Overheard in the Waiting Room

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

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

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

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

But time and again the same sentiments were repeated:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writing in The Guardian, report author Claudia Wood said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is It Coz We Is Disabled?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly utterly unreasonable….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ESA SOS - The Starting Gun #ESAendgame

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

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

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

They will totally change your perception of ESA and WCAs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So today, in the comment thread below please leave :

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


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

Enough is Enough.

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

"Alone we Whisper, Together we Shout"


http://wowpetition.com/

A monumental day for equality #equalmarriage #pip

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

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

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

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

20 Metres, Coming Up Short

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

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

Rochester

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

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

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

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

Chatham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New rules judge you fit for work based on imaginary help #esaSOS

There are new regulations for Employment Support Allowance about to come into force on the 28th of January. These regulations were proposed only six weeks before they will come into force, leaving very little time for the impact to be considered.

Worse, these regulations make drastic changes to the assumptions made during the assessment that will result in even more people being refused sickness benefits or told to take part in work-related activity.

The two big changes are:

An assessor can consider what mobility aids, equipment, medical treatments or medicines might help the claimant return to work, and then, without consulting them as to whether the change is suitable, they can judge them fit for work or for work related activity based on them making that change. This completely ignores things like side-effects of medication, suitability of adaptions and mobility aids, or even if such help is available to the individual. This could already happen to some extent, such as with wheelchairs, but will now apply to a far wider range of changes. This also raises the huge problem of medical treatment without consent, since refusing to take a drug that could help a person return to work, even for very good reasons, could lead to benefits being withdrawn.

The second huge change is to how the the assessment considers the relationship between mental and physical health conditions. Where previously any disability or restriction could be applied to any activity, whether it was caused by mental problems or physical problems. These new regulations will strictly separate the two such that one set of questions considers purely physical restrictions, and another set purely mental restrictions. You may be completely unable to perform a task due to mental illness, but be considered able to physically and therefore able to full stop. This equally applies to side effects of medicines. For medicines that treat mental health conditions, only the impact of side effects ON mental health will be considered. Crippling physical side effects caused by treatment for mental health will be completely ignored when deciding that a person can work.

These changes will pull the rug from under the feet (or wheels) of hundreds of thousands more people who are struggling to live, never mind to earn a wage. Make no mistake; whatever the intention of these changes, this is a cut in support.

What you can do

The clearest analysis of these changes that I have read is from Ekklesia. Briefing on ESA Regulations [Ekklesia] I recommend that you read this.

Please write to your MP urgently to oppose these new regulations. You can find and contact your email through Write to Them. My own communication with my MP will be available on this blog later today.

Please share this and other blogs about this subject on Twitter with the hashtag #esaSOS as well as on Facebook and anywhere else you think suitable. A tweet of your own will have far more impact than a retweet.

Please also add your signature to the War On Welfare petition to call for a cumulative impact assessment of this government's welfare reforms.

Further Reading

DWP guidance on the changes: Memo DMG 1/13 [PDF]

The Employment and Support Allowance (Amendment) Regulations 2012 [legislation.gov.uk]

Diary of a benefit scrounger: ESA SOS

Thousands of disabled and sick people will be hit by new ESA/WCA changes [Ekklesia]

If you can only walk twenty metres you'll get no help

When PIP starts to replace Disability Living Allowance next year anyone who can walk just twenty metres will not qualify for help with mobility. Twenty metres is less than the distance most of the disabled parking bays at my local Tesco are from the door. It's really not much. Hundreds of thousands of people will no longer get a mobility allowance and as a result will no longer be eligible to lease a Motability car. One day it might be you that needs this.

The government has also left out the phrase "safely, reliably, repeatedly and in a timely manner" from the PIP regulations. This means that if a person can do something just once, or can push through pain to do it, they might not get help and can't even challenge it at tribunal.

These are just two of the largest problems. Please write to your MP and ask them to fix this urgently. I can't stress enough how urgent this is. You can contact your MP at Write To Them

There is lots more information at We Are Spartacus.

Please also sign the (Stop the) War On Welfare petition which is calling for government to do a cumulative impact assessment on welfare reform. A great many changes are being made all at once and yet the government have not stopped to consider how they will affect people when taken all together.

This is the message that I sent to my MP, you can use mine as a starting point for your own if you are stuck. Remember that MPs pay more attention to unique messages.

Dear xxxxxxx,

I am writing to you about the new Personal Independence Payments (PIP) which will soon replace DLA. It has emerged following the publication of the PIP regulations last week that there are many problems with the regulations, two of which are extremely serious.

Under PIP a person who can walk just 20 metres will not be eligible for the mobility component of PIP. That is an astonishingly short distance. Even the closer disabled parking bays at my local Tesco are twenty metres from the entrance. This decision will deny mobility allowance to hundreds of thousands of people who rely on it, and an estimated 100,000 people will lose their Motability cars in the first year alone as a result.

I also note with alarm that the phrase "safely, reliably, repeatedly and in a timely manner" has not been included in the regulations. This phrasing is extremely important, since a person may be able to do something once but then not again for hours - effectively meaning that the activity cannot be done, but PIP will take no account of that.

Government ministers claim that the vulnerable will be protected. I hope that you can see why I am so concerned about PIP and how this will leave people trapped in their homes without transport and denied support for even the bare minimum of activities that they must perform. Please can you give me your assurance that these regulations will be amended so that disabled people can continue with their lives.

Sincerely,

[Name and address]

A Testing Journey

I have my Work Capability Assessment (WCA) on Sunday.

Yes, you read that right: A Sunday. And, yes, 2 days before Christmas. I presume Atos are working weekends in order to claim overtime expenses from the DWP.

I've read news reports about people getting all precious and going to the press saying "why would they want to assess me? Look at me... I'm clearly not fit for work." Erm... that's the point of the assessment: To look at you.

But there was something in the envelope that made my jaw drop in disbelief: A suggested journey plan.

"What's wrong with that? Surely that's Atos being helpful in giving you directions to their centre..."

They told me to take a route that's not wheelchair accessible.

First of all they tell me to walk 16 minutes to Kings Cross tube station. I'm not going to get pedantic about that; I talk of going for "a walk" despite being a wheelchair user. They tell me to take the Circle Line to Edgware Road and then walk another 9 minutes to the testing centre.

Edgware Road has no wheelchair access. In fact the closest wheelchair accessible tube station is Kings Cross.

You have to remember this isn't just a random travel leaflet shoved in with the letter; this is a tailor made journey plan for someone coming from my address to the testing centre at that specific date and time.

Atos haven't seen me in 4.5 years. It's possible that some of my health problems may have changed. But one thing that has not, and will never get any better is my lifelong mobility impairment.

Atos and the DWP know I'm a wheelchair user because of an incurable impairment. My impairment's incurableness is the reason I have an indefinite DLA award.

Further proof that Atos believe in miracles.

Well over 100,000 to lose Motability vehicles under draconian new rules

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

When I blogged on this topic back in January, I predicted thousands of disabled people would lose their Motability vehicles under the Government’s draft criteria for Personal Independence Payment (PIP), set to replace Disability Living Allowance (DLA) under the Welfare Reform Act. Yesterday, the Government published the final version of the criteria and the reality is far, far worse than we could have imagined.

Many consultation responses on the draft criteria complained that the descriptors for Activity 12 (Activity 11 in the draft), addressing physical difficulties in moving around, were unclear and confusing. We hoped they would be clarified; in particular, we expected clarification that being unable to walk more than 50 metres would qualify claimants for the enhanced mobility component and the Motability scheme. But we’re stunned by the decision that to qualify for Motability, a claimant needs to be unable to walk more than 20 metres – a far shorter distance.

This has massive repercussions for the majority of Motability customers who, whilst they might be able to walk 20 metres, do nonetheless have very significant difficulties getting around. Under the second draft criteria, published in January, DWP predicted that 27% fewer working age people would be eligible for the scheme once PIP was fully rolled out. It is now clear from the Government’s own figures that 42% fewer disabled people of working age will be eligible for the Motability scheme once PIP is fully rolled out than would have been eligible had DLA continued unchanged (see Personal Independence Payment: Reassessment and Impacts, published 13 December 2012).

So what will this mean for disabled people? Only those with the greatest difficulty getting around, mainly those who use a wheelchair most of the time, will qualify for the Motability scheme on grounds of physical impairment. Huge numbers of disabled people with serious musculo-skeletal conditions, serious heart conditions or respiratory difficulties, cerebral palsy, neurological conditions such as MS and ME and many, many more will no longer benefit from the scheme. Their car will simply be taken away before they have a chance to appeal.

Those who no longer qualify for Motability are likely to be unable to get to work, attend medical appointments, visit friends, go shopping or, indeed, have much of a life at all. More than a hundred thousand people, who were previously able to get out and about independently, will find themselves staring at four walls; they will need more support for essential journeys, such as medical appointments, and their quality of life will be decimated. When visiting a small supermarket, 20 metres doesn’t even get you from the parking space to the entrance, never mind around the supermarket. In fact, lots of people have to walk more than 20 metres from their car to their front door when they get home again!

Disabled people who live in rural areas will be hurt the most. What little public transport is available is less likely to be accessible. There may be no local shops, no GP or pharmacy nearby; asking for a lift to the GP means asking someone to commit a considerable part of their day to drive a considerable distance.

Then there’s the knock-on effect on the UK car industry and the wider economy. In our report, Reversing from Recovery, published in June this year, the Spartacus network used the DWP’s own projections under the draft criteria to demonstrate the knock-on effect on the car industry and wider economy once all DLA claimants of working age had been migrated to PIP. However, under the DWP’s revised projections of the number of claimants eligible for Motability, under the final PIP criteria, the effect on the car industry and economy will be much more serious:

• the car industry could lose nearly 50,000 new car sales a year (we predicted a loss of 31,450 sales under earlier projections),
• more than 5,500 jobs could be lost from the economy (we predicted a loss of just over 3,500 jobs under earlier projections)
• the Treasury could lose £126 million in tax receipts from motor-related industries (we predicted a loss of £79 million under earlier projections),

as a result of fewer claimants using the Motability scheme by the time PIP has been fully rolled out. And of course, if disabled people lose their jobs because they can no longer get to work, they will claim more in benefits and pay less tax. All in all, the original estimate of the effect on the economy was bad enough, but these figures are far worse.

For some, there is one slight cause for encouragement: the Government has listened to concerns about the speed of implementation and the necessity for evaluation and revised its timetable. DLA claimants with indefinite awards will only start to be reassessed from October 2015 – but newer claimants are more likely to have been given time-limited awards and therefore won’t benefit. And without extra assurances from either side of the political divide, we have to assume that the criteria published today will eventually affect all DLA claimants, albeit with implementation taking place over a longer timetable.

Hundreds of thousands of disabled people whose cars are vital to their life and health stand to lose virtually everything. No car = no independence, no job, no salary (with a consequent risk of homelessness), no social life plus increased dependence on family members, health and social care services and other benefits to survive. This begs the question: how does this cut help disabled people to fulfill the social contract of being part of society and contributing by work, volunteering or being part of their community? Even those held up by the Minister for Disabled People, Esther McVey, as inspirational role models will have their lives cruelly and unnecessarily restricted.

The Government has clearly paid little heed to the impact of this ‘reform’ on disabled people’s human rights. There is no doubt that the PIP criteria for people with a physical difficulty in getting around is retrogressive under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, ratified by the UK in 2009. The proposals seriously compromise disabled people’s human rights under several Articles of the Convention, including, among others, the right to live independently and to be included in the community (Article 19), and the right to personal mobility, specifically to….’ personal mobility with the greatest possible independence’ (Article 20).

This attack on the lives of disabled people who have difficulty getting around is NOT a price worth paying. MPs on both sides of the House of Commons should vote these regulations down. The Government can, and must, do much better than this, if it really wants to build on the legacy of the Paralympics.

                                       *************************************

* To get the enhanced mobility component of PIP, you need to accrue 12 points from either the first or second mobility activity in Part 3 of Schedule 1 of the PIP regulations. The first activity (Activity 11 in other DWP documents) covers non-physical difficulties with planning or following a journey and the second activity (Activity 12 in other DWP documents) covers physical difficulties in getting around. To get 12 points from the second activity alone, you have to be unable to stand then move more than 20 metres. If you have no difficulties with planning or following a journey and you can walk more than 20 metres, you will not be awarded the enhanced mobility component and you will not be eligible for the Motability scheme.

International Day of Persons With Disabilities

Today is the UN's International Day of Persons With Disabilities. The theme is "Removing barriers to create an inclusive and accessible society for all." Our government are celebrating the day by preparing to send sick and disabled people on unlimited unpaid "work experience". In a way this is removing barriers - now sick and disabled people can be subject to the same punitive measures that unemployed able-bodied people are - but I don't think this is what was meant.

The DWP press release has made an effort to deny that this is mandatory or punitive, but just a few words later explains that anyone who refuses to go on such unpaid work experience (or is unable to but ignored) will be subject to Mandatory Work Activity instead and failing that, will lose the majority of their ESA benefit. It would be nice to think that MWA is only used in extreme cases but in practice anyone and everyone can be sent for this mandatory labour without cause. My own brother is one such example.

This measure applies only to people in the Work Related Activity Group (WRAG) and those in the Support Group are safe for now but people in the WRAG are NOT fit for work, even ignoring the fact that so many people are wrongly assigned to the WRAG when they should be in the Support Group. They are expected to be able to return to work, with help, at some unspecified point in the future. This new policy of forcing them on to The Work Programme, work experience and Mandatory Work Activity (Unpaid labour) completely ignores this and will cause harm, suffering and even death.

Image by @dochackenbush

Disability Workfare – Even Worse Than We Feared

With Disability Workfare due to kick in on Monday, DWP chose the end of the week to throw out their press-release, clearly trying to restrict the ability of anyone to challenge it in any significant manner or even engage in a meaningful debate. The press-release claims that no disabled person will be mandated onto work experience, but in the very next sentence starts talking about mandating us onto subtly different Mandatory Work placements under threat of sanction. So if you turn down work experience it isn't difficult to guess what will follow.

We now know that from Monday contractors from the likes of A4E will be able to mandate a disabled person onto indefinite Mandatory Work Placements, and while the Work Programme Providers are reluctant to elaborate, and DWP claim otherwise, it is clear much of this will be with private sector companies. Of course with contractor bonus payments dependent on showing progress, and contractors being given targets for sanctioning people on the Work Programme (a fact revealed by DWP’s own research), the absolute certainty is that the immediate interests of individual contractors will be given precedence over the interests of the disabled people forced into their absolute control.

Chillingly the press-release states that Mandatory Work Placement will be used in “circumstances where someone refuses to take reasonable steps to address a barrier which is stopping them working.” So the likelihood is that we will see Mandatory Work Placements being used as a club to force disabled people into treatments some medically unqualified A4E or Serco contractor desperate to get his monthly bonus thinks is appropriate, no matter whether that is the actual case. As an example, I have major back problems, for most people standard physiotherapy is an appropriate part of treatment for back issues, and we have seen suggestions of linking the Work Programme and physio in the past, but in my case my back problems are linked to my Hypermobility Syndrome, and the stretching aspects of normal physio would be actively damaging, but is that a nuance that a pressured A4E hack is going to understand, or care about? There are plenty of other examples of damaging treatments out there, for instance ME and exercise, which even has a powerful lobby of UK doctors backing it, no matter that the rest of the medical world disagrees with them.

The press-release even resorts to outright lying when it states “People who are too sick or disabled to work are placed in the support group for ESA”. All people in receipt of ESA have been classified as too sick to work by ATOS following a Work Capability Assessment and are placed in both the Support Group, and in the Work Related Activity Group, which is precisely the group that mandatory workfare will now apply to. The difference between the two groups is that someone in WRAG may, and only may, become able to work at some indefinite point in the future, and that point will often be years away, if at all (a point DWP are incredibly reluctant to acknowledge). Additionally, as Labour’s Shadow Employment Secretary, Stephen Timms, has pointed out, many people are being wrongly placed by ATOS into the WRAG when they should in fact be in Support Group. It is likely that this new policy will drive the already disastrous rate of WCA appeals even higher.

Indeed the prospects of disability workfare are so bad that even the major disability charities, who have clung to workfare through the worst of the protests against it, are now dropping it like a stinking corpse. The British Heart Foundation have already severed all ties, Cancer Research UK will pull out on the 1^st January and Scope are urgently reviewing their position.

One aspect of disability workfare that seems not to have been explored is that there is going to be a huge issue around the legal concept of duty of care (i.e. the requirement to protect people from harm) for anyone taking on someone from ESA under a Mandatory Work Placement. People on ESA have by definition been found not currently fit for work, while duty of care applies to anyone an employer is in a supervisory position over (or to customers or even passers-by), it is not necessary for them to be the disabled person's employer in terms of law for duty of care to apply. It may well be the case that taking on a disabled person under mandatory workfare will violate the terms of their employer liability insurance, leaving them directly liable.

The press-release also contains the bizarre assertion that not having had many jobs is a valid reason for subjecting a disabled person to mandatory workfare. Speaking as a disabled person, I have only ever had one job, so would presumably be subject to this. Of course that one job was for 22 years and revolved around developing flight control systems to stop aircraft falling out of the sky; so maybe not having had many jobs isn’t the career weakness DWP claim it is. For that matter the Civil Service Fast Track typically recruits direct from university, so it is likely that the authors of the press-release have themselves only had one job….

(Amended to refer to the indefinite Mandatory Work Placements rather than Mandatory Work Activity, which is apparently limited to 4 weeks)

Leveson and Disability, Ships Passing in the Night

We’re not imagining it, the Leveson report admits there really is an anti-disability agenda in the press. You just have to dig deep to find the admission!

The press coverage has inevitably focussed on the recommendations for press regulation, and the PM’s instant retreat from it into a lock-in with the hacks in the Last Chance Saloon (which the Press were told they were inhabiting after the last press inquiry in 1990 following the death of Princess Diana), but that forgets that Leveson took a huge amount of evidence, written as well as in person, and the report is not only his recommendations, but his analysis of that evidence and with it the way that the contemporary press behaves.

While it was phone hacking and the Millie Dowler and Maddie McCann cases that dominated the press coverage, evidence was submitted to the Inquiry about the way that disabled people have been systematically demonised by the press, but unfortunately Lord Leveson refused to call disability groups to give evidence, restricting them to written evidence.

Time and again as you skim through the huge (2000 pages) report you find a section where you think that Leveson is about to talk about disability, but then he shies away again and very little of substance is actually said. He actually raises it in a section in Volume II entitled ‘Harm’ and with the spiralling disability hate crime rates you think that surely here is where he will talk about disability, after all he’s going into detail in the section on the complete fabrication of anti-Muslim stories and the outing and ridiculing of Trans people unfortunate enough to draw media attention, but then he falters at the final hurdle and disability is reduced to ‘them too’. The value for disabled people here is his conclusion that groups as well as individuals need to be able to call on a press regulator to protect them, all too often the PCC has simply dismissed complaints about the most outrageous attacks on disabled people because no individuals are named, but it is still an opportunity missed.

Leveson finally hits his disability stride in the next section, reporting three media stories around ESA stats, one from the Mail, one from the Sun, one from the Express, and all three particularly egregious examples of their kind. Leveson concludes that the stories are clearly inaccurate, indeed that there is no reasonable way to draw the conclusions being trumpeted in headlines alleging “94% of incapacity benefits [sic] can work”. Leveson tacitly accepts the conclusion that there is a clear anti-disability agenda at work, which could actually be hugely valuable, because it is further official recognition, after that of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, that there has been a concerted press campaign to demonise us. Disturbingly, even in this section the evidence from disability groups and from journalist Katharine Quarmby, author of the seminal ‘Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People’ goes unreferenced, it is only the evidence from media accuracy group Full Fact, with additional reference to the concerns of the Select Committee on Work and Pensions, that features in Leveson’s analysis. It would seem the learned judge hasn’t come across Nothing For Us, Without Us.

A full half of Volume III is devoted to Data Protection, and with data on ‘vulnerable’ people drawing additional protection under the Data Protection Act, together with certain notorious cases such as Gordon Brown’s child, you would expect disability to crop up once or twice, sadly it seems not to occur even once. Volume IV does have one interesting revelation, that in 2005 the PCC lobbied against a European Directive that would have outlawed audio-visual content that incited hatred on the grounds of, amongst other things, disability, because that would ‘infringe on editorial prerogatives’ (even though audio-visual content is barely relevant to the PCC). It is quite frightening that the press regulator will go out and lobby in defence of an editor’s right to bigotry, but not to defend vulnerable minorities against it.

Volume IV does address our needs when Lord Leveson returns to the subject of discrimination against groups rather than individuals, arguing that there is no good reason why the press regulator should not address this, and impose sanctions and redress if that is required. This has been a substantial weakness of the existing press regulation and we shouldn’t underestimate how significant a change it could be, but we need it to be wrapped up in a press regulatory mechanism that does address incitement to hatred, and I think Leveson has shied away from that, in fact he acknowledges in a later section that harm of this kind is difficult to address through self-regulation (which is another reason to line up against Cameron’s refusal to legislate). Unfortunately that is the last reference to disability in the Report, though it had rapidly become clear that the Report was not going to instantly reverse the campaign of vilification that continues to be directed at us.

In her piece for Channel 4 News, Katharine Quarmby perhaps nails the true problem with Leveson and disability, talking about his refusal to call disability groups to give evidence before the Inquiry and saying he “displayed the nervousness around disability that so characterises the elite” and ultimately glossed over it rather than try to understand the politics that surround us. Unfortunately that means a deeper analysis of press demonisation of disabled people is now a discussion for the next inquiry into press ethics – it’s a pity we only have them once a generation....

Disabled? Work Programme? Bah, Humbug!

Collector: At this festive time of year, Mr. Scrooge, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute.

Scrooge: Are there no prisons?

It has been known for a while that the DWP, under the Glorious Leadership of the finger-wagging Iain Duncan Scrooge, plans to extend compulsory workfare to disabled people. Thanks to a DWP memo, we now know this will kick off on the 3^rd of December, and as a lovely Christmas present for we ‘workshy’ Tiny Tims, Dear Uncle Iain Duncan Scrooge is extending the sanctions regime for disabled people from the very same date.

The implications of the Compulsory Workfare changes are that workfare contractors from the likes of A4E, Serco and Igneus are being given the rights to determine that a disabled person, who even ATOS have acknowledged is not fit for work, should in fact be forced to work for an indefinite term. These people are not experts in disability and they certainly are not experts in the limitations imposed by our individual disabilities. Worse still, they are driven by a bonus-dependent pay structure to get us into work come what may, yet they will have the authority to send us on indefinite forced labour, at a fraction of the minimum wage, no matter our objections that our disabilities will not allow us to do the work, or that it is actively dangerous to our health.

The memo repeats Dear Uncle Iain Duncan Scrooge’s favourite claim that work is good for you and that being out of work is actively bad for your health, almost as though DWP were desperate to convince their own staff and contractors that bullying disabled people into work is a good idea; the problem is that this research relates to the population in general, and is completely inapplicable to a cohort of disabled people ruled unfit for work by even the notoriously biased Work Capability Assessment. When I was working I used to end each working day curled up in foetal position on the office floor, in so much pain that I couldn’t think straight; I’m really not certain that counted as good for me.

It is particularly interesting that the memo is worded to refer to people in the WRAG as having ‘limited capacity for work’, whereas the ESA WRAG criteria define us as ‘not currently fit for work’. It is never a good sign when you need to hit the definitions with a sledgehammer to get them to fit your policy.

For those who have never experienced the DWP in action first hand, this may all seem a bit theoretical, and surely no reasonable person would expect a disabled person to do something they aren’t capable of, or that might even be dangerous to them? That is something I am sure Dear Uncle Iain Duncan Scrooge would be the first to claim, but I have actually been here before and yes, we do have something to fear. Back in 2009 I was claiming JSA, and was referred to Flexible New Deal, one of the workfare predecessors. Knowing full well that I was disabled and walked with crutches, JCP sent me to attend an interview with a workfare contractor in a building accessed up a flight of slippery external iron steps, in foul weather, in an office so stuffed with furniture I could barely fit into it and certainly couldn’t walk safely, where I was expected to discuss the intimate details of my disability while sat back to back with someone else discussing his ongoing drug problem.

Now, to the credit of the people who interviewed me, they realised immediately that I was far too disabled for the scheme and should actually be on ESA, but even with them reporting this back, JCP insisted that I had to go on the scheme come what may. It was only when I wrote a letter of complaint and copied it to my MP, in his persona as the then Minister for Disabled People, that there was a magical change in JCP’s attitude and would I please change my claim to ESA? My ESA claim has been a nightmare all of its own, but perhaps the salient feature for the current topic is that I was told I would be called for an interview with RBLI, the training arm of the Royal British Legion, which, I was warned, would be in a yet another building accessed up an external iron staircase….

I actually received a written apology from JCP admitting they had ‘lost track’ of my disability. Yet the initial contractor kept demanding I come back for further interviews, even though I wasn’t even claiming JSA any more, and, even once they ‘remembered’ I was disabled and moved me on to ESA, the workfare contractor, the commercial arm of a disability charity, dealing solely with disabled clients, had an office up a flight of external iron stairs and half a mile from the nearest disabled parking. That is not just ‘losing track’ of my disability, it is an active contempt for my disability, and even my safety.

And now that contempt is going to be capable of meting out mandatory workfare backed by sanctions. We already know from DWP data that disabled people are being disproportionately sanctioned. 10,130 sanctions were applied to around 8,500 disabled people (some being sanctioned twice or more), 45% of those sanctions were directed at people with mental health issues, despite only 30% of disabled participants having mental health issues. With Work Programme figures being released in different places at different times it is difficult to determine the overall rates of sanction, but combining the newly released outcome figures with the earlier sanction figures should give us a lower bound (as the earlier sanctions statistics will have applied to a smaller pool and there is anecdotal evidence sanction rates are increasing). That gives us 8,500 sanctioned from a population of around 80,000 disabled participants, or around 10.5%, which is significantly higher than on the Work Programme as a whole, where a Freedom of Information request has revealed a typical sanction rate of 6%. This sanctions regime applies even as the Work Programme fails to get disabled participants into work at an even greater rate than it fails non-disabled people (only 1.3% of disabled Work Programme participants were found work, versus 3.5% for non-disabled participants, and against an expectation that 5% would find help even without ‘support’). 

The sanctions changes are detailed on the DWP’s website. At the moment disabled people can be sanctioned if they don’t attend a Work Programme interview or don’t do whatever ‘work related activity’ is mandated, and I have already heard of disabled people being threatened with sanctions simply for having their disability manifest itself in the middle of a training course. Some contractors are even reported to have regional offices solely dedicated to handling sanctions, or to have reduced the sanctioning process to pushing a button, removing any chance of individual circumstances being adequately considered. Some even have targets for sanctioning (see this DWP document, page 77/78). The current sanctions start at 50% of your benefit, rising to 100% after 4 weeks, but stop when you are beaten into submission. That is bad enough, but under the new regime they won’t stop even when you submit, you will face an additional punitive fixed term sanction even after complying with whatever is being demanded, one week for a first ‘offence’, two weeks for a second, and four for any following instances. It is difficult to construe this as anything other than deliberate and calculated punishment, with no regard whatsoever for our disabilities.

It is also disturbing to note that even if you submit an explanation for why you are unable to participate, DWP expect you to participate while they consider it. If they don’t accept your explanation you can appeal to a tribunal – but better hope those are running faster than the one year plus delays currently being experienced on WCA appeals…

And the truly contemptuous irony, all of these savage changes from Dear Uncle Iain Duncan Scrooge are coming into force on 3^rd December, the International Day of Persons with a Disability.

Always the Pall-Bearer, never the Corpse - Lord Freud & The Risk-Taking Poor

This week, Lord Freud, parliamentary Undersecretary for the Department of Work and Pensions, has been talking once again about the lifestyle choices of benefit claimants and the fact that poor people simply don't take enough risks.

In an interview for House Magazine, where he speaks sensibly about the need for better guidance and clarity within the system, Freud continues to reveal his profound naivety about the lives of people on low incomes. 

“You know, the incapacity benefits, the lone parents, the people who are self-employed for year after year and only earn hundreds of pounds or a few thousand pounds, the people waiting for their work ability assessment then not going to it – all kinds of areas where people are able to have a lifestyle off benefits [sic.] and actually off conditionality.”

Clearly, none of these situations are ones of choice.  Nobody chooses to be incapacitated for work, the majority of lone parents are not even single, let alone impoverished, out of choice.  The self-employed example is an interesting one, because it puts such a porky pie to this rhetoric of risk.

Being a creative type, I've known many self-employed people on very low incomes. I've come across three categories of circumstances:

• People who are earning a very small amount, but have other support, such as a decent pension, a high-earning spouse or financial support from other family. Sometimes these people are hobbyists who produce more steampunk tea-cosies than they can give away, some are pursuing a lifelong dream and others are just pleased to earn a few quid commission on tupperwear or sex-toys.

The risks these people take are highly variable, but they're not close to needing benefits.

• People on benefits who are earning such a small amount that they are only able to reduce the amount they claim on benefits, but are working hard with a view to becoming completely free of benefits at some time in the future.
• People who are earning just enough to stay off benefits for now.  I know these people include at least one of the Where's the Benefit? gang and what they have achieved is pretty amazing.

These second two categories of people are all major risk-takers.  Having helped close friends with the paperwork in these circumstances and having done small amounts of paid writing work myself, I can tell you that any unconventional work, including self-employment, does not mix with the benefits system; until you have done the work, been paid and filled in multiple forms, it is sometimes impossible to know

• how much form-filling is necessary (after writing one piece, I endured a six month paper trail with the DWP, taking up far more time and energy than the work itself.)
• whether you're going to inadvertently break a rule and get into trouble.
• whether your capacity for a little work is going to bring you under suspicion for fraud. 
• at what point you'll lose your benefits.
• how difficult it could be to get back on benefits, if you lose them and need them again.

Meanwhile, the benefits system is much stricter - and less sensible - than the tax system when it comes to expenses and overheads. Often, money is counted as earnings if it passes through your hands, even if you have to spend it to keep your business going. Some of this stuff actually looks like it might improve with the new systems, but it's still a mess now and it always has been. 

So why would anyone bother?  Well, only because they can't do conventional work, but they have the skills and just enough energy to do something. These are usually disabled people, or those caring for disabled people, who have much less time or energy, or much less reliable time and energy, than they'd need to work even part time, employed by someone else.

Providing that there is work available, it would surely be far easier and far less of a risk to do conventional work, if one has the capacity to do so. The idea even benefits claimants who are actively working, thus reducing the amount of benefits they claim and contributing to the economy, can be described as lazy or cautious, is completely ludicrous.

Freud said,

"...people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks, they’ve got least to lose."

This is nonsense. This is like saying we should recruit soldiers from people who are sick and have shortened life expectancies, because they have less to lose - what's a limb here or there if you're heart's going to give out any minute?  We need our soldiers to be healthy because, as well as being better equipped for the job, they are unlikely to lose as much - they are much less likely to be killed than someone with pre-existing ill health. Similarly, in terms of major financial risk-taking, that's entirely for the likes of Freud and his peers, who have a soft plump pillow of inherited cash and savings beneath them.

When people on benefits are afraid of taking work, it is because they are afraid of being left with literally no income or savings. Of being left homeless and hungry, with absolutely nothing. Sometimes even nothing minus debt.

And finally, on the subject of terrible analogies, Freud defends his massive personal privilege that some  consider disqualifies a person to pontificate about the behaviour of those so very much less fortunate than themselves.

"I think you don’t have to be the corpse to go to a funeral, which is the implied criticism there."

This is true, but you're more likely to be welcome if your understanding of the world hasn't filled you with complete contempt for the deceased and his loved ones.

It helps if you have some understanding of mortality.