Attack on the sick and disabled has stained Rachel Reeves’s first Budget
An attack on the sick and disabled has stained Rachel Reeves’s first Budget.
Her decision to tighten the requirements of the Work Capability Assessment for these benefits, and to investigate sick and disabled people for fraud when it is practically nonexistent in their benefit claims, has is hugely unpopular already.
As This Writer stated on X, “Rachel Reeves announces changes to the Work Capability Assessment and a crackdown on practically-nonexistent fraud in benefits. This is not clever. Sick and disabled people genuinely need help, not persecution.”
This is the most popular post I have published about the Budget – and I appreciate the following response to it:
https://t.co/oXN46mgzL9#Pmqs pic.twitter.com/c4A6W0sj8E
— speaker (@upnorthowen) October 30, 2024
Disability rights organisations including Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC), Black Triangle and others wrote to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall – and to Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, detailing what attacks on sick and disabled people will mean – including many deaths:
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the proposed changed to the WCA will have affected more than 450,000 new Disabled claimants by 2028-29. Many of these will lose hundreds of pounds a month with only around 15,400 able to escape into paid work.
It is clear that these measures will do nothing to address current labour shortages.
The planned changes will also unquestionably lead to more benefit deaths, a characteristic of the UK social security system which is the subject of an ongoing inquiry by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.
163,000 of those affected by the changes will be people in the “substantial risk” group.
These are not people with “mild” mental health conditions, as portrayed in sections of the media. These are people at substantial risk of harm if coerced into looking for work. They include victims of child and sexual abuse and those carrying severe trauma.
Expectations on this group to engage with job centres will increase. This is entirely inappropriate; it takes years of specialist training for counsellors and therapists to learn how to engage safely with this group of people which work coaches do not have.
The new measures will unquestionably cause additional incidences of self-injury and attempted suicide among claimants while contributing to the mental health and recruitment crises among DWP staff.
The letter goes on to point out that attacking sick and disabled people is unlikely to save any money: savings will be offset by an increase in benefit appeals and a rise in demand on the National Health Service, social care and mental health services.
So this particular part of the Budget will help nobody.
Instead, as the letter states, it is “pandering to populist narratives that deny disability and demonise disabled claimants”.
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I’ll say it again. For many years I worked as a Civil Servant and for the Inland Revenue. We shared our property with the DWP and their Fraud Dept in particular. I had many issues of fraud that I couldn’t even REFER to our Tax Fraud Office due to their size (for the entirety of Scotland) being miniscule. As I found out the DWP Fraud Dept (which covered ONLY the town it was situated in) had more manpower and resources than the Tax Fraud Department for the whole country of Scotland! DWP Fraud would investigate fraud of £50. We immediately wrote off debt of under £100 and didn’t pursue debts (other than two automatic letters) if they were under £5000. (NB these were undisputed debts and simply ‘unpaid’ and not as the result of fraud) Even in my local office we had many millions being unpaid due to fraud (that could not be addressed) and millions in agreed debt that we were unable to pursue. Meanwhile our DWP colleagues were being sent out to get a fraud conviction on a £50 fraud..