Here’s an example of Tory government idiocy for you: how will Rishi Sunak force disabled people to work if he’s axed the scheme for it?

Sunak announced on Friday (April 19, 2024) that he wants to stop GPs issuing fit/sicknotes for mental illnesses because he thinks they’re handing them out willy-nilly to people for normal life worries.

He has also ordered a consultation on the future of the Personal Independence Payment, which offers help to cover the extra costs of living with a disability. The aim is to find ways of denying it to people who need it, in order to save money.

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And now he is cutting the £100 million Work and Health Programme that, as far as This Writer can recall, lumped the sick and disabled together with the healthy in a bid to get them back into work.

It will be retired in November.

I wrote, way back in 2015, that a private company

was tasked with running a “work-focused occupational health assessment” which “will identify the issues preventing an employee from returning to work and draw up a plan for them, their employer and GP, recommending how the employee can be helped back to work more quickly”.

So it seems the scheme will be rolled out to lump in people who have jobs – but are ill – with people who don’t have jobs and make them all jump through the same hoops in order to keep their benefits or sick pay.

Considered that way, getting rid of the Work and Health Programme might not be a bad idea, right?

But this is the scheme that is used to get sick and disabled people into work. So, again, how will Rishi Sunak force disabled people to work if he’s axed the scheme for it?

The social media are all over this:

Perhaps Sunak thinks that – as a general election is likely to have taken place by November and his government may well be history by then – the consequences of his decision won’t be his problem. What will his successor do?

Source: Help for disabled people in England and Wales to get jobs is axed amid benefits crackdown | Disability | The Guardian

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