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Introduction
Disabled people today face many challenges that their abled peers simply do not. These range from barriers to services and employment and stigma and discrimination as well as factors linked to their disabilit/ies. Benefits such as Disability Living Allowance (DLA), which is given to meet the extra costs of having a disability, and is given regardless of work status, and Employment & Support Allowance (ESA, the replacement for Incapacity Benefit) which is an allowance given while the claimant is too sick to work, either temporarily or permanently are vital to the lives of many disabled people.
Media and Political Language
In the past few years, both under the present Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition and under the previous Labour administration the discourse around welfare benefits has changed – both from politicians and the media. Those on benefits of any kind have been demonised as ‘work-shy,’ ‘feckless’ and ‘scroungers.’ Those who are unemployed on Jobseeker’s Allowance have been stigmatised, but so have sick and disabled people. Recently, the pages of newspapers such as the Sun and the Daily Mail have been filled with stories of those who cheat the system and who falsely claim they are disabled, or that they are too sick to work. We must not forget that there are those who abuse the welfare state in this way – and also that there are people who were once legitimately qualified for sick/disabled benefits but recovered and failed to inform the authorities – a lesser-known fact is that rates of fraud on sick/disability benefits are quite low – for example the rate of fraud for Disability Living Allowance is only 0.5% whereas Pension Credit fraud is 1.5% and Jobseeker’s Allowance is 2.8%. Official (i.e. government) error for DLA is higher, at 0.8% than the rate of fraud. These statistics are from “Fraud and Error in the Benefit System: April 2008 to March 2009 – Revised Edition” (DWP) table 2.1, p8. Unfortunately the focus of the media on stories of fraud had created the impression that many people on DLA/ESA are “faking it” with research showing that “focus groups all claimed that levels of fraud were much higher than they are in reality, with some suggesting up to 70 per cent of claimants were fraudulent. They justified these claims by reference to article they had read in newspapers” (“Bad News for Disabled People”, Inclusion London, Oct 2011) a debate in the House of Commons has suggested a link between the media’s inflammatory language and disabled hate crime:
There is a lot in the media about people being “benefit scroungers”, and disabled people are often deemed guilty by association, which breeds contempt among the public, some of whom perceive disabled people to be cheating the system to ensure that they get state handouts. That is wrong and unacceptable.
-Tom Clarke MP, 23 Nov 2011
Reforms to Benefits
The present government has an ideological stance on benefits, revealed in statements such as ”we [governments] have trapped people in poverty through the extent of the welfare that they have” (David Cameron) and talk of “welfare dependency”. Conservative (and other) politicians believe that to allow someone to spend time in receipt of benefits, or to make life comfortable for them on benefits, is to doom them forever to staying on those benefits (and living in poverty) rather than working. They point to the existence of a new class who have been brought up on benefits, where a multi-generational family has never worked, and where no one has any intention of working. Whether that is in fact true of those on unemployment benefits is beyond the scope of this site, however, the same language has been applied to sickness and disability benefits.
Beginning under the previous government and continuing through this one reforms have been made to ESA and proposed for DLA. In addition other benefits have been affected, but I shall here be concentrating on these two.
Assessments
In order to receive ESA you must be signed off as unfit to work by a GP. Currently, after 13 weeks you will be assessed by a medical professional (doctor, nurse, physiotherapist or similar – not necessarily being the one most appropriate for your condition) employed by a company called Atos Healthcare on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions. You can submit supporting evidence such as GP and specialists’ letters, which will be considered along with the report from Atos. A decision maker will then decide whether you are “fit to work” in which case you will no longer receive ESA unless you appeal the decision, or “unfit to work”, whereupon you will enter either the Work Related Activity Group (for return to work at some time) or the Support Group (where you are not going to be working again). This sounds fair and reasonable at first glance, certainly assessing claimants is reasonable, as many conditions do get better, go into remission, or are otherwise successfully treated to the point at which work can be resumed.
For Disability Living Allowance (DLA) a questionnaire is filled in, and some are asked to attend a medical assessment – however under proposed changes recipients of DLA would also be assessed in the same way as ESA claimants would be.
The experience of most disabled and sick people who go through this process is not a positive one. First of all, the GP/specialist’s evidence can be and regularly is outweighed by that of the nurse/whoever who assessed the person. This means that a person who is a non-specialist without your medical notes and who has seen you for an hour can over-rule a Consultant specialist in your condition. It seems rather odd that when the government says GPs will be trusted to run the health service as a whole and yet their opinion of patients whom they know is to be disregarded, and they are to be stripped of their powers to issue sick notes, with a new body to award them, that body possibly being Atos.
There is also a problem with Atos’ assessments. Anecdotal evidence suggests a brief examination with little attention to what the patient is saying. Indeed, of those turned down, 40% have ESA awarded to them on appeal. Are these assessments fit for purpose? Appeals cost £21.1 million in 2010/11. Those with fluctuating and hidden conditions often find their disabilities downplayed by the assessor in their report.
Then there is the human cost. Sick/disabled people find the assessment process stressful and often frightening. Many with stress-affected or mental illnesses find themselves becoming more ill, and others may develop depression or anxiety. In a letter to The Guardian, the Chief Executives of a number of mental health organisations wrote:
We’ve found that the prospect of IB reassessment is causing huge amounts of distress, and tragically there have already been cases where people have taken their own life following problems with changes to their benefits.
The healthcare assessments are badly conceived. While there need to be some sort of check on people falsely claiming disability – why can we not trust GPs and specialist doctors that actually know the patient? Do we really think GPs are corrupt? Why outsource to a company which seems determined to meet the government’s aim of “getting the numbers down” any which way? How much does it cost, to pay Atos and then to pay for appeals? Have we even saved any money? And what about the human cost? The illnesses, the stress, the people forced back into work when they are not really capable of it – the lost hours, the poor performance, the poverty of those who cannot work – but cannot be permitted to claim sickness benefit. And what of those who are on DLA who will be refused their benefit – the benefit with the lowest level of fraud of all – and won’t be able to work at all because of it? DLA is not an out-of-work benefit – which the government should know because David Cameron claimed it for his son! Why are the disabled being targeted?
There are a number of changes scheduled for DLA in the future, including the introduction of the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) to replace it. Maria Miller has stated will see a cut of 20% in payments from this benefit because this is “a principled reform”.
There will be more on these issues in the blog, and ideas for what to do about the situation we find ourselves in. I believe we – abled or disabled – must do something, as a matter of justice. Part of this website calls out to Christians, in the wake of David Cameron’s declaration of faith and statement that Christian values underpin his ideology, and I declare that the fight against welfare injustice is one which should be joined by Christians, that part of being followers of Christ means standing up for the poor and needy, and helping others in distress.
Comments and suggestions to webmaster@welfarejustice.org.uk
