The Tories new welfare plan is, it seems, their old welfare plan – with a more ambitious timeline. It’s to be welcomed, but this is not the step change that you’d expect. In Jan08 Chris Grayling broke new ground when he proposed diagnosing all 2.7m on incapacity benefit for what work they could do (as opposed to the ‘ill’ or ‘sick’ binary distinction). Today, they express an ambition to get this done in three years. Set aside questions as to whetehr you can find enough doctors to do 2,500 “capabilty asssessments” every day – all this means is going a little faster on the original Freud proposal. There is a welcome move towards benefit simplification, but I have to agree with the conclusions of James Purnell on Open Left.
This would be a good idea if they were proposing to do it.
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