In the Guardian Today – a new threat.

George Osborne has instructed Treasury officials to draw up proposals to scrap inflation-linked rises for benefits, although he is unlikely to make any changes for next year.

Here.

So now we know the context of then anti-benefit claimants campaign.

Janine  has just pointed to this on Facebook,

 

THE deaths of two people who were waiting for appeals to be heard against the loss of benefits has prompted calls for a fairer assessment system.

The two claimants, both from West Dunbartonshire, died from the conditions which caused them to claim Incapacity Benefit (IB) while waiting for appeals to be heard against cuts to their benefits.

One was deemed fit for work during a work capability assessment, despite having a deteriorating chronic illness, and lost both incapacity benefit and disability living allowance.

When his support worker appeared at the appeal tribunal she had to report her client could not be there because he was dead. The appeal was upheld and the backpayment will become part of his estate.

The other had a congenital condition which caused difficulty in walking but was assessed capable of work and his incapacity benefit was withdrawn. He was waiting for a date for an appeal tribunal when he died.

The assessment was inadequate and very unprofessional. The doctor simply did not have the information

A third person, again from West Dunbartonshire, died recently after winning a second appeal tribunal following three years of repeated assessments and decisions being overturned.

He worked as a shop assistant in his 20s but was forced to give up due to severe heart and lung problems caused by a degenerative syndrome.

An “indefinite” award of IB and Disability Living Allowance (DLA) was revoked after only two months on the basis of a questionnaire he had filled in.

Six months later it was reinstated by an appeal tribunal. Despite this ruling and the finding that his condition was worse than the original assessment, his case was once again referred for medical assessment.

Once again, the benefit was withdrawn. He appealed again, with help from staff at the Clydebank Independent Resource Centre, and a tribunal date set for a further six months on.

By that time he had been confined to bed with severe pain for several days and his extreme difficulty in reaching the chair in the tribunal room caused the chair of the panel to say the hearing would be as short as possible and that a taxi would be waiting to take him home.

He won the appeal but only after three years of unrelenting anxiety over whether his benefits would be cut.

People claiming IB, currently being replaced by Employment and Support Allowance, and DLA undergo a work capability assessment by a healthcare professional, such as a nurse or physiotherapist employed by Atos Healthcare, which gained the contract from the Department for Work and Pensions in 2005.

The assessment is not a medical examination but the claimant is asked a series of questions about their capabilities.

If they are judged fit for work they lose benefits such as IB and DLA, which yesterday’s Welfare Reform Bill proposes replacing with a Personal Independence Payment.

Danny McCafferty, chair of the Independent Resource Centre in Clydebank, which wins 70% of the cases it takes to appeal, says the assessments by Atos are flawed.

As the Government confirmed plans to implement a £50 immediate fine for “errors that could have reasonably been prevented” on benefit claims, yesterday, Mr McCafferty suggested that a penalty should also be levied on the contractor.

“Atos Healthcare is not producing the results it is paid for because so many decisions are being overturned. It is costing the country money to go through the appeals process.

“It would be better if every time an appeal was upheld Atos Healthcare had to repay the fee it was paid for the case or, better still, pass it on to a welfare group to help other people,” he said.

With a backlog of cases waiting for appeal dates, Mr McCafferty expects the success rate of the Clydebank resource centre (which is part-funded by Oxfam) to increase well beyond 70%.

That is unlikely to be reduced by the Coalition Government’s plans for welfare reform. They include replacing DLA with a Personal Independence Payment from 2013 which instead of providing a guaranteed payment to some people with specific disabilities, will require claimants to have regular assessments on how their condition affects them.

Case Study: Daily care but deemed fit for job

MARY Hodgson, from Annan in Dumfries and Galloway, worked from the age of 16 until she was 41, latterly as a support worker for people with learning disabilities.

That ended suddenly when a lower disc cut through her spinal cord leaving her semi-paralysed.

“I went from being a fit and healthy person to being unable to walk without crutches and needing a wheelchair to go any distance,” she said.

“The damage to my nerves has caused other problems and I need daily care from a nurse.”

She was assessed as fit to work. That decision was overturned on appeal and she now receives the higher rate of Employment and Support Allowance, but the experience has left her fearful over her future support.

“The assessment was very inadequate and very unprofessional,” she said.

“The doctor who carried it out simply did not have the right information and his report said I could carry out a task I had not been asked to do. If there are now going to be even more assessments, they should be made with a report from the claimant’s GP who knows the details of the case.”

Peter Allen, 60, who lives near Inverness agrees that assessments are flawed.

He is unable to work because of severe arthritis in his legs.

He has not claimed Employment and Support Allowance but underwent a work capability assessment because he applied to have his national insurance contributions covered to protect his pension.

He won one appeal after being assessed for work but has been called for another assessment next month.

“My knees are getting worse and I also have a hip problem but I fully expect them to say I’m fit for work,” he said.

“The questions are so loaded that whatever answer you give, it goes against you.”

Herald Scotland

Here.

“From Camcorder Guerillas.

“It’s fair that those with broader shoulders should bear a greater load” 

I mention this because it has been brought to our attention that people in Ipswich are suffering under the ‘testing’ regime that this is part of. The local centre dealing with medical testing is known as ‘Lourdes’ – the sick,  and the disabled go there and, bingo, they are miraculously cured!

It’s got to the point where the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce (yes!) has been  concerned enough to post this:

Papworth Trust is leading a coalition of disability charities declaring that the Work Capability Assessment, which examines people’s fitness for employment, isn’t working.

Charities are being overwhelmed by evidence showing the assessment to be inaccurate and often unfair to the nation’s most vulnerable people. The assessment is too focused on physical capability, meaning that people with serious mental health issues, learning disabilities and fluctuating health conditions are often marked as fit to work.

Wendy, a Nurse Manager who had a breakdown and tried to commit suicide after being overwhelmed with stress, has been assessed as fit to work. Wendy says “I went from being a capable person to someone who couldn’t even make simple decisions such as what to eat.  I was like that for several months.” 

Her assessment was carried out by a nurse rather than a psychiatrist or psychologist.  Because Wendy could wash, dress, walk and talk coherently, she was determined fit to work. Wendy says “Our financial worries are a major stress factor. I’ve always paid into the system and have never claimed for anything before.  I desperately want to go back to work but am still unwell.  I need time and support to recover before I can hold down a full-time job again.”

Papworth Trust believes that the independent assessors have not been sufficiently trained to recognise the full range of disabilities, causing people dealing with serious health conditions to be reported as work ready.

(More here.)

Background.

The battle against benefit cuts and “poverty pimps”Posted by Laurie Penny – 24 January 2011 10:38

Disabled people and their allies are fighting back against cuts – shame on the rest of us if we do not fight with them.

Of all the obdurate lies peddled by the Conservative Party in the run-up to the last general election, perhaps the most callous was when the Tory disability spokesperson Mark Harmer told key representatives of Britain’s millions of disabled and mentally unwell citizens: “I don’t think disabled people have anything to fear from a Conservative government.” It turns out that disabled people have a great deal to fear.

More Here.

Campaigning in January,

As part of the Coalition of Resistance’s ‘National Day of Protest Against Benefit Cuts’, Disability rights campaigners demonstrated today outside the London HQ of Atos Origin to protest against the punitive medical testing of those claiming disability and sickness benefits. The new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) has replaced Incapacity Benefit.

Protesters are angry that in spite of well documented criticisms of the Work Capability Assessment by HM Government’s Professor Harrington, ATOS have again been awarded a £300 million contract by DWP to continue making these flawed assesments which have already ruined many disabled peoples’ lives and has already led to several suicides.

According to NHS Information Centre incidents of self-harm, attempted suicide and actual suicide have increased in recent years since the introduction of the Welfare Reform Programme 2007 and ATOS Origin Work Capability Assessment regime.

Even though the National Audit Office estimated that for the year 2009-2010 fraud costs 0.6% of DWP’s budget – massively below the levels stated by Chancellor George Osborne in the Comprehensive Spending Review, Iain Duncan Smith added to the recent wave of media disability hatred by saying in the Sun newspaper on December 1st 2011 “We have managed to create a block of people in Britain who do not add to the greatness of this country…”

Here.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse:

Douglas Alexander, the new shadow work and pensions secretary, today moved to clarify Labour‘s stance on welfare by saying he will back phased reform of housing benefit and stressing the party’s support for stricter incapacity benefit tests.

Note: Private companies have widely abused these tests. Big numbers of seriously ill people, charities, and pressure groups have shown, are found ‘fit for work’ . Their ‘success’ rate  has earned their surgeries the nickname of  “Lourdes’.

He also said he was broadly supportive of plans for a universal credit, the centrepiece of Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare white paper, due to be unveiled next week, but set a series of tests for his support. The universal credit will unify most benefits and tax credits into a single payment.

In his first interview since taking on what is likely to be a central political battleground, Alexander told the Guardian his preference was a Danish model of the state guaranteeing work, and then obliging people to take the job or lose benefit. “This is a form of conditional welfare. Real guarantees of work, but real sanctions if the offer is not taken up.”

Note: There is and never will be guarantees for work for all. Sanctions for those for refuse job offers, however ,exist and have done so for many many years.

Duncan Smith, he said, had by contrast been obliged by the Treasury to follow an American punitive model of simply cutting benefit, regardless of whether work was available. In return for his £2bn universal credit scheme, Duncan Smith had agreed to £18bn of welfare cuts, many of which will reduce disincentives to work. Alexander and Duncan Smith are due to clash on welfare in a Commons debate on Tuesday.

Labour has been criticised, including by its former party general secretary Peter Watt, for appearing to be siding with the feckless poor against the hard-working squeezed middle, so appearing less credible on how to tackle the deficit.

But Alexander listed a series of welfare reforms he was willing to accept, including changing access to disability living allowance, driving out fraud, temporary changes to the uprating of some benefits, and testing the availability for work of incapacity benefit claimants .

Note: so instead of defending the poor he attacks them.

On the planned reductions in housing benefit for those in the private rented sector – the issue that has led to allegations that as many as 80,000 poor families will be driven from their homes – he said Labour supported the principle.

Note: the principle of kicking people out of their homes.

But critically, Alexander said, the government was making an error by making the changes in one year and by cutting the level of benefit down from the 50th to the 30th percentile of rents in the local area, a move he said would mean 700,000 of the poorest people losing an average £9 a week. “The government are trying to pretend these rushed and arbitrary changes will affect a small number of people – it will affect hundreds of thousands of people,” he said.

He added: “If the government produced a proposal for a staged and lower percentile reduction over years that is something we could consider.”

Note: so he prefers removing people and slashing their benefits slowly.

That’s all right then.

But he said he was implacably opposed to plans from April 2013 to cut 10% of housing benefit from anyone claiming unemployment benefit for a year. “This is just punitive,” he said.

Note: one slender reasonable position.

Alexander acknowledged that Labour in office had made mistakes on welfare. The Labour government should have done more to tackle low pay job insecurity, he said, adding Labour came relatively late to tackling the large numbers placed on incapacity benefit for years by the Thatcher government. Labour had initially focused instead on reducing unemployment.

He also conceded the housing benefit bill had been forced to take too much of the strain “for generation-long failures in the housing market, principally the lack of affordable homes to rent and buy”.

Challenged that Labour had been slow in office to reform welfare, he said: “We made significant reforms, but welfare reform is easier to assert than achieve. Many of the government’s current reforms build on what we set in train.”

Alexander predicted: “Welfare is going to be a central battleground not just of political argument, but public discussions in the years ahead. Our responsibility is to protect people and help them into work. My grave fear is that this government, like the Thatcher government, will show themselves very good at welfare cuts, and very bad at getting people into work.”

Note: waffle, waffle and more waffle.

George Osborne, and his Liberal Democrat allies, had burnt a lot of credibility in trying to prove the overall spending package was fair, when independent thinktanks had demolished those claims.

He said the coming battle would not simply be about cuts or fairness, but about the pressure being applied on the living standards of hard-working families. He also asserted that many other Tory reforms in the spending review, including cuts to childcare, the freezing of tax credit, and the increase in commuter fares, created disincentives to work.

He added that the localisation of council tax benefit proposed by Osborne risked complicating the simplicity of the universal credit system.

The prospect is for a cross-party consensus on ending the welfare state, replacing it with a state that fits people into work, and that provides a minimum safety-net for the really hard cases.

From Here