueless bunch of people about disability employment it would be difficult to imagine. The JCP staff persistently pushed the boundaries of what my disability allowed me to do, if I could do something for 10 minutes, they would write down 30, and then persistently try to undermine that at every other meeting. The training agency people (once I'd climbed the rickety outside staircase to their office - god help me if I'd arrived with a wheelchair not crutches....) knew so little about privacy and data protection that they saw nothing wrong in asking me to discuss the intimitate details of my disability while the gentleman sat immediately behind me was discussing his drug problem. Do either of these sound like organisations likely to give the necessary weight to the complexities of disability, or to their Duty of Care - especially if they seem to believe that Duty of Care doesn't apply in the first place?
When I was working I regularly ended up curled up in pain on the office floor because of my inability to sit for extended periods, Duty of Care can potentially be something as basic as recognising that someone cannot even sit at a desk, but how much recognition and understanding are we going to see when showing those may mean a bollocking in the manager's office, or a missed bonus? And if basic physical constraints are so readily targetted for undermining, what chance does someone with complex mental health issues have.
I thought this was scary when it was just the prospect of DEAs or A4e employees mandating disabled people onto indefinite Workfare assignments under threat of sanction, but if they don't even think they have a Duty of Care towards us....
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Sanctions removed from work experience - but only a small victory
The government today caved in to bad publicity and agreed to remove the possibility of sanctions from those who refuse to take part in the work experience scheme. Those guilty of gross misconduct may still be sanctioned with removal of benefits.
However, a DWP spokesperson confirmed this afternoon that it is only the work experience scheme which is affected by this change. Those on the work programme, which is run by third party providers such as the disgraced A4e, may still face sanctions if they do not cooperate with the programme. As detailed in the previous article on this site, it is mandatory to attend the work programme after a set amount of time receiving Job Seekers Allowance or Employment Support Allowance. The DWP spokesperson pointed out that the work programme provides much more than just work experience placements and referral to the programme does not necessarily mean undertaking work experience.
I also raised the issue of those who are receiving ESA and placed in the work related activity group being referred to the work programme and possibly for work experience. This is problematic since at the current time many people overturn the decision to place them in the WRAG on appeal and appeals can take a year in many cases so that people who are not fit for the work programme, never mind fit for work might be sent for work experience. The spokesperson did point out that people can present evidence and ask for a reconsideration before going for an appeal, although since at least 40% of those who appeal their decision go on to overturn it I do not think this is enough to ensure that everyone on the work programme is physically and mentally up to the task.
As it stands then, the removal of sanctions from the work experience scheme is a minor victory but the danger is that it will convince the public that all is well once more and the anger over people being made to work without pay may cool. Jobseekers and sick people can still be referred to the work programme where companies such as A4e can send people to do unpaid work experience or face loss of benefits. In the case of those who recieve ESA there is no limit to the length of time they may be made to work without pay.
However, a DWP spokesperson confirmed this afternoon that it is only the work experience scheme which is affected by this change. Those on the work programme, which is run by third party providers such as the disgraced A4e, may still face sanctions if they do not cooperate with the programme. As detailed in the previous article on this site, it is mandatory to attend the work programme after a set amount of time receiving Job Seekers Allowance or Employment Support Allowance. The DWP spokesperson pointed out that the work programme provides much more than just work experience placements and referral to the programme does not necessarily mean undertaking work experience.
I also raised the issue of those who are receiving ESA and placed in the work related activity group being referred to the work programme and possibly for work experience. This is problematic since at the current time many people overturn the decision to place them in the WRAG on appeal and appeals can take a year in many cases so that people who are not fit for the work programme, never mind fit for work might be sent for work experience. The spokesperson did point out that people can present evidence and ask for a reconsideration before going for an appeal, although since at least 40% of those who appeal their decision go on to overturn it I do not think this is enough to ensure that everyone on the work programme is physically and mentally up to the task.
As it stands then, the removal of sanctions from the work experience scheme is a minor victory but the danger is that it will convince the public that all is well once more and the anger over people being made to work without pay may cool. Jobseekers and sick people can still be referred to the work programme where companies such as A4e can send people to do unpaid work experience or face loss of benefits. In the case of those who recieve ESA there is no limit to the length of time they may be made to work without pay.
Wednesday, 22 February 2012
Meanwhile in "faker rhetoric fuels abuse" news...
Two tweets and one news article from this morning alone:
Young disabled stay silent over hate crimes - Crime - UK - The Independent including case study of one woman who was grabbed by the hair for having not "looked disabled" in her school days. Which would imply that her attackers presumed that she was faking now.
NEWS: A #Wiltshire man with Muscular Dystrophy says he's suffered verbal abuse and had a rib broken for parking in a disabled bay @TargetMD
— BBC Wiltshire (@BBCWiltshire) February 22, 2012
Young disabled stay silent over hate crimes - Crime - UK - The Independent including case study of one woman who was grabbed by the hair for having not "looked disabled" in her school days. Which would imply that her attackers presumed that she was faking now.
Bus driver, noticing I have 2 crutches instead of the usual 1, said, "got another forgery then, have you?". Not funny. Just not.
— Philippa (@incurablehippie) February 22, 2012
Saturday, 18 February 2012
Emergency Meeting: Organising Against the Welfare Reform Bill
Via Claire from Winvisible:
Monday 20 Feb 5pm-6.30pm at Tent City University, Occupy London, St Paul’s
London EC4M 8AD
All welcome
Buses 4, 11, 15, 23, 25, 26, 100, 242
Tube: St Paul’s, Central Line
Overground: City Thameslink
This is outdoors, so dress warm. Hot drinks available and accessible loos nearby.
For more info: Global Women’s Strike gws@globalwomenstrike.net
020 7482 2496 , 07904 255 145
Short and Sweet Truth
Friday, 17 February 2012
Shocked headline as fat disabled woman has fun
Obese woman demanding 50 hours care a week 'went to pop concert', screams the Telegraph. Obese? Disabled? Had a night out? This is surely an outrage to all common decency! Nobody who is fat should have fun, especially not if they are mentally ill and fat. Never mind that a good night out could have made this woman feel a bit better. Never mind that it might have been her first night out in years. Her weight and her mental illness make it an indisputably horrifying thing to have done, according to the paper.When the paper reports that she is 'demanding 50 hours a week care', what it means is that she previously received care through Direct Payments, which has now been withdrawn and she is appealing for it to be reinstated.
Reading the article, despite the numerous mentions of her 'morbid obesity', none of her reported care needs relate to her weight at all. All of these references serve simply to stir up prejudiced feelings about this woman, to build up the readers' outrage.
The paper reports that she has been diagnosed with a personality disorder, following traumas and bereavements, and her psychiatrist has decided that she should 'break her reliance on the support of others'. This happens to a lot of people with personality disorders, in particular female survivors diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Mental health services commonly do not like treating people diagnosed with BPD, or services diagnose people with BPD when they do not like them - either or both are commonly true. It is not known as the 'wastebucket diagnosis' for nothing.
This does not mean that people with personality disorders do not require support. The council, in court, argued that because she can play computer games, buy cigarettes and go to a pop concert, she should have all her care withdrawn, despite evidence that in the past she went for months on end without washing, due to a massive fear about bathing without somebody there.
The Telegraph then offers a poll. A poll! So that readers can vote on whether they think this woman's care needs should be provided for.
As if constant, irrelevant references to this woman's weight, and scare quotes when describing things like her "extreme paranoia" and "lack of motivation", mocking her all the way through - a woman who already has mental health problems - as if all of that was not enough, let's allow the public to vote on what they think her future should be.The Daily Telegraph have humiliated a vulnerable woman for committing the sins of being fat (many people on certain psychiatric drugs are, it's a significant side-effect), for having suffered trauma in her past, and for going to see The Wanted in concert, whoever they are. Their ridiculous poll adds insult to injury, and I just hope the woman in question never reads it.
This post originally appeared at The F-Word
[The image is a photograph of a warning sign reading "Caution Do not play on, in, or around this container". It was taken by Brittney Bush Bollay and is used under a Creative Commons Licence]
The Magical Thinking at DWP Gets Worse
In my earlier piece on Magical Thinking, I said that it was clear that DWP didn't have the faintest understanding of long-term disability, and were basing their policy on their lack of understanding.
Just how bad that lack of understanding is became chillingly clear in an article in the Guardian on Thursday. The article reports that in a meeting with disability groups in December, DWP announced that it intended to extend a Workfare-like scheme to disabled people. Under Workfare, unemployed people can be forced to take 30 hours a week of unpaid work experience for 8 weeks, or even 6 months in some cases, with the threat of being sanctioned and their benefit withdrawn if they do not comply. Workfare is already under severe fire from many unions and campaigning groups who view it as akin to slave labour, with people effectively working for far less than the minimum wage and jobs effectively taken permanently out of the marketplace as companies like Poundland, Asda, Tesco, Argos and others just take one Workfare assignee after another. Public pressure has already forced several companies, such as Sainsbury's and Waterstones, to withdraw from the scheme.
For disabled people the potential of Workfare alone would be bad enough, but when asked about time limits on the disability scheme, a DWP official said "There are no plans to introduce a maximum time limit." and also made it clear that sanctions would be applied to force people onto the scheme, or punish them if they refused: "Ministers strongly feel there is a link-up to support those moving close to the labour market, and the individual's responsibility to engage with the support. Ministers feel sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility."
The scheme will be targeted at people in the ESA WRAG, which includes people with long term disabilities which are severe enough to mean they are not currently capable of work, but are expected to potentially be capable at some point in the future. As I made clear in my earlier article, that 'potentially' means 'might become capable', not 'will become capable' and for many people we are looking at years not decades of them being unfit for work. Unfortunately DWP are sticking their head in the sand in an attempt to deny the reality of disability and replace that reality with magical thinking in which we all have miracle cures at the 12 month mark and become miraculously capable of competing in the job market on an equal footing with none disabled people. Forcing anyone from WRAG into work is a subversion of what the scheme is supposed to stand for, and the limits on the scheme as currently proposed mean it could even be applied to someone with a terminal illness if they have more than six months to live. Worse, it could be applied to someone with severe mental health issues, with no regard for the consequences to their mental health, or to someone with a physical disability with no thought to the negative physical consequences for them.
We knew DWP was being run to an ideological diktat, sorry, Christian principles, with a disregard for facts that would have embarrassed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at its worst, but this is a step far, far beyond the pale. I know both from direct personal experience and the experience of others that JCP Disability Employment Advisers have an appalling inability to recognise and understand disability, in particular how it will impact working (which considering that is their sole professional purpose is a pretty utter failure). To now give these people the ability to decide on their own initiative that a disabled person should be forced into a work assignment, with only the vaguest notion of what the consequences for that person's health might be, is taking the DWP's duty of care and tossing it not just out of the window but into a passing bin wagon.
A lot of stuff coming out of the DWP worries me, but the consequences of this notion truely scare me. The whole point of people being in the ESA WRAG is that they have been assessed as not currently fit for work, and to design a scheme whose sole purpose is to force people who aren't fit for work into work, and then to try and justify it both having no limits and being subject to sanctions, suggests that DWP are truly placing diktat above reality and that magical thinking has displaced any other form of thinking they might once have been capable of.
(Edited to correct who has withdrawn from Workfare - should have been Sainsburys, not Tesco, Tesco admit to having taken 1400 people under the scheme in the past 4 months, potentially 168,000 hours of unpaid work ).
Just how bad that lack of understanding is became chillingly clear in an article in the Guardian on Thursday. The article reports that in a meeting with disability groups in December, DWP announced that it intended to extend a Workfare-like scheme to disabled people. Under Workfare, unemployed people can be forced to take 30 hours a week of unpaid work experience for 8 weeks, or even 6 months in some cases, with the threat of being sanctioned and their benefit withdrawn if they do not comply. Workfare is already under severe fire from many unions and campaigning groups who view it as akin to slave labour, with people effectively working for far less than the minimum wage and jobs effectively taken permanently out of the marketplace as companies like Poundland, Asda, Tesco, Argos and others just take one Workfare assignee after another. Public pressure has already forced several companies, such as Sainsbury's and Waterstones, to withdraw from the scheme.
For disabled people the potential of Workfare alone would be bad enough, but when asked about time limits on the disability scheme, a DWP official said "There are no plans to introduce a maximum time limit." and also made it clear that sanctions would be applied to force people onto the scheme, or punish them if they refused: "Ministers strongly feel there is a link-up to support those moving close to the labour market, and the individual's responsibility to engage with the support. Ministers feel sanctions are an incentive for people to comply with their responsibility."
The scheme will be targeted at people in the ESA WRAG, which includes people with long term disabilities which are severe enough to mean they are not currently capable of work, but are expected to potentially be capable at some point in the future. As I made clear in my earlier article, that 'potentially' means 'might become capable', not 'will become capable' and for many people we are looking at years not decades of them being unfit for work. Unfortunately DWP are sticking their head in the sand in an attempt to deny the reality of disability and replace that reality with magical thinking in which we all have miracle cures at the 12 month mark and become miraculously capable of competing in the job market on an equal footing with none disabled people. Forcing anyone from WRAG into work is a subversion of what the scheme is supposed to stand for, and the limits on the scheme as currently proposed mean it could even be applied to someone with a terminal illness if they have more than six months to live. Worse, it could be applied to someone with severe mental health issues, with no regard for the consequences to their mental health, or to someone with a physical disability with no thought to the negative physical consequences for them.
We knew DWP was being run to an ideological diktat, sorry, Christian principles, with a disregard for facts that would have embarrassed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at its worst, but this is a step far, far beyond the pale. I know both from direct personal experience and the experience of others that JCP Disability Employment Advisers have an appalling inability to recognise and understand disability, in particular how it will impact working (which considering that is their sole professional purpose is a pretty utter failure). To now give these people the ability to decide on their own initiative that a disabled person should be forced into a work assignment, with only the vaguest notion of what the consequences for that person's health might be, is taking the DWP's duty of care and tossing it not just out of the window but into a passing bin wagon.
A lot of stuff coming out of the DWP worries me, but the consequences of this notion truely scare me. The whole point of people being in the ESA WRAG is that they have been assessed as not currently fit for work, and to design a scheme whose sole purpose is to force people who aren't fit for work into work, and then to try and justify it both having no limits and being subject to sanctions, suggests that DWP are truly placing diktat above reality and that magical thinking has displaced any other form of thinking they might once have been capable of.
(Edited to correct who has withdrawn from Workfare - should have been Sainsburys, not Tesco, Tesco admit to having taken 1400 people under the scheme in the past 4 months, potentially 168,000 hours of unpaid work ).
Monday, 13 February 2012
Magical Thinking and Miracle Cures
The Welfare Reform Bill is back in the House of Lords this week, so Iain Duncan Smith has a comment column in the Independent telling us how we are all wrong and that the WRB is going to make things better not worse. Which is going to be a tough sell to the 700,000 disabled people who will lose Employment and Support Allowance due to time-limiting, the 500,000 disabled people who will lose Disability Living Allowance and the tens of thousands of disabled kids whose families will lose £1500 a year of tax credits (however IDS assures us that £1500 isn’t a significant amount of money, not even to families already below the poverty line). And those are just some of the cuts, the list goes on, and on, and on.
IDS talks a good tale, and he’s extremely proficient at half-hidden appeals to petty-minded jealousy against those forced to rely on benefits (an odd talent for a minister who professes to be guided by Christian principles) but when you look at the actual details of the WRB the loopholes he glosses over start to appear, particularly when you look from the harsh reality of the inside of the benefit system. I worked for 20-odd years doing highly skilled development work in the aerospace industry, so getting me back into work makes sense on multiple levels, but my disability now means that I can't sit at a desk without rapidly ending up in so much pain I can't think straight (and when your work is safety-critical that’s not great). Having been forced out of my job by redundancy, the Department of Work and Pensions eventually admitted that I'm far too disabled to claim JSA and pushed me onto ESA.
If we look at what the WRB says about ESA, then we find that IDS and his minions, particularly Lord Freud, who famously anointed himself as our national expert on disability employment a couple of weeks after first looking at the issue, would now have you believe that all disabled people receive an automatic miracle cure at the 12 month mark which means we can then compete equally in the jobs market, and therefore won't be disadvantaged by time-limiting ESA to 12 months.
Strangely enough I am 23 years into my disability with no cure, miracle or otherwise, in sight; in fact my doctors specifically ruled one out over a decade ago. The disability isn't going to get better and the cumulative damage to joints is going to carry on building year on year. And I am far more typical of disability's reality than IDS's 12 month miracle cure. A psychiatrist confronted with an expectation of miracle cures would likely label that as magical thinking and there would probably be frowning and tutting and a lot of note-taking; magical thinking is not a good thing, it signifies a loss of touch with reality, and a belief that supernatural forces are manipulating the world around you. Of course when you consider IDS’s frequent claim that he is implementing a Christian benefit policy then the magical thinking and miracle cures start to fit into a wider pattern of thought.
The problem for the rest of us is that we can’t ignore reality in favour of supernatural intervention. The Work Related Activity Group of ESA (which I am in) is supposedly for disabled people who are not currently fit for work but can potentially return to work at some point with appropriate support. That potentially means might, not will, and some point could be decades away, but DWP, at IDS and Freud's behest, is interpreting that as the 12 month miracle cure. More than that, DWP policy fails to acknowledge that there is an enormous range of disability that falls into the gap between someone who just needs a little extra support in WRAG to get straight back into work, and those people whose disabilities are so limiting that they are eligible for the Support Group and not expected to worry about work at all.
Hundreds of thousands of disabled benefit claimants in the WRAG have disabilities which will leave us unable to work over periods of years, if not decades. For most of us the reality is that a disability is for life, not just for Christmas, and there is no magical Medical Model fix to make it all go away with a wave of Lord Freud’s fairy wand, nor is DWP’s beloved Bio-Psycho-Social Model (aka the floggings will continue until you admit you’re better) going to make one jot of difference, unless it is to pressure people into damaging themselves further. No matter what Lord Freud may proclaim in the Lords in the next few days, I and other disabled people in the WRAG are not going to have a miracle cure at 12 months; to make my disability go away you would have to reprogramme the genetics of every cell in my body to correct the faulty connective tissue, and then fix all of the damage caused by nearly 50 years of those ligaments and tendons failing to protect joints, never mind the two distinct and individually disabling spinal injuries. What you see is what you get and that is someone who can't manage a job that involves sitting at a desk, standing or walking around. Find me a job I can do flat on my back (and I have problems even there) and there is a chance I can work, but how many jobs allow for that possibility? And each disabled person will come with their own individual set of limitations and issues.
IDS, Lord Freud, Chris Grayling and Maria Miller proclaim at every opportunity that disabled people could compete in the job market on a level footing with non-disabled people if we really wanted to. The under-the-counter briefings to the tabloid attack-hacks preach that we’re all idle scroungers who have been trapped into a life of idleness for no other reason than the easy availability of benefits. I’m not sure whether that counts as yet more magical thinking, or just plain wishful thinking, because even before the WRB axe the benefit system pays a pittance of what I used to earn and the long term financial implications are frankly terrifying. Getting out of the house once a week, not speaking to anyone from one week to the next, watching the death spiral of two decades worth of savings and pension; not really a life I would choose for myself.
To get a disabled person from WRAG to work involves at least three fundamental steps: first their disability needs to improve to the point that work is feasible, and that is simply not in the control of either DWP or the disabled person; next they need to negotiate the job market, more on that in a moment; and finally their job needs to be adapted to suit their individual needs, more on that too. I’ll be generous and accept that DWP are probably trying to help in the first of those steps, unfortunately their practical understanding of disability appears to be totally lacking (or perhaps driven by the kind of remorseless, fact-agnostic ideology that gave Soviet Five Year Plans a bad name). As so often seems to be the case with DWP, we would probably achieve far more if they would just stop trying to help.
So what is the reality of the job market for disabled people? Can we compete with other, non-disabled, people? IDS says yes, but once again the reality is something different. While I was claiming JSA and before DWP accepted that I really wasn’t fit enough to work, I sent out around 200 job applications. I had two decades worth of cutting edge engineering development experience on prominent multinational projects, and a CV that multiple employment consultants said could not be bettered, and I was registered with all of the appropriate specialist recruitment agencies; so how many interviews did I land? One. And that was from a company specifically looking to cherry-pick people with my skillset being made redundant by my ex-employer and which was working directly with the outsourcing consultants. Even more alarming, interviewers working for a company which made a selling point of its socially responsible employment policies admitted that it had never occurred to them that they might actually get a disabled job applicant. And that one interview is now nearly three years in the past, when the jobs market was in a far better condition than the state it has slid to under the Coalition.
The reality gets worse. In talking to multiple employment consultants, I was told that I should do everything possible to hide my disability from prospective employers, because I would be discriminated against. Not might, would. Nearly twenty years after the Disability Discrimination Act required employers to ensure disabled people are able to work and compete for jobs on an equal footing, with the new Equality Act making it illegal to even consider disability in a recruitment decision, people who had spent years as recruitment professionals were telling me that discrimination against disabled job applicants was so universal I needed to hide who I was in order to have any hope of making it past the first cut. One employers’ group proclaimed it a triumph for equality that slightly more than one employer in four would consider employing a disabled person. Meanwhile the other seventy-odd percent of employers surveyed openly acknowledged their intent to flout the law, confident in being able to do that because the government does not enforce disability equality law, that is left to the disabled victims themselves, who overwhelmingly have neither the health, wealth nor legal background to be able to challenge the offenders. The disablist attitudes of employers represent perhaps the single most fundamental barrier to moving large numbers of disabled people into work, and also a barrier open to being dealt with by action from central government, yet the silence from DWP, and from IDS’s ministerial team, is deafening.
Even if you get through to the interview stage, the moment an employer looks at a disabled potential employee and imagines that they may need to fund access changes, specialist seating, telecoms, whatever they might need to actually do the job, the potential for the disabled person to be surreptitiously dumped as ‘too costly’ raises its ugly head. Extra costs are actually minimal in most cases and the DWP’s Access to Work scheme was designed to take care of the non-minimal cases, funding a range of equipment and services for employer (seats, telecoms, access changes etc.), or employee (P.A.s, taxis etc.). AtW was unique, it was a benefit that actually turned a profit for the government, with the Treasury receiving about £1.48 in income tax etc. for every pound AtW spent. Before the election there was even talk of tweaking how AtW worked so that someone like me could arrive for interview at a potential employer and tell them that a package of extra support to cover little stuff like only being able to work while lying flat was already arranged. So of course when the Coalition took power, with their absolute focus on pushing as many disabled people as possible back into the workforce, they promptly slashed AtW’s budget and the range of items covered, leading to a marked drop in the number of people being helped and meaning that many disabled people will now present potential employers with a distinct capital cost for selecting them over a non-disabled candidate. Thanks, IDS!
IDS talks a good tale, and he’s extremely proficient at half-hidden appeals to petty-minded jealousy against those forced to rely on benefits (an odd talent for a minister who professes to be guided by Christian principles) but when you look at the actual details of the WRB the loopholes he glosses over start to appear, particularly when you look from the harsh reality of the inside of the benefit system. I worked for 20-odd years doing highly skilled development work in the aerospace industry, so getting me back into work makes sense on multiple levels, but my disability now means that I can't sit at a desk without rapidly ending up in so much pain I can't think straight (and when your work is safety-critical that’s not great). Having been forced out of my job by redundancy, the Department of Work and Pensions eventually admitted that I'm far too disabled to claim JSA and pushed me onto ESA.
If we look at what the WRB says about ESA, then we find that IDS and his minions, particularly Lord Freud, who famously anointed himself as our national expert on disability employment a couple of weeks after first looking at the issue, would now have you believe that all disabled people receive an automatic miracle cure at the 12 month mark which means we can then compete equally in the jobs market, and therefore won't be disadvantaged by time-limiting ESA to 12 months.
Strangely enough I am 23 years into my disability with no cure, miracle or otherwise, in sight; in fact my doctors specifically ruled one out over a decade ago. The disability isn't going to get better and the cumulative damage to joints is going to carry on building year on year. And I am far more typical of disability's reality than IDS's 12 month miracle cure. A psychiatrist confronted with an expectation of miracle cures would likely label that as magical thinking and there would probably be frowning and tutting and a lot of note-taking; magical thinking is not a good thing, it signifies a loss of touch with reality, and a belief that supernatural forces are manipulating the world around you. Of course when you consider IDS’s frequent claim that he is implementing a Christian benefit policy then the magical thinking and miracle cures start to fit into a wider pattern of thought.
The problem for the rest of us is that we can’t ignore reality in favour of supernatural intervention. The Work Related Activity Group of ESA (which I am in) is supposedly for disabled people who are not currently fit for work but can potentially return to work at some point with appropriate support. That potentially means might, not will, and some point could be decades away, but DWP, at IDS and Freud's behest, is interpreting that as the 12 month miracle cure. More than that, DWP policy fails to acknowledge that there is an enormous range of disability that falls into the gap between someone who just needs a little extra support in WRAG to get straight back into work, and those people whose disabilities are so limiting that they are eligible for the Support Group and not expected to worry about work at all.
Hundreds of thousands of disabled benefit claimants in the WRAG have disabilities which will leave us unable to work over periods of years, if not decades. For most of us the reality is that a disability is for life, not just for Christmas, and there is no magical Medical Model fix to make it all go away with a wave of Lord Freud’s fairy wand, nor is DWP’s beloved Bio-Psycho-Social Model (aka the floggings will continue until you admit you’re better) going to make one jot of difference, unless it is to pressure people into damaging themselves further. No matter what Lord Freud may proclaim in the Lords in the next few days, I and other disabled people in the WRAG are not going to have a miracle cure at 12 months; to make my disability go away you would have to reprogramme the genetics of every cell in my body to correct the faulty connective tissue, and then fix all of the damage caused by nearly 50 years of those ligaments and tendons failing to protect joints, never mind the two distinct and individually disabling spinal injuries. What you see is what you get and that is someone who can't manage a job that involves sitting at a desk, standing or walking around. Find me a job I can do flat on my back (and I have problems even there) and there is a chance I can work, but how many jobs allow for that possibility? And each disabled person will come with their own individual set of limitations and issues.
IDS, Lord Freud, Chris Grayling and Maria Miller proclaim at every opportunity that disabled people could compete in the job market on a level footing with non-disabled people if we really wanted to. The under-the-counter briefings to the tabloid attack-hacks preach that we’re all idle scroungers who have been trapped into a life of idleness for no other reason than the easy availability of benefits. I’m not sure whether that counts as yet more magical thinking, or just plain wishful thinking, because even before the WRB axe the benefit system pays a pittance of what I used to earn and the long term financial implications are frankly terrifying. Getting out of the house once a week, not speaking to anyone from one week to the next, watching the death spiral of two decades worth of savings and pension; not really a life I would choose for myself.
To get a disabled person from WRAG to work involves at least three fundamental steps: first their disability needs to improve to the point that work is feasible, and that is simply not in the control of either DWP or the disabled person; next they need to negotiate the job market, more on that in a moment; and finally their job needs to be adapted to suit their individual needs, more on that too. I’ll be generous and accept that DWP are probably trying to help in the first of those steps, unfortunately their practical understanding of disability appears to be totally lacking (or perhaps driven by the kind of remorseless, fact-agnostic ideology that gave Soviet Five Year Plans a bad name). As so often seems to be the case with DWP, we would probably achieve far more if they would just stop trying to help.
So what is the reality of the job market for disabled people? Can we compete with other, non-disabled, people? IDS says yes, but once again the reality is something different. While I was claiming JSA and before DWP accepted that I really wasn’t fit enough to work, I sent out around 200 job applications. I had two decades worth of cutting edge engineering development experience on prominent multinational projects, and a CV that multiple employment consultants said could not be bettered, and I was registered with all of the appropriate specialist recruitment agencies; so how many interviews did I land? One. And that was from a company specifically looking to cherry-pick people with my skillset being made redundant by my ex-employer and which was working directly with the outsourcing consultants. Even more alarming, interviewers working for a company which made a selling point of its socially responsible employment policies admitted that it had never occurred to them that they might actually get a disabled job applicant. And that one interview is now nearly three years in the past, when the jobs market was in a far better condition than the state it has slid to under the Coalition.
The reality gets worse. In talking to multiple employment consultants, I was told that I should do everything possible to hide my disability from prospective employers, because I would be discriminated against. Not might, would. Nearly twenty years after the Disability Discrimination Act required employers to ensure disabled people are able to work and compete for jobs on an equal footing, with the new Equality Act making it illegal to even consider disability in a recruitment decision, people who had spent years as recruitment professionals were telling me that discrimination against disabled job applicants was so universal I needed to hide who I was in order to have any hope of making it past the first cut. One employers’ group proclaimed it a triumph for equality that slightly more than one employer in four would consider employing a disabled person. Meanwhile the other seventy-odd percent of employers surveyed openly acknowledged their intent to flout the law, confident in being able to do that because the government does not enforce disability equality law, that is left to the disabled victims themselves, who overwhelmingly have neither the health, wealth nor legal background to be able to challenge the offenders. The disablist attitudes of employers represent perhaps the single most fundamental barrier to moving large numbers of disabled people into work, and also a barrier open to being dealt with by action from central government, yet the silence from DWP, and from IDS’s ministerial team, is deafening.
Even if you get through to the interview stage, the moment an employer looks at a disabled potential employee and imagines that they may need to fund access changes, specialist seating, telecoms, whatever they might need to actually do the job, the potential for the disabled person to be surreptitiously dumped as ‘too costly’ raises its ugly head. Extra costs are actually minimal in most cases and the DWP’s Access to Work scheme was designed to take care of the non-minimal cases, funding a range of equipment and services for employer (seats, telecoms, access changes etc.), or employee (P.A.s, taxis etc.). AtW was unique, it was a benefit that actually turned a profit for the government, with the Treasury receiving about £1.48 in income tax etc. for every pound AtW spent. Before the election there was even talk of tweaking how AtW worked so that someone like me could arrive for interview at a potential employer and tell them that a package of extra support to cover little stuff like only being able to work while lying flat was already arranged. So of course when the Coalition took power, with their absolute focus on pushing as many disabled people as possible back into the workforce, they promptly slashed AtW’s budget and the range of items covered, leading to a marked drop in the number of people being helped and meaning that many disabled people will now present potential employers with a distinct capital cost for selecting them over a non-disabled candidate. Thanks, IDS!
IDS goes for the grand exit in his article by proclaiming we must restore fairness to the claimant through making work pay and fairness to the taxpayer by ensuring money isn't wasted on trapping people on benefits. But again we see him descending into magical thinking (the alternative would be to accuse him of trying to sell the big lie). I am not trapped by the benefit system, it pays a pittance of what I used to earn; I am trapped by three things: the discriminatory attitudes of employers, the hamstringing of Access to Work, and, ultimately and unavoidably, by the reality of my disability. IDS can ignore that reality, pretend it doesn’t exist, but are magical thinking and miracle cures really a sound basis for government policy?
Tuesday, 7 February 2012
Simplified Version of Draft PIP Criteria
Here is the simplified version of the PIP criteria we've been working on.
Draft Pip Criteria - Simplified Version
We hope it will give you all the information you need to decide how you will be personally affected by the change from DLA to PIP. Soon, we will publish a guide to the consultation too, so perhaps we can use this simplified version to start to think about what submissions we might make to the consultation.
Hopefully by later in the week, we can start writing our submissions when the guide to the consultation is finalised. We hope it will mean that many, many more people will engage with this process and we can make our views heard.
If you've already done a submission or don't want to wait, we would like to invite you all to send any submissions you make to us, so that this time, we can keep a public record of as many responses as possible. We will be inviting Charities, DPOs and other campaigning groups to do the same.
Clearly, this will not suit everyone. Some may wish their submission to be private and we wholeheartedly respect this. However, to avoid any suggestion that our views may not be properly considered, we feel it would be helpful to provide a space where they can be collected.
Draft Pip Criteria - Simplified Version
Thursday, 2 February 2012
The Death Of Decency #wrb
It's been a long, hard eighteen months. Harder and tougher than I could ever communicate to you. I could try and tell you of the times Sue and I spent hours fevered, medicated and desperately unwell just trying to string together a few coherent sentences. The times we tried frantically to finish articles for newspapers interrupted by journalists, politicians or charities wanting us to help with research about issues they didn't really understand, or the times we took turns to cry with despair about what was happening to our country which no-one but a handful of seriously ill people seemed to care about.
I could tell you of how receiving messages from people so terrorised they wanted to tell us their lives were no longer worth living became routine. Of sleepless nights fearing that the person had gone ahead with their plans, or even of the devastating night when despite the online community rapidly rallying help we heard that the prompt police response was too late and another person was found dead.
I could tell you that we always knew this to be an unwinnable battle. That very early on we decided that whatever dirty tricks politicians pulled we would not sink to that level. That we would always act with honesty, ensuring our facts were double and triple checked, that we would counter lies with integrity and truth. That the more justice appeared to be absenting herself from this process, the more we were determined to ensure her voice remained.
I could tell you all those things and more, but never would you be able to truly understand how much this battle has cost those who had least to give. We have lobbied, debated and pleaded, often ignoring issues which would affect us personally as we decided on principle that we would act for the the best interests of all our community, even if that was to the detriment of our own personal lives, financial situations and our long term health.
I could, but that's not the most important thing to say.
The most important issue of all is the message sent by a British government to the British people. That disabled children who aren't the most disabled of all will have their support cut to 'justify' increasing the support to the most severely disabled children by less than £2 a week. That newly disabled or seriously ill adults living alone will lose the money previously deemed vital to pay someone to provide care. That children with serious illnesses and disabilities will have their entitlement to National Insurance contributions removed. An entitlement previously supported by politicians of all parties as sending a crucial message of the inherent value of life. That people with serious illnesses such as Multiple Sclerosis, early onset Alzheimers or cancer will, after 12 months, no longer be entitled to the financial support they spent their working lives paying National Insurance for if their partner earns more than £7500 per year.
I could tell you of how this was sold to the British public. A people with 'it's just not cricket' hardwired into our DNA. Of how carefully, deliberately, knowingly successive governments moved from all agreeing that it was inhuman to demonise the sick or disabled to carefully, deliberately, knowingly, drip feeding a complicit media into a propoganda exercise stunning in its success, to label these very same people as unworthy of empathy, compassion or support. Of how calculated this rebranding exercise was to ensure the public believed the empty promises of 'always supporting the most vulnerable' because, after all, these people are mostly faking fraudsters anyway. Doesn't it say so in the papers, on the news, even on the BBC?
I could try and explain to you that this isn't about eliminating fraud, that this will affect you or your family when inevitably accident, sickness or ageing moves you from being 'not yet disabled' to 'one of us'. I could try, but that's the nightmare of 4am no-one wants to remember when they awake. I could tell you that understanding, that empathy, that sense of life altering devastation is an insight that will only come to you when it's too late.
I can, with pride, tell you of a demonised community who have found strength in each other. I can tell you of how inspiring it is to feel the love and support of these people, and the awesome sense of privilege in witnessing the broken come together. I can tell you of the values we all grew up with, principles our ancestors fought for, our playground guilt as we were chastisted for hitting the bespectacled child.
I could tell you of how bewildered we have been to witness a British government act in a manner more befitting China. I could tell you how each deliberate lie, each serpent tongued statement and guarantee of consultation rankled and oozed. I could tell you that something fundamental in us was mortally wounded when finally we produced cold, hard evidence to prove the government were saying one thing and doing quite the other, to then witness the government's nose grow proportionately only to it's falsehoods.
I could tell you that actually, this is not about the money. That the financial cuts will be detrimental to lives, but that the message the government have sent to the British people, that the weakest, the frailest, the most vulnerable are no longer worthy of collective support will be rejected once that same public understand that message.
I could tell you all of that, but over the next few years you will discover this for yourselves. So all I will tell you is this;
Something fundamentally British died yesterday. If you thought it was already dead, think again.
Friday, 27 January 2012
A Premium Life
There's one cut that I've heard almost nothing about. I mean literally only 2 tweets and one blog comment. There's been nothing about it in either the mainstream press or on leftie/disability blogs.
At the moment there's an Income Support top-up called the Severe Disability Premium (SDP). It's often confused with Severe Disablement Allowance because of the similar sounding names despite being very different things.
The amount of money the law says you need to live on each week depends on your circumstances. If you're considered "severely disabled" for the purposes of benefits it's regarded that you need £151.65 a week to live on.
As someone that gets the middle or high rate care component of DLA and as someone who lives alone I'm considered "severely disabled" for such purposes. My Incapacity Benefit, including age-related premiums, is only £108.05 a week. This leaves me with a £43.60 shortfall between the amount of money the law says I need to live on and the amount of money I get. This is where the SDP comes in: I get an Income Support payment of £43.60 to bridge that gap.
The Welfare Reform Bill is scrapping the SDP. Entirely. Not replacing it with something different and stricter like the DLA to PIP changeover: It's just going.
The cost of living is going up, not down. So why do I suddenly need £43 a week less to live on?
I know that to a Tory £43 a week is a drop in the ocean. To a Tory it's maybe the cost of dinner if they eat somewhere cheap. But to me it's almost a third of my week's income. To me it's the difference between being able to visit my father or not. To me it's a grocery shop.
Crossbencher Baroness Meacher put forward amendment 21A on the second day of the report stage in the Lords which would have preserved an SDP-esque payment after the WRB had gone through. It didn't even go to a vote: Freud pointed out to her that letting severely disabled people retain their current income level would cost more than the amount the bill budgets for, so she withdrew it (it's not "cost-neutral").
It's not only people in similar circumstances to my own that will be affected, during the discussion Baroness Grey-Thompson brought up the fact that this will have a huge impact on young carers. People love to don a Red Nose to raise money to send young people assisting a parent 10 Pin Bowling once a fortnight, but where's the outcry over the fact that the government is stripping away financial support from parents which will make the young person's life harder?
All in this together? How about we knock 33% off the MPs' wages instead of severely disabled peoples' incomes. It'd be a much more sizeable saving than the mere £43 a week that makes such a huge difference to someone like me.
Update 15/11/13: DavidG has just pointed me to this article from October last year. It states the number of people that will be affected by the cuts to Disability Premiums: 230,000. I've also become aware today of this 32 page report by the CAB (also from October 2012) into the withdrawl of the Severe Disability Premium.
At the moment there's an Income Support top-up called the Severe Disability Premium (SDP). It's often confused with Severe Disablement Allowance because of the similar sounding names despite being very different things.
The amount of money the law says you need to live on each week depends on your circumstances. If you're considered "severely disabled" for the purposes of benefits it's regarded that you need £151.65 a week to live on.
As someone that gets the middle or high rate care component of DLA and as someone who lives alone I'm considered "severely disabled" for such purposes. My Incapacity Benefit, including age-related premiums, is only £108.05 a week. This leaves me with a £43.60 shortfall between the amount of money the law says I need to live on and the amount of money I get. This is where the SDP comes in: I get an Income Support payment of £43.60 to bridge that gap.
The Welfare Reform Bill is scrapping the SDP. Entirely. Not replacing it with something different and stricter like the DLA to PIP changeover: It's just going.
The cost of living is going up, not down. So why do I suddenly need £43 a week less to live on?
I know that to a Tory £43 a week is a drop in the ocean. To a Tory it's maybe the cost of dinner if they eat somewhere cheap. But to me it's almost a third of my week's income. To me it's the difference between being able to visit my father or not. To me it's a grocery shop.
Crossbencher Baroness Meacher put forward amendment 21A on the second day of the report stage in the Lords which would have preserved an SDP-esque payment after the WRB had gone through. It didn't even go to a vote: Freud pointed out to her that letting severely disabled people retain their current income level would cost more than the amount the bill budgets for, so she withdrew it (it's not "cost-neutral").
It's not only people in similar circumstances to my own that will be affected, during the discussion Baroness Grey-Thompson brought up the fact that this will have a huge impact on young carers. People love to don a Red Nose to raise money to send young people assisting a parent 10 Pin Bowling once a fortnight, but where's the outcry over the fact that the government is stripping away financial support from parents which will make the young person's life harder?
All in this together? How about we knock 33% off the MPs' wages instead of severely disabled peoples' incomes. It'd be a much more sizeable saving than the mere £43 a week that makes such a huge difference to someone like me.
Update 15/11/13: DavidG has just pointed me to this article from October last year. It states the number of people that will be affected by the cuts to Disability Premiums: 230,000. I've also become aware today of this 32 page report by the CAB (also from October 2012) into the withdrawl of the Severe Disability Premium.
Thursday, 26 January 2012
Rod Liddle is an Arse
Something weird and kinda wonderful happened today: A right-wing tabloid published some vile disablist propaganda, and the internet gave a crap.
There's nothing wonderful about vile disablist propaganda, obviously. But we've been seeing it for a couple of years now and usually there's no backlash against it. When Melanie Phillips writes a hideously homophobic piece or when Liz Jones writes a bizarre article about semen theft; Twitter gets on its moral high-horse (rightly, of course). But when the Daily Mail claims that only 1 in 14 IB claimants is genuine, or when The Sun state that in 3 years time one in every 17 people will be claiming DLA as if this is some kind of outrage (and without qualifying that, actually, one in every 5 people have some kind of impairment) no-one usually bats an eyelid at the press abuse of disabled people. In fact, people who would like to consider themselves as "decent" start moaning about all the fakers and scroungers because the official fraud figures of around 0.5% are hidden away on the Society pages of The Guardian rather than splashed across the front of The Sun.
This week we've reached a turning point: People objecting to propaganda, 38 Degrees pulling their finger out, UK Uncut organising a protest against the WRB (even if they did forget to make it accessible...). Shame it's all a bit too late and this time next week the bill will be a done deal.
There's nothing wonderful about vile disablist propaganda, obviously. But we've been seeing it for a couple of years now and usually there's no backlash against it. When Melanie Phillips writes a hideously homophobic piece or when Liz Jones writes a bizarre article about semen theft; Twitter gets on its moral high-horse (rightly, of course). But when the Daily Mail claims that only 1 in 14 IB claimants is genuine, or when The Sun state that in 3 years time one in every 17 people will be claiming DLA as if this is some kind of outrage (and without qualifying that, actually, one in every 5 people have some kind of impairment) no-one usually bats an eyelid at the press abuse of disabled people. In fact, people who would like to consider themselves as "decent" start moaning about all the fakers and scroungers because the official fraud figures of around 0.5% are hidden away on the Society pages of The Guardian rather than splashed across the front of The Sun.
This week we've reached a turning point: People objecting to propaganda, 38 Degrees pulling their finger out, UK Uncut organising a protest against the WRB (even if they did forget to make it accessible...). Shame it's all a bit too late and this time next week the bill will be a done deal.
Wednesday, 25 January 2012
And in the news...
The BBC today published a news story on their website about right-to-die campaigner Debbie Purdy, her husband, and the benefits system.
Husband of Debbie Purdy told 'quit work' for benefits.
It's a ridiculous situation, it shouldn't happen, but it does. It's the final paragraph that really irritated me:
In the first half of the sentence the DWP say "we don't comment on individual cases." This is then followed in the second half of the sentence by commenting on an individual case. My cat is more consistent than the average DWP employee and she frequently demands to be petted and then bites me when I touch her.
There's also the problem that the second half of the sentence is a complete lie. Yes, the government are resolving the problem that one can sometimes be better off on benefits than in work. But they're not resolving the problem by improving benefits for families like Purdy's: They're just making everybody poorer.
Many of the benefits to be capped, including housing benefit, are available to people in work on low incomes. By cutting back on these benefits you're making remaining in work harder not easier.
The article says that Purdy gets IB and DLA. DLA is being subjected to 20% cuts and many genuinely ill people are being found fit for work in the IB to ESA moves. Right there is another possibility that these reforms might leave Purdy worse off.
Whenever there's a benefit-related news story the DWP are always given a right-to-reply in which they invariably tell a pack of lies. So why is it that when the right wing press - which unfortunately has to include BBC News these days - run a story straight from the mouths of the DWP that disabled people don't get the same right?
Husband of Debbie Purdy told 'quit work' for benefits.
It's a ridiculous situation, it shouldn't happen, but it does. It's the final paragraph that really irritated me:
The Department for Work and Pensions said it did not comment on individual cases but that planned reforms of the welfare system would benefit people such as Ms Purdy.
In the first half of the sentence the DWP say "we don't comment on individual cases." This is then followed in the second half of the sentence by commenting on an individual case. My cat is more consistent than the average DWP employee and she frequently demands to be petted and then bites me when I touch her.
There's also the problem that the second half of the sentence is a complete lie. Yes, the government are resolving the problem that one can sometimes be better off on benefits than in work. But they're not resolving the problem by improving benefits for families like Purdy's: They're just making everybody poorer.
Many of the benefits to be capped, including housing benefit, are available to people in work on low incomes. By cutting back on these benefits you're making remaining in work harder not easier.
The article says that Purdy gets IB and DLA. DLA is being subjected to 20% cuts and many genuinely ill people are being found fit for work in the IB to ESA moves. Right there is another possibility that these reforms might leave Purdy worse off.
Whenever there's a benefit-related news story the DWP are always given a right-to-reply in which they invariably tell a pack of lies. So why is it that when the right wing press - which unfortunately has to include BBC News these days - run a story straight from the mouths of the DWP that disabled people don't get the same right?
Finally!
It's taken more than a year of begging but: 38 Degrees have finally decided that welfare issues are sexy enough to support. Here's the Email they sent out today:
A cynical person might speculate that they're only jumping on board now that disabled people have made headlines with the Spartacus Report and they're hoping to dash in and claim a victory. But whatever their motivation it's great to have them on board, and here's hoping it will result in them offering more support for disability issues in the future. So please support this campaign so they realise that, actually, disability issues are a popular choice for them to engage in.
"The Lords have told government to ditch plans that would leave people struggling financially if they became sick or disabled. Now 38 Degrees members can help make sure MPs listen." Kathy Peach, Head of Campaigns & Social Change, Scope
Dear [supporter],
In the next few days we could help stop some of the worst cuts to support for sick and disabled people. The House of Lords voted to stop some of the most unfair cuts - including support being ended after only a year for some people recovering from very serious illnesses, like cancer. [1]
The government is threatening to reverse these decisions and bring the cuts back. [2] But they can only do that if they can persuade enough MPs to do what the government tells them. If we work together, we can push our MPs to stand up for what's right and defend sick and disabled people.
Right now, many MPs could be on the verge of doing the right thing. A final, people-powered push from thousands of 38 Degrees members could convince them to back the Lords’ changes to the bill.
Click here to send an email to your MP - it only takes 2 minutes:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/stop-cuts-to-support
All over the country, disabled people and their families are anxiously waiting to see what will happen. The decision could be the difference between a decent life and serious poverty. Becoming sick or disabled could happen to any of us. Now, we’ve got a chance to stop MPs making a tough package of cuts even worse.
Send an email to your MP - ask them to make sure they back the Lords’ changes:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/stop-cuts-to-support
Time and again, 38 Degrees members have taken action to stand up for what’s fair. We’ve challenged the government when they’ve turned a blind eye to tax dodgers. We made it clear that we won’t put up with NHS plans that mean people who pay more get better care. And we’ve been telling MPs to protect Legal Aid for people challenging decisions about their benefits.
Even with the changes the Lords have made, there are big worries about what these plans mean for disabled people. But if MPs don’t back the Lords’ changes, it could end up being even worse. Our voices will be joining hundreds of other groups, including Scope and Sense, who want MPs to protect these improvements. [3]
Together, we can persuade MPs to vote the right way on cuts to support for sick and disabled people:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/stop-cuts-to-support
Thanks for being involved,
Hannah, Cian, Becky, Johnny, David, Marie and the 38 Degrees team
NOTES
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9009079/Boost-for-cancer-patients-as-reforms-that-would-cut-support-defeated.html
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/01/welfare-disabled-government
[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16523649
[3] Read more about some of the other groups campaigning here:
http://thehardesthit.wordpress.com/
http://www.scope.org.uk/
http://www.sense.org.uk/
http://diaryofabenefitscrounger.blogspot.com/2012/01/i-support-spartacus-report.html
A cynical person might speculate that they're only jumping on board now that disabled people have made headlines with the Spartacus Report and they're hoping to dash in and claim a victory. But whatever their motivation it's great to have them on board, and here's hoping it will result in them offering more support for disability issues in the future. So please support this campaign so they realise that, actually, disability issues are a popular choice for them to engage in.
Monday, 23 January 2012
♫...Here in my car I feel safest of all...♫
On Thursday I posed a question that's been bothering me:
I got a couple of replies:
So then I asked:
And got these replies:
The government only care about business and profits, not people. They're not listening to the human case for not taking benefits, so I think we need to try another tack: The business case. As I understand it; Motability was effectively the only thing that stopped the car industry from caving in.
I have no contacts within the car industry, I know nothing about business lobbying. I'm worse than useless at motivating people to do stuff. I have zero ideas about how we get the car business to speak up. All I do know is that while the government won't listen to disabled people, they will listen to the concerns of their big business buddies. So I'm throwing this idea out there as a possible avenue for a plan of attack we haven't exploited yet.
Seriously: Why are car companies not lobbying the government over the number of people losing Motability eligibility? #DLA #wrb
— Lisa Egan (@lisybabe) January 19, 2012
I got a couple of replies:
@lisybabe perhaps they don't know about how PIP is going to reduce numbers on eligible Enahnced Mobility #DLA #WRB
— M Thomson Fibromite (@Fibromitesunite) January 19, 2012
@lisybabe Because, I assume, they don't realise how bad it might be.
— Robin (@queerpup) January 19, 2012
So then I asked:
Next question then: How do we get car companies lobbying the government over the number of people losing Motability eligibility? #DLA #wrb
— Lisa Egan (@lisybabe) January 19, 2012
And got these replies:
@lisybabe Do they even know it is happening?
— Tentacle Sixteen (@latentexistence) January 19, 2012
@lisybabe first step would be getting a breakdown of payments from motability to car companies - find out the biggest likely losers?
— dog in a sink (@doginasink) January 19, 2012
@lisybabe Start writing to them. Point out that you are a Motability customer, and under Govt changes you will lose that, as will X000 other
— Robin (@queerpup) January 19, 2012
@lisybabe Someone at Motability must have thought about this. Perhaps worth contacting them.
— Tentacle Sixteen (@latentexistence) January 19, 2012
@lisybabeThe car dealers are going to be quite pissed off when they realise exactly how much (cont) tl.gd/fe2b7u
— Carole(@robomam) January 19, 2012
The government only care about business and profits, not people. They're not listening to the human case for not taking benefits, so I think we need to try another tack: The business case. As I understand it; Motability was effectively the only thing that stopped the car industry from caving in.
I have no contacts within the car industry, I know nothing about business lobbying. I'm worse than useless at motivating people to do stuff. I have zero ideas about how we get the car business to speak up. All I do know is that while the government won't listen to disabled people, they will listen to the concerns of their big business buddies. So I'm throwing this idea out there as a possible avenue for a plan of attack we haven't exploited yet.
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Just a form - some benefit myths
Here are three myths that have been annoying me recently, the first two repeated constantly by government ministers.
Fact: Some people might only fill in a form to claim DLA, but decisions makers demand strong evidence to award the benefit. That evidence might come from the claimant's GP, or consultant, or other specialist in their disability. It might come from an occupational therapist or social worker. Many people send supporting evidence with their claim form, but if they don't the DWP will write to medical professionals and ask for it. If nothing is available, the DWP will send the claimant to a medical assessment - and they might well do that anyway. So the claimant might just fill in a form, but the decision needs a lot more evidence than that. Renewals may be treated differently.
Myth: DLA is awarded for life.
Fact: DLA is awarded for life ONLY if the disability is for life. Some cases are obvious. Missing limbs, progressive diseases. They don't get better. They get worse. There is no point in repeatedly assessing people with such disabilities apart from to see if they have got worse, and in that case a simple letter asking the patient if they have got worse would suffice to determine who to reassess. People who have variable conditions or illnesses that might improve get awarded DLA for a limited time after which they have to reapply. In my own case I have been awarded DLA for two years, and more recently for five years. Not for life.
Myth: People on benefits get free cars.
Fact: People who are unable to walk or virtually unable to walk get the higher rate mobility component of DLA. This is worth about £50 per week. They can spend it to improve their lives however they wish. Many people use the money to buy a wheelchair or a car. There is a scheme called Motability which is run by a charity, NOT the government, and people who receive high rate mobility can choose to lease a car or a wheelchair through them, paid for out of their own DLA.
The Motability scheme (remember, paid for by people who use it) purchases new cars and leases them to its customers. Most customers pay the entire £50 per week of their mobility allowance to the Motability scheme for three years to lease the car. That is £7,800 in total. At the end of the lease the car is sold. If the payments and the sale price together are not expected to match the purchase price, the customer pays the difference in advance. So it is perfectly possible to have a high end car, but unless it has a high resale price, the customer could be paying hundreds or thousands of pounds extra for that lease. And they don't get to keep it.
This article is taken from the authors own blog at latentexistence.me.uk.
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