Tories have wasted £120m in two years trying to tell people they’re not disabled
Habitual cruelty: if you thought the Tories stopped persecuting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities during the Covid-19 crisis, think again.
What a waste of time and money.
Over the last two years, Conservative governments have spent more than £120 million in taxpayers’ money fighting disability benefit claims – despite losing three-quarters of tribunal appeals.
That means automatic wastage of £90 million – but it is likely that the quarter of claimants who lost their appeals also had valid grounds to claim Personal Independence Payment and/or Employment and Support Allowance but were outflanked by a prejudiced system.
The increase in expenditure is far greater than the 13 per cent increase in applications would suggest. And it is happening at a time when the country can ill-afford to waste any cash at all. There can only be one reason for it: sick cruelty – the Tories are enjoying torturing sick and disabled people to death.
And why are there so many applications for disability and sickness benefits in the UK? Do conditions here – especially working conditions – cause illness and disability?
The new figures are further proof that the Tories’ convoluted appeal process has nothing to do with saving money from fraudsters and everything to do with starving people with disabilities – to death, if possible.
It is now well-documented that claimants initially have to go through an internal appeal process within the Department for Work and Pensions called mandatory reconsideration.
The courts only recently ruled that a Tory regulation forcing claimants to go without any benefit payments, and therefore without any income, for the period of a mandatory reconsideration – no matter how long that may be – was illegal.
Only after the DWP rules that a claim should be rejected can the sick or disabled person take their case to a tribunal.
And it is at tribunals that 76 per cent of PIP claims, and 75 per cent of ESA claims, are upheld.
This means the Tories have needlessly and cruelly deprived these people of their means of survival for the number of months – years in some cases – that these claims have been disputed.
We all know that there is hardly any fraud in disability benefit claims – the last recorded number This Writer saw was somewhere in the region of one or two per cent of claims.
So the huge proportion that the Tories refuse – and the amount of time and money wasted in the appeal process – can only mean one thing:
The Tories hate disabled people and want them to die.
Why isn’t this a national – if not international – scandal?
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To your everyday tory, anyone with a disability/health issue, physical or mental – no matter how severe – is really capable of winning paralympic gold; and therefore it’s right they should be interrogated on a regular basis because, to them, they’re ALL lazy-arse blaggers.
On the subject of paralympians, I find quite interesting how we extremely rarely (bordering on NEVER) hear from the likes of tanni grey whatshername, or other (current OR ex-) paralympians about the unfairness and cruelty of atos and WCAs…
Bread and circuses, I guess, but even so, I’ve heard a shedload more from the sussex and cambridges on the matter – and protocol demands they remain neutral.
Futile turning to the utterly useless starmer’s labour for any kind of support, neither.
Are caroline (skin)flint and angela (ill)eagle still accepting donations from maximus lobbyists, I wonder?
I wonder if the increase in applications for disability and sickness benefits could relate to the increase – by six years – of the state pension age for women, and of one year for men? Not really that difficult to figure out a connection there is it?
Certainly waspi women have been cruelly ill treated, many in their 60s start developing conditions that make work difficult if not impossible plus many women of that age are looking after elderly parents and therefore saving the government a fortune. But still people in their 60s are supposed to find a job despite employer prejudice against them.
Aktion T4 at its best denial of benefits to those
Who need them to survive take it away and many
Do the government work for them by saying goodbye
Cruel world isn’t life grand for those in control but
The poor can look out
Quite So Mike , but what about the Billions Squandered on a failed Work Programme that got only 2% of participants into any sort of employment part time or otherwise and did nothing to address the severe skills shortages we have in our Nation due to the lack of professional training available to the youth now leaving school and college’s throughout the country.
Something they are about to repeat with the bribes being offered to companies
to take on Youngsters for so called work placements announced this morning.
I suggest they send a delegation to Germany and observe how they do things over there ; Skill Centres dotted throughout the country reskilling folk made redundant or offering youth the opportunities they need to compete in a modern industrialised economy. David
Tories aren’t interested in learning from successes in other countries.
No they are not and that’s why we have a handful of people pretending to be the all knowing all seeing Fountain of Wisdom , refusing to take advice or
listen to anybody they happen to disagree with, in fact they think its beneath them to even engage in conversation or exchange ideas on improving things.