Tag Archives: sick

After coroner’s warning over death of disabled man, benefits process to get HARDER

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

What are the courts going to do about this?

The excellent Disability News Service is reporting that a coroner has ordered Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride to take action that will prevent flaws in the Universal Credit system leading to further deaths after a disabled man became overwhelmed by the application process and committed suicide.

Instead, it seems Stride is determined to increase the death toll exponentially.

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Here’s the DNS story:

It states:

An inquest into the death of Kevin Gale earlier this month heard from his psychiatrist, who expressed significant concerns about the way mental health service-users were supported with their universal credit claims within DWP.

The inquest also heard from the trust’s nursing director, who told the coroner that they considered the issues identified by the psychiatrist to be “national” and said they were “debilitating for service users”.

Kevin Gale, who is believed to have worked previously as a window cleaner, took his own life on 4 March 2022.

Coroner Kirsty Gomersal sent a Prevention of Future Deaths report to Stride.

She pointed to the “number of and length” of the universal credit forms that had to be completed which “can be overwhelming for someone with a mental health illness”, and which are “perpetuated if the applicant cannot get help to complete the paperwork”, while also highlighting the “long telephone queues to speak to a DWP advisor”.

She added: “Having to travel long distances for appointments can be detrimental for those with a mental health illness.”

And what’s happening to the benefit system?

Here’s The Independent:

Jeremy Hunt has warned those who “coast” on benefits will lose handouts if they refuse to take a job as part of a new crackdown.

Claimants deemed fit to work, but who fail to take steps to find employment, will be cut off from accessing benefits such as free prescriptions and dental treatment, help from energy suppliers and cheaper mobile phone packages.

Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, said that schemes to help people back into the workforce would also be expanded as part of a new £2.5bn five-year long back-to-work plan.

Under the plan, claimants will be forced to accept a job or undertake work experience to improve their prospects. Those who fail to do so will be hit with an “immediate sanction”.

At the moment, claimants can face open-ended sanctions where they have their benefits stopped. Those under this sanction for more than six months will now have their claims closed, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said, which would also end their access to other benefits such as free prescriptions and legal aid.

Mr Stride said: “…We are expanding the voluntary support for people with health conditions and disabilities, including our flagship Universal Support programme.

“But our message is clear: if you are fit, if you refuse to work, if you are taking taxpayers for a ride – we will take your benefits away.”

Overall, the government says expanded help-to-work schemes will help more than 1 million people over the next five years.

Part of this package includes plans to add another 100,000 people to the Individual Placement and Support scheme, which aims to get those with severe mental illness quickly into paid employment.

Mandatory work trials will be rolled out, meaning that claimants will be forced to accept a job or do work experience to improve their prospects, and those who fail to do so will be hit with “immediate sanction”.

Reform of the “fit note” system will also be explored under the plans. In a trial in certain, fit notes, an alternative to sick notes which set out what work someone can do, will be handed out by the benefits system, not doctors.

So, after receiving an order from the courts to make it easier for people with severe mental health problems to claim disability benefits, Stride and Hunt have chosen to make it many orders of magnitude harder.

And we can all see them:

The last of the ‘X’ posts above makes an extremely good point.

If these changes are being made in order to allow the government to make tax cuts in advance of a general election, then the Tories will once again be pushing the most vulnerable people in society to their deaths, to make already-comfortable people a little better-off.

Are you disabled or suffering from a long-term sickness? Do you want to die to boost the bank account of someone who is already wealthy?

Are you a Tory voter? Do you have sick or disabled relatives and/or friends?

Which of them do you want to see die, so you get a tax cut that will induce you to vote Tory again?


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Sick and disabled people are dying while trying to claim benefits; Tory press calls them ‘scroungers’ again

A cartoonist’s view of government sickness and disability assessments; ministers set the bar at an impossibly high level.

The Conservatives seem to have launched another attack on sickness and disability benefit claimants – labelling them as “scroungers” again, even though many are dying before they even receive state payments – due to the Kafka-esque assessment process.

Tory lickspittle Andrew Pierce has published a poison pen piece in the Daily Hate Mailaimed at whipping up division between claimants and the rest of the population.

It’s a classic Tory “divide and rule” tactic, that was deployed to devastating effect during the years of the Coalition government. It comes out whenever the government needs to distract people away from its own shortcomings.

So, for example, today you could be asking why the Conservatives ignored warnings that schools built with RAAC concrete were falling down – for 13 years – and only started doing something about it after collapses came to public attention. The Tory answer to that is: “Look at those skiving benefit scroungers!”

The reality isn’t remotely similar to Tory Boy Pierce’s claim.

The reality is that people claiming sickness and disability benefits often die before they receive a penny, because the system already works very hard to deprive them of it – as Labour MP Debbie Abrahams pointed out in a Westminster Hall debate earlier this week:

If a coroner writes a ‘Prevention of Future Death’ report, it means they believe a death could have been prevented but the circumstances in which the deceased had been placed – in this case, a benefit claim process that is so complicated and obstructive that it not only discourages claimants but depresses them and further harms their physical health – actually contributed to or caused their death.

Obviously, if we have a claim process that is actually harming or killing claimants, it should be impossible to suggest that they are lazy scroungers; a lazy scrounger would not put him- or herself through the trial of such a procedure because it would not be worth the hassle.

And the underlying reality is that prime minister Rishi Sunak and Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride want to make the Work Capability Assessment harsher, in order to force a million sick and disabled people back onto the jobs market.

They’re not doing this because those people are actually fit for work and shouldn’t be on benefits.

They’re doing it because more people looking for work means employers can pay less; if a job applicant wants more than employers are willing to pay – like an actual living wage – they can refuse the application on the grounds that they can always find someone else who will take the lower payment.

But you won’t see that fact in one of Tory Boy’s hate screeds.


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Tories lied again: The Work Capability Assessment is back

The new Tory way to tell whether a sick or disabled person can work: it’s quite an old cartoon by now – but it still works because it is more or less accurate.

That was nice while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Remember when Jeremy Hunt announced a plan to scrap Work Capability Assessments for sickness benefits in his first spring budget earlier this year?

Well, it seems the Tories have changed their collective mind because Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride has launched a consultation on proposed changes to the work capability assessment – the test aimed at establishing how a disability or illness limits a claimant’s ability to work.

According to the BBC, the proposals include:

  • Updating the categories associated with mobility and social interaction
  • Reflecting flexible and home working – and minimising the risk of these issues causing problems for workers
  • Providing “tailored support” for those found capable of work preparation activity in light of the proposed changes

The consultation is expected to run for eight weeks, and the Government hopes the reforms will come into force by 2025 – which will be after the next general election.

The BBC fails to include a link to the government consultation

Reading between the lines, it seems Stride wants to change the guidelines so that people who are too ill to work will be deemed to be perfectly capable of doing so – possibly by working from home.

The BBC report features a dissenting view from James Taylor, executive director of strategy at disability equality charity Scope, said if people are forced to look for work when they are unwell this could make them even “more ill”.

“If they don’t meet strict conditions, they’ll have their benefits stopped. In the grips of a cost-of-living crisis this could be catastrophic,” he added.

Yeah – we’ve witnessed such catastrophic situations before under Tory governments since 2010. Thousands of people died when they should not have had to.

Labour’s Debbie Abrahams, who has worked to help sick and disabled people in danger due to government policies, highlighted the problems with the Tory approach in Parliament:

The BBC article fails to include a link to the government consultation. You can find it at https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/work-capability-assessment-activities-and-descriptors


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National newspaper incites hatred against disabled people, low-paid workers and pensioners

Targeted: this poster appeared in 2019 so the number of sick and disabled people who have died is likely to be far higher – especially after the Covid-19 pandemic. Papers like the Telegraph seem to be trying to make that number skyrocket.

What’s going on at the Daily Telegraph? First we find that the paper has been spreading falsehoods that the boss of a supermarket chain that keeps its groceries as cheap as possible and pays its workers more than most has blamed the minimum wage for inflation (he hasn’t); now this:

Prem Sikka has archived the article so you can read it for yourself:

And the website to which Samuel Miller links, here, pulls no punches – claiming the tool to calculate “how much of your salary bankrolls the welfare state” is “straight out of the Nazi handbook”:

The Telegraph article states: “Of the 5.2 million people claiming out-of-work benefits, roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job, following a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic, it emerged last week.”

The Mary Sue piece responds [boldings mine]: “As a propaganda piece, it’s not subtle. “Roughly 3.7 million have been granted indefinite exemptions from finding a job” is a funny way of saying that 3.7 million disabled people, who cannot work due to their disabilities, have been awarded up to £515.40 a month (maybe going all the way up to £782.35 if they’re severely disabled) in order to keep them from starving to death on the streets.

“Putting this number down to “a surge in claims of mental health issues and joint pain during the pandemic” is derisive and clearly intended to diminish the reader’s perception of what are, in fact, disabling conditions to live with that, yes, actually were caused by the pandemic—either a result of infection with the virus itself or the psychological impacts of lockdown, mass death, and the other sociological effects of a global pandemic.”

The Torygraph continues: “On top of this, the controversial decision to maintain the state pension triple lock is estimated to cost taxpayers £1,000 each over the next four years, according to calculations by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a think tank.

“It raises the question, just how much of our hard-won salaries are spent on the benefits of those who do not work? With the calculator below, Telegraph Money can now reveal how much of your salary goes towards bankrolling the welfare state.”

In fact, none of our salaries are spent on benefits. The system doesn’t work that way. The government of the day sets its spending levels and then taxes us enough to keep that spending from pushing inflation too high (not accounting for interference from external influences like foreign wars and Brexit).

But let’s not allow trifles like the facts to get in the way of the Torygraph‘s argument.

Back to Mary Sue: “Note the emphasis on “do not work” and how it conflates the people who cannot work due to age or disability with the fantasy figure of the refusenik, who lounges around at home, wilfully choosing not to work, all on the government’s tab. It should be clear by now that the purpose of this article is to raise outrage against both the welfare system itself and the most vulnerable people who are dependent on it, but still, there’s more.”

The Torygraph states: “Despite Rishi Sunak’s insistence that he is a “low tax conservative” who wants to “bring people’s taxes down”, his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, has implemented a combination of frozen thresholds, removed investment incentives, and increased corporation tax – all while keeping welfare spending close to £300bn a year.

“Economists now predict it will be decades before the tax burden returns to pre-pandemic levels.

“At the same time, welfare spending was the single biggest component of public sector expenditure in the financial year 2021-22, at £298.7bn out of a total of £952.3bn. For the typical taxpayer, this amounts to close to a third of their annual tax bill of £6,500 paid directly towards benefits.

“Using the latest public spending data, our analysis shows someone with the average UK salary of £33,000 sees £2,000 a year spent on welfare.”

Mary Sue responds: “The authors of the piece, Alex Clark and Tom Haynes, go on to object to the marginal and long overdue increase of corporation tax (even though the U.K. still has the joint highest uncapped headline rate of tax relief among G7 countries), the freeze on higher rate tax thresholds (meaning the wealthiest aren’t getting a tax cut), and the fact that this didn’t coincide with a lowering of government welfare spending, as if the former requires the latter as a form of penance.

“They seem outraged that most public sector spending goes toward the welfare state, with around a third of the average individual’s tax bill going toward it—this despite acknowledging that the percentage of public spending that goes toward welfare benefits has actually gone down while overall spending has gone up.”

The Torygraph: “Many high earners are now paying relatively more towards the welfare state because of the lowering of the 45p tax threshold in 2023-24, which now stands at £125,000, down from £150,000 before. Telegraph analysis shows 6pc of the average salary goes towards paying for benefits, compared to 13pc of a high earner’s salary.

“Someone earning £150,000, five times the average salary, contributes close to £19,000 towards the welfare state – more than nine times the contribution of someone on the average salary.”

Mary Sue: “But of course, the greatest outrage in this piece is reserved for the very wealthiest, who, due to earning significantly more than people in lower tax brackets, accordingly pay more tax and therefore contribute more to the welfare system. Leaning heavily on the fact that the highest tax bracket’s threshold was lowered from £150,000 pa to £125,140 this year, requiring the people in that gap to pay a whole 5% more on anything they earn above that limit, Clark and Haynes bemoan that a larger percentage of their tax bill goes towards maintaining the welfare system than lower earners. Someone earning five times the average U.K. salary pays up to nine times the amount towards the welfare system, we are told, as if this isn’t the entire point of staggered tax rates and how the system is supposed to work.”

Mary Sue then makes a hugely important point [boldings mine, again]: “It’s incredibly difficult to successfully apply for disability benefits of any kind in the U.K. According to a recent government study, the release of which is suspiciously close this particular Telegraph article’s publication, “the health assessment system for deciding if someone can claim disability benefits is grueling and often incorrect.” 90% of PIP (the most common benefit) claimants are denied on their first attempt with 89% of them denied again on their second round.

“The difficulty and sheer mental and physical stress involved in first applying and then attempting an appeal has led to a significant number of disabled people giving up, not because they don’t need the help after all but because the process is simply impossible for them to navigate with their disabilities. Reasons for denial are frequently absurd, and many disabled people have been reporting for years now that their assessor wrote down and submitted completely different information than they providedmisinformation that led to their claim being denied.

“While 3.7 million people considered too disabled to work may seem like a lot, when the total number of disabled people across the country is taken into consideration, 12.1 million, it suddenly seems a lot more reasonable. There aren’t too many people in receipt of benefits, or capable of working but given a pass not to—it’s the exact opposite, and the amount of money disabled people are awarded by the government is, in most cases, barely enough to live on.”

Mary Sue then goes on to consider the comparison it has made with Nazism: “This kind of rhetoric is dangerous, and comparing this calculator, and the article that accompanied it, to Nazism is neither figurative nor hyperbole. One of the very first things that the Nazis did, as a deliberate first step on their path to the Holocaust, was stir up hatred and resentment of disabled people based on the idea that their continued existence is a financial burden to the state.

“Labelling them as “useless eaters,” people who required care and support while being unable to contribute to the state, the Nazis distributed a flurry of propaganda focused on presenting disabled people as a financial burden to everyone else—a burden that prevented “good Germans,” who worked and paid taxes, from being able to access the resources they needed. This propaganda was so ubiquitous that it even made its way into children’s maths books.

How many steps is a calculator—designed to let you know exactly how much enabling disabled people’s continued survival costs you personally—removed from this? How far off is an article dedicated to decrying the expense of disabled lives as an undue burden, especially on the upper classes?”

Charitably, the author of the Mary Sue article doesn’t believe those who wrote the Torygraph piece were deliberately trying to stir up hatred: “it seems very likely that the authors have bought into the British right wing cultural obsessions of benefit frauds and disability fakers, a group of people that are vanishingly rare but which conservatives see as boogeymen around every corner. I’m sure they believe all those people now experiencing joint pain and mental health problems, as a result of a mass disabling event which caused those specific medical problems on a large scale, are just lying to get out of having to work.

“It’s a very convenient thing to believe if you want to pay lower taxes and are resentful of having to share even a fraction of your wealth with people less fortunate than yourself. It ties in very nicely with all the other conservative ideals that The Telegraph and its readers stand for, and that’s why it’s so dangerous: That’s exactly how and why it worked so well the last time.

Painting a group of people as too expensive to keep alive is literally the first step to genocide, and given the political environment, in which hate speech against a number of groups as well as legislation targeting them has become normalized, in both the press and parliament, its very concerning that The Telegraph felt comfortable publishing an article that so openly expresses these sentiments.

“I wonder how many people’s disability benefits the coronation could have paid for instead. Funny how papers like The Telegraph didn’t have an issue with taxpayers funding that.”

In fact, some of us would suggest that the genocide has been happening, quietly, for more than a decade – since before the Conservatives came back into office in 2010, in fact.

Back in 2015, after This Writer (that’s me) forced the government to honour a Freedom of Information request I had submitted, we all learned that 2,400 people had died between dates in 2011 and 2014 – within two weeks of being denied the sickness benefit ESA on grounds of being “fit for work”.

Nobody knows how many have died over a longer period after being found “fit for work” because the Department for Work and Pensions has never bothered to check. But the newspapers have been full of stories telling how people have died of starvation, of ill-health due to their disabilities, or simply committed suicide in despair because of the cruelty of the system.

Changes to the way ESA is assessed – removing the admittedly-hated “Work Capability Assessment” in favour of the even-worse Personal Independence Payment assessment – are expected to deprive a million people of the benefits they need to survive.

And benefit sanctions – which have been proved to be useless in getting people with long-term illnesses and disabilities back to work – are to be stepped up, pushing more vulnerable people towards taking their own lives.

As This Writer has stated many times over more than a decade in which I’ve been writing about it, this is genocide by proxy. The government creates conditions that force sick and disabled people to die, and then claims to be totally innocent of causing the deaths.

And it is at a time when these changes are being introduced that bosses of a national, right-wing, newspaper decide to publish an article demonising the sick and disabled (together with other benefit claimants and pensioners).

Going back to Mary Sue‘s “Nazi” motif, everybody know by now (don’t they?) that before World War II the Daily Mail actually supported Hitler’s regime in its articles.

Now it seems to be the Telegraph that has taken up the baton of the fascists.


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The Tyranny of Tickboxes – How the U.K. government is escalating its war on disability rights in 2023 | Black Triangle Campaign

Here’s an article that’s well worth reading – but This Site won’t re-publish much of it here because the information has already been covered by Vox Political elsewhere.

For now, let’s limit ourselves to this:

After years of the war on the poor,worsening mental health, increasing mass hunger and suicides, the UK government has announced a further round of attacks. Two measures stand out.

There will be more benefit sanctions, where benefits are stopped if people are deemed to have failed to look for work. This will add to the over 2 million food parcels a year currently needed. It will also push more vulnerable people into taking their own lives.

And the main test for Employment and Support Allowance will be abolished. If this had been done out of a belated recognition of the harm these tests have caused in the lives of millions of people, it would be a good step. It is not. Instead, the feared Work Capability Test will be replaced by something even worse: the kind of test currently used for another benefit – Personal Independence Payment or PIP.

It is notoriously difficult to pass the PIP test, and be awarded benefits, especially if your main disability is a mental health issue.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that 1 million people will be deprived of benefits because of the extension of the PIP test into assessments for ESA.

The scene is being set for all the harm already done by ‘Welfare Reform’ to be added to massively.  

We have beaten such changes before and it is entirely possible to do so again.

Expect a new wave of information detailing how that can happen – starting soon.

Source: The Tyranny of Tickboxes – How the U.K. government is escalating its war on disability rights in 2023 – Black Triangle Campaign


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Politicians want people with Long Covid to work. Is it another cull of the sick?

Long Covid: to sufferers, it is a huge burden they have to carry every day. Now politicians on both sides of the political fence want to force them to suffer that burden AND go to work as well, so they don’t have to take migrant workers from abroad. It will be a death sentence.

Politicians in both main political parties want to push sick people back into work – but isn’t that an indictment of the UK’s political response to Long Covid?

Let me explain, with the help of Samuel Miller:

You have to look behind the headlines, behind what the mouthpieces are uttering, in order to understand what they really mean.

Here’s an example:

How about this now-deleted tweet from broadcaster Jeremy Vine?

It attracted a strong response:

The document contains details of people who have died or committed suicide as a result of government mistreatment of their sickness benefit claims in attempts to force them back into work.

Looking at the evidence, and based on my own experience of government policy over the last 20 years (Tory and Labour), This Writer is moved to ask:

Are we looking at the beginnings of another politically-motivated cull of the sick?


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DWP still linked with countless deaths, despite 10 years of reviews

Here’s yet another attempt to make the government see sense:

All those investigations and yet the bodies continue to pile up.

And the government somehow continues to deny any blame.

Why do you tolerate this? Is it just because you aren’t among the dead?


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#LocalElections2023: how #VoterID discriminates against the disabled

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:

Representatives of sick and disabled people have responded strongly:

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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Mental illness days taken by civil servants rise 38% in one year and here’s the reason

Is it any surprise that Whitehall civil servants took a record 661,433 sick days due to mental health last year – 38 per cent more than the already-phenomenal 558,125 of the year before?

Labour says data reveals ‘mental health crisis at the heart of Whitehall’, as unions blame staff cuts, low pay and long hours.

The figures show that the amount of mental health-related sick leave across the heart of government has been rising continuously for the past decade.

Civil servants at the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) took the most sick days for mental health in 2021-22 – a total of 280,597. Staff at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) took off almost as much time – 236,365 days – while the Ministry of Defence (MoD) had the third-highest total, at 88,723 days.

Unions representing Whitehall workers blamed the rising numbers on increased workloads, the impact of Covid-19, staff cuts, low pay, long hours and poor morale.

And the unions are exactly right.

The Tories cut public service pay as soon as they could after taking office – by freezing it for several years at a time (if I recall correctly). So already these employees were being placed under increasing stress because they were finding it harder to make ends meet – and this has become progressively worse.

Staff has been cut back hard, meaning workloads have increased, meaning those who remain are having to work longer hours to hit their targets – if possible.

Oh, and we are told that Tory government ministers have developed a fondness for mistreating their staff as well.

Result: low morale.

Roll all that together and you have a dangerous concoction that is likely to harm the mentality of anybody forced to partake of it.

There is a solution – but it is not one that would occur to a Tory.

You simply employ enough staff to get the job done within normal working hours, and pay them a salary that adequately compensates them for the time they put in and the expertise they bring to the work.

And instead of berating them for failure, you make sure that they are praised for success.

Not only will morale and mental health improve, meaning fewer days’ work will be lost due to illness, but the quality of the work will improve and the people carrying it out will want to stay in the job – because they’re good at it, it’s rewarding and the atmosphere is welcoming.

That’s how you motivate a workforce and keep its members healthy.

But it will never happen under a Conservative government.

Source: Mental health sick days taken by civil servants rise 38% in one year | Civil service | The Guardian

The Tory government hasn’t bothered to check who will be harmed by disability benefit changes

[Image: Black Triangle Campaign].

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.

Source: Disability benefits: Ministers cannot say how many will be hit by changes that could leave them out of pocket


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