In defence of the Welfare Bill
Oliver Lewis 5:30pm
The government’s welfare reforms seem to be staggering on, despite the concern
from the Lords that they’ll harm those who need help most: children and the disabled. But before the Bill goes back to the Commons, and everyone becomes more agitated, let me put the case for
the Bill from the perspective of someone it might affect.
I have a vested interest in the impending changes to disability benefits, because both my brothers are autistic – one severely so. My family depends on the Disability Living Allowance; caring for my brothers is a full time occupation for both my parents, and without support they simply wouldn’t be able to cope.
So I’ve been watching, with concern, the government’s proposal for the Disability Living Allowance to be transformed into something called a Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for people over 16 (including both my brothers). To qualify for this, anyone claiming they have a disability will have to be medically examined, even if they were claiming benefits before. This means that both my brothers will have to have their autism independently assessed.
In light of this, some people expect me to be worried and to lend my support to the charities and special interest groups who are agitating for a delay to the Bill, and an NHS-style U-turn.
But I’m actually cautiously in favour of these reforms. So far, I’ve seen no evidence to persuade me that this Bill isn't reasonable, and I have no reason to think that any assessment of a disabled person’s condition will be unfair. My little brother Joe recently had to take a medical examination – in the manner of those required by PIP – to see if he was able to work. He failed with flying colours. The doctor concluded in under ten minutes that he would never be able to cope in the work place, and recommended to the DWP that he was eligible for Employment Support Allowance.
It’s important to remember is that the current benefits that come with support – such as the blue badge – also seem set to remain.
The government has made no secret of the fact that it’s planning to save money and expecting many people to fail the PIP test, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that any injustice will be done. Neil O’Brien’s research last week showed that ‘the number of people claiming the benefit has roughly trebled since its introduction in 1992’ and that currently ‘only 6 per cent of claimants have their claim medically assessed by a specialist for the purpose of their claim’. It seems a fair assumption that the amount of fraud is significantly higher than the 0.5 per cent the DWP currently claims. As long as the tests are carried out by reputable and medically qualified people, this new system seems a lot fairer to everybody.
In fact, despite Polly Toynbee's claims, as far as I can see, the government has been cautious and sensible about making sure these reforms do right by the disabled community. Starting from 2013, it expects the process of examining every claimant to take up to three years. It has engaged with disabled groups, amended proposals and recently agreed to halve the time that seriously ill or disabled people will have to wait to receive PIP – to three months instead of six – a massive improvement, especially for cancer patients. The Welfare Reform Minister, Lord Freud, has also proposed an amendment allowing disabled people living in care homes to keep payments worth up to £51 per week.
Yes, there are still some big questions that haven’t been answered. Who exactly will be conducting these medical examinations? How exactly will PIP be simpler to use than the current DLA? Having had to watch my parents endure mountains of forms, constant phone calls, endless letters, tribunals and other problems caused by DLA bureaucracy while trying to care for my brothers, the promise of making the system simpler is very welcome, but I'll be wary until I see the results for myself.
But the fact remains that the government has a duty to spend tax payers’ money wisely, as well as to look after the weakest members of society. The charities and lobbyists who fight for the disabled – and indeed for children – do them no favours by assuming all reform is bad.
Previous
TrevorsDen
January 24th, 2012 5:55pm Report this commentI think all of us want to help the disabled. But why have the numbers grown so steadily?
AndyinBrum
January 24th, 2012 6:16pm Report this commentDiagnoses have improved and medicine has improved so that people are living longer as adults & children are surviving to adulthood.
Sean Mulcahy
January 24th, 2012 6:59pm Report this commentAs the husband of someone going through the process my experience so far is that the way the reforms are being discussed by politicians and the media is focused on the fraudsters and chancers. This leads to the feeling in those that do deserve support that the starting point is that no one believes them. This is what I find objectionable not the actual policy.
John Lea
January 24th, 2012 7:43pm Report this commentMade the fatal mistake of clicking the link and reading Toynbee's wretched column. Now seriously annoyed - don't do it Speccie readers! How can someone so clearly belonging to the Islington champagne socialist set and therefore immune from the very real social problems that our welfare culture breeds, dare lecture the rest of us on how uncivilised and awful we are not to continue feeding the benefits monster?
AliC
January 24th, 2012 9:22pm Report this commentGenuine case - help
Lifestyle of 5 kids and never worked = time to cut welfare and kick them into work.
Why are there so many more on the sick though?
And earning over 50k, time to leave council house and get on private rental or buy.
Peter From Maidstone
January 24th, 2012 9:32pm Report this commentUnfortunately there are so very many fraudsters and chancers that it is inevitable that the community of those with real disabilities has been tarnished. But if this process of properly considering the situation of all claimants is allowed to remove those who have no claim to support because of disability then those who realy do need the support will be properly identified and supported by the wider society.
There seems, for instance, to be a very large number of people not working because of a bad back or stress, both of which are liable to false representation.
Nickle
January 24th, 2012 11:32pm Report this commentIt seems a fair assumption that the amount of fraud is significantly higher than the 0.5 per cent the DWP currently claims.
============
Of course it is.
Most of the fraud is with the governments who wanted to hide unemployment.
Disabled went from 1 million to 2.5 million
Go figure.
Ostrich (occasionally)
January 24th, 2012 11:51pm Report this commentBut, but, but...Peter, the DWP asserts that only 0.5% of claims are fraudulent. Are you suggesting that they are being terminologically inexact? However, if they are, I'm sure they've got a perfectly good reason for it.
Andrew Taylor
January 25th, 2012 12:20am Report this commentMy God! Bliar, McDoom and the Two Eds, et al, have got something to answer for. In thirteen years they seem to have turned the UK into a whinging dependence state; all locked into welfare handouts of one kind or another and totally incapable of doing even the smallest thing on their own account.
Now, only the whites can be racist, only the left can possibly care about the needy, and only the State can decide what is good and what is not good for individuals.
Toynbee drones on muttering about hundreds of thousands of children being thrown into abject poverty (by which the hypocrit in chief probably means not having a widescreen TV and only one foreign holiday a year), etc, etc.
If they can't afford to live on £26k/year (and that comes without the need to drag themselves from their scratchers in the morning to go to work, without the need to pay 5 or 6 quid to park at the station, without the need to pay for high rail fares and, probably, without the need to pay their council tax) then they need to stop spending £7/day (x however many snoutcasts there are in the house) on fags and cut the pub visits down to one or two a day and learn to live on the lower sums that some of us are having to scrape by on!
Trapped
January 25th, 2012 12:29am Report this commentThis posting software is a pain...
Trapped
January 25th, 2012 12:29am Report this commentTrying again
I'd agree if the people doing the testing were good examples of the medical world. The companies currently involved, are not such examples, their track record is somewhat comparable to a very shady insurance company. They only pay out if there's no loophole or technicality they can exploit to get out of their obligations.
Return assessment to actual NHS or qualified doctors and specialists with the appropriate knowledge in the areas which claims get filed, it'll increase load on the health system to begin with but you can bet your bottom dollar a lot of the remaining percentage who are fraudulent will end up having to back out of their case when actual medical evidence -fails- to support them.
People keep saying that 0.5% fraud is an underestimate, I don't agree. It's that the 0.5% is well publicised and the bulk of legitimate claimants are ignored and swept under the rug, even when changes come into force negatively impact them. The small minority make the majority of legitimate claims an awful lot harder.
tb
January 25th, 2012 6:50am Report this commentHas anybody come out with a decent reason why ~5 people earning £26,000 have to pay somebody else to sit around and earn the equivalent of a £35,000 salary?
Fergus Pickering
January 25th, 2012 6:59am Report this commentTrapped, how can you possibly know what the percentage of fraud is? Whenever there is benefit, there will be a fraud, and bad backs and stress form what proportion of claims? Do you know? The fact that there ARE frauds does not reflect at all upon disabled people. The fraudulent claims, self-evidently, come from people who are NOT disabled, and when they are so easy (bad backs, stress) then we can expect a lot of them. Where there are few checks, few frauds will be discovered. Ad the fact that you or I has a disabled relative has no bearing on the case at all.
Colin Cumner
January 25th, 2012 7:09am Report this commentHow much more debate does there have to be on this subject before any ACTION occurs? Even Blind Freddie can see Britain's welfare costs are unsustainable. The tragedy here is that those who are genuinely disabled and who could do with more financial support are unable to get it because an army of fraudsters has siphoned off the cash that might otherwise have gone to them.
Chris lancashire
January 25th, 2012 8:53am Report this commentFergus Pickering: Absolutely right; the fact that there is ANY fraud brings the whole system into disrepute. I have no idea - and I suspect neither does Trapped or indeed the government - what the scale of abuse is.
The result is that taxpayers feel they are being taken for fools when they should, in fact, be proud they are part of a caring society. IDS's reforms seem reasonable and fair and should be supported.
hannah
January 25th, 2012 1:39pm Report this commentTrapped- I agree with you. I think the focus on a *small* (we all agree it may be larger than the 0.5% claimed, although we also all agree it is a small fraction of the overall) minority of people who may abuse the system, the wider group is being tarnished with a reputation of being Lazy, Uncultured and ultimately a 'Drain on Society'rather than genuine people, in a hard situation, trying to get back on there feet.
Comments such as: 'then they need to stop spending £7/day (x however many snoutcasts there are in the house) on fags and cut the pub visits down to one or two a day and learn to live on the lower sums that some of us are having to scrape by on!' are entirely unhelpful. Equating those on benefits to the 'Chav' culture creates an impossible situation for genuine claimants. Can you imagine what a social stigma this would be if you lost your job and were reliant on benefits for a while?
Incidentally, misclaimed benefits accounts for around £2 billion each year (around £1 billion of this due to governmental mistakes). Tax evasion accounts for around £70 billion lost each year. Does it seem fair that a disproportionate amount of media attention is focused on the 'Welfare State', of which only a minority are taking advantage of?
Trapped
January 25th, 2012 3:52pm Report this comment@ Fergus - Remember, we're discussing DLA, DLA -does- have a very low fraud percentage, because the shakeout rate (that is to say the number of successes at tribunal) isn't lethally high. Which implies the DLA decision makers get it right the majority of the time.
For DLA the process is pretty rigorous, the number of DLA claims that go to tribunal compared to ESA is low. ESA has the higher fraud percentage, not DLA. This is the problem, people keep getting their benefits confused. ESA is the one people claim for bad backs and stress, but I can assure you that won't fly in a DLA app. They pretty much have very specific rules on how impairment affects people and the caselaw hasn't been made a mess of because it's still handled in house.
It's ESA that has the fraud problem, not least because the people administering the ESA test currently have an appauling record at even passing genuine claimants, which is what happens when you reduce everything to a computer assisted box ticking exercise.
If you want to go after benefits fraudsters, look at JSA and ESA, they're the vulnerable spots, and in ESA's case, largely because they got shipped to a somewhat incompetent private sector assessor.
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