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The Department for Work and Pensions has announced plans to record all disability benefit assessments:
Plans to move to a new telephony platform during 2024 and make enhancements to the Video Assessment application … will bring the ability to record all disability health benefit consultations.
The update comes just a week after the publication of a report from the Work and Pensions Committee into the health assessments system used by people who cannot work or face extra costs due to disability or ill-health to access vital benefits.
The report contained a proposal from the chair, Sir Stephen Timms MP for all assessments to be recorded by default, with an option for claimants to opt-out.
The cross-party committee of MPs said that footage could then be used to review cases more accurately without having to go to appeal, and help assessors learn from past mistakes. It added that some of the suggestions could drive down the high rate of decisions reversed on appeal, which still stands at 69 per cent for Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
This is the part that encourages This Writer.
This Site has long publicised the belief that assessors from the private companies hired by the DWP to make recommendations on benefit claims have disqualified claimants for false reasons.
The answer – recording the assessments – has (also) long been known, but has been resisted by the DWP on the basis that it insisted on specific – expensive – equipment being used.
It seems that stipulation has now been rendered pointless due to advances in technology, and the government has at last bowed to the inevitable. The change is expected to come into effect next year.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating, of course.
I certainly hope that benefit assessments after the new recording guidelines come into force show a marked increase in approvals – and that the number of appeals drops as a result. They are a waste of tribunal time.
I fear that the DWP and the assessment firms will merely find another excuse to disqualify people who genuinely deserve help.
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The ballot box: why does the government want to make voting a health hazard for people who are already sick and/or disabled?
Sick and disabled people and/or their carers may be endangered by the Tory government’s new “Voter ID” demands, which require them to take off their face masks and be (potentially) exposed to Covid-19.
Take a look at this tweeted question to the Electoral Commission, and the response it triggered:
Hello, if you wear a face covering for any reason, you will be asked to remove it so polling station staff can check your ID looks like you. If you have any questions you may wish to contact your Returning Officer. Find out more: https://t.co/kJmbB4eh0R
— Electoral Commission (@ElectoralCommUK) April 19, 2023
Representatives of sick and disabled people have responded strongly:
The Electoral Commission confirm that even extremely clinically vulnerable and disabled people will have to remove their face masks if voting in person. We will be asking them for their EEA and to issue guidance that ID checks are done outside for CV people. https://t.co/3q9O8xgw8Z
— Buckinghamshire Disability Service BuDS (@BuDs_UK) April 19, 2023
So clinically vulnerable people may ask for their identity to be checked in the open air. But they still have to take their masks off.
Some of them are going to be put off voting by this stricture – and that means the new “Voter ID” rules are disenfranchising UK citizens:
If this election was being used to pilot “Voter ID”, then it might be understandable, but it has been tested several times already and this sort of problem should have been cleared up. One can only surmise that the discrimination against the sick and disabled is intentional.
Is it worth demanding change from the Electoral Commission, or the government?
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This is good news – it demonstrates to the DWP, politicians and the rest of us how real benefit fraudsters operate:
Two men have been arrested on suspicion of fraudulently claiming disability benefits, as part of a major anti-fraud government crackdown. The men are alleged to have created 15 identities between 2019 and 2023 to defraud £800,000 from the public purse.
An investigation by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in collaboration with the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) and the Metropolitan Police found eight applications for power of attorney were faked and used to apply for benefits on behalf of disabled applicants. The men from London allegedly also pretended to represent severely disabled applicants unable to manage their own affairs by supplying false medical reports to support claims for up to thousands of pounds of public money.
Benefit payments used to support disabled people including Personal Independence Payment (PIP), Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), are alleged to have been among those hijacked by the fraudsters.
Further co-ordinated action will see the DWP work with partners to ensure that any vulnerable claimants who had their benefits hijacked are supported and have their entitlements correctly altered.
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(This could be a record for the speed at which fears voiced in a Vox Political article have been confirmed. Around an hour after I published what follows, I received the comment that now appears at the end of this article.
(Read the piece – and then check out what a disabled person told me about it.)
If you don’t know what Personal Independence Payment is, then you haven’t read this Site for very long. Or properly. Have a quick search; you’ll probably have to try Disability Living Allowance for the early years.
Done? Well, I’ll carry on anyway.
DWP minister Tom Pursglove (who?) has been telling other MPs that there are guidelines about the assessments carried out on people claiming PIP.
He said they’re intended to determine the “needs arising from a health condition or disability” – not the condition itself.
He said regular reviews are a “key feature of PIP”, in place to ensure “payments accurately match the current needs of claimants”.
(In reality, this often means that payments are withdrawn because claimants are determined to have magically got better. Alternatively, claimants are put through continuous reviews to find out if, say, the limbs they lost have grown back.)
So when Mr Pursglove said, “Claimants with very high levels of functional impairment who are on the highest PIP awards, and whose needs are only likely to increase, should receive an ongoing award of PIP, with a light touch review at the 10-year point,” I had a doubt.
If you actually searched back through This Site’s DLA and PIP articles, you’ll know my reasons.
Did you spot the cop-out words “should receive”?
He didn’t say people with degenerative conditions will receive an ongoing award, and he didn’t say they will get a light-touch review.
All we need is one claimant to come forward, say they have a degenerative condition and have not received this treatment, and the whole Tory/DWP house of falsehoods will fall down. Again.
ADDITIONAL: It took around one hour for that one claimant to come forward. In a comment on the Vox Political Facebook page, that person stated the following:
“Ha ha, is it bollox true. Just had my PIP review on a degenerative condition and they CUT my award. Took them three years from review letter to review interview. The system is designed not to work for the claimant. Have you ever tried ringing the PIP line? What a dysfunctional joke that is.”
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Conditions under which people in Great Britain who are likely to die within a year may claim PIP, DLA and AA have been brought in line with those in Northern Ireland, and with UC and ESA. Were the Tories waiting for someone in particular to die in poverty beforehand?
The period of time over which you may claim the top rate of disability benefits (and Attendance Allowance) has been extended by six months… if you are expected to die within a year.
New regulations for the Department for Work and Pensions mean that, from April 3, the definition of “terminally ill” has been changed for the purposes of personal independence payment (PIP), disability living allowance (DLA), and attendance allowance (AA) in Great Britain.
The changes bring those benefits in line with Universal Credit and Employment and Support Allowance, for which they were put in place in April 2022. They were introduced for PIP, DLA and AA in Northern Ireland at the same time.
The definition now refers to someone who is suffering from a progressive disease, who can reasonably be expected to die of that disease within 12 months.
People thought to be in their final year of life may now receive financial support six months earlier than they could previously, under “special rules” that allow those nearing the end of life to get faster, easier access to the benefits, higher payments, and avoid a medical assessment.
In most cases, they will now receive the highest rate of PIP, DLA or AA.
So the question, for This Writer, is simple:
Why were people with terminal illnesses in England, Scotland and Wales required to wait an extra year for this, meaning they would have died before becoming eligible for it? Who did the Tories want to die in poverty?
Here’s yet another shocking admission from the Conservatives: they have rushed in changes to disability benefits without bothering to research whether they will harm people with complex or invisible conditions.
I have a stake in this. Mrs Mike has long-term illnesses and disabilities that are not immediately visible. She may fall foul of the new assessment system (although I am heartened that it is informed by assessments for the Personal Independence Payment, which she already receives).
The DWP
has been unable to say how many people could be vulnerable to losing out on payments because it does not have the data available.
Labour MP Marsha de Cordova asked in a written parliamentary question how many universal credit claimants cannot work due to a health condition or disability but do not receive PIP. DWP minister Tom Pursglove responded to say the Government would publish these statistics in the future.
iunderstands the DWP does not currently hold this data.
Vicky Foxcroft, Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, said it “beggars belief that the Government have announced a major policy change without any idea how many people it impacts”.
The DWP has stated:
“We will take time to carefully consider how best to implement the changes – and give security and certainty to claimants, continuing to engage with disabled people and people with health conditions, and our stakeholders, as our proposals develop, before the reforms are rolled out on a staged basis.
“We will put protections in place to ensure that no one experiences financial loss at the point at which the reform is enacted, while improving our offer of tailored support to help people find and stay in sustainable work.”
Of course, getting people into work is the point but whether it is achievable under these policies is highly questionable.
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The Tories are bringing this nightmare back again.
Jeremy Hunt’s Budget announcement that he is ending the Work Capability Assessment has turned out not to be the relief so many benefit claimants with long-term illnesses thought it would be.
He is ending the Limited Capability for Work-Related Activity element of Universal Credit, meaning that people who received it may now have to seek work under the new Personal Independence Payment system.
They’ll need to claim the new UC health element, and to do that they must also be eligible for Personal Independence Payment – and under this system they may also be required to seek work or accept job offers.
Additionally, assessments will now be carried out by work coaches from the Department for Work and Pensions, rather than the (so-called) health professionals who currently carry out the much-maligned WCAs.
There are fears that these civil servants will not have the proper training to identify claimants’ conditions and needs, and may be set target numbers of people they have to try to force into work, which they will impose on disabled people.
The Institute of Fiscal Studies think tank has estimated that a million people could be forced into work and 600,000 could lose an estimated £350 per month in support as a result of the change.
Hunt has been up-front about the intention behind the change: it’s to push people into work who would not otherwise have sought it.
The problem is that it may push people into work who simply cannot do it.
Experience has shown us what happens when the government forces people with long-term illnesses and disabilities to seek work:
They are rejected by employers – or find that they simply cannot do the work. Unsuitable for employment, and unable to claim benefits, they either starve to death or die of their health conditions.
We have seen it before – many times, in the years since the Tories came back into office in 2010.
It is scandalous that Jeremy Hunt is talking up a change that may make unendurable the lives of people who are already among the UK’s most vulnerable.
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Despair: people with long-term illnesses and disabilities are being driven towards suicide because they can’t afford to live in Tory Britain.
You just know the Department for Work and Pensions is already considering this a “positive benefit outcome”:
More people are contemplating suicide as they “cannot cope” as a result of rising costs, charities have said.
Charities supporting those with chronic diseases or disabilities have called for an overhaul of the benefits system.
One woman who has multiple sclerosis (MS) said her costs had almost trebled.
MS Society Wales, said many who come to them were “at the end of their tether”, with the stress often affecting their condition and exacerbating their symptoms.
Disability Wales said it had also seen an increase in mental health issues resulting from the cost of living crisis.
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Uncannily accurate: The Conservative government’s genuine policy towards PIP claimants may as well have been as it appears in this cartoon from 2017. But what will replace the assessment system it satirises?
I should be pleased.
This Site has campaigned against the Work Capability Assessment for sickness and disability benefits, practically since I started publishing it at the end of 2011.
In my opinion, it has been misused, as a tool to force people who are too ill to work onto job-seeking benefits that carry sanctions if a claimant fails to carry out particular tasks – tasks which the long-term sick and disabled are often clearly incapable of doing.
In many cases, the results have been fatal. I know this because it took me two years to force the Department for Work and Pensions to release figures showing that 2,400 people died within a limited period (two weeks) after being found fit for work, between dates in 2011 and 2014.
That’s right – these people had been found fit to go to work by this hopelessly flawed tick-box assessment system, and then they had proven themselves to be nothing of the sort.
And the Tory government carried on as though nothing was wrong.
I also have personal experience of the system’s flaws. After my partner – Mrs Mike; remember her? – was wrongly put in the work-related activity group for Employment and Support Allowance, she appealed in the hope of being relocated to the support group.
Instead, whoever received her letter slapped a “Do Not Contact” tag on her file for no discernible reason and allowed her claim to end after 12 months, while she waited – in considerable confusion and distress – for a response that was never going to come.
Fortunately, I was around to kick up a stink and get the situation sorted out. But that just highlights the fact that many thousands of people don’t have that kind of help at hand.
And now, we’re told, the Work Capability Assessment is to be scrapped.
But we’re not being told what will replace it.
This Independent article has comments from a couple of organisations that have a stake in what happens:
Trades Union Congress general secretary Paul Novak [said:] “Scrapping the work capability assessment will be welcome if it means an end to assessments that cause anxiety instead of helping people achieve their aspirations,” he added, while urging greater investment in public services to get people off NHS waiting lists and reduce barriers to training.
James Taylor of the disability equality charity Scope said axing the assessment was “the minimum change needed to even begin improving a welfare system that regularly fails disabled people”, and stressed the need for “a more person-centred system” offering “specialist, tailored and flexible” support.
“Those that want to work should be supported. But for some, that’s not an option and disabled people shouldn’t be forced into unsuitable work,” he said. “There is a lot of work to do for the government to restore trust in our benefits system.”
Notice that they both mentioned ways of getting more people back into work; this is Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s aim with the changes to the benefit system.
And that’s why I fear for the future of sickness and disability benefits in the UK.
I think the odious Hunt is planning another push to put sick people into jobs they can’t do. If I’m right, his plan will fail on many levels.
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