At a conference last month, I had the dubious honour of sitting on a panel next to John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. After he spoke on the forthcoming Incapacity Benefit reforms, the floor was opened for questions. A guy with Cerebral Palsy asked the question at the forefront of my mind:
“How on earth can disabled people be encouraged to take up employment when, once in work, they may face a bill of up to £200 per week for community care charges?”
‘Care charges’ are the contributions that disabled people have to pay if we need assistance with everyday tasks like washing, dressing, or eating a meal. Mr Hutton repeated the classic mistake made by many a politician when faced with a question from someone with CP – he pretended he’d understood what they’d said, when in actual fact he hadn’t. So he ended up giving a completely irrelevant response and hoping that nobody would notice.
Abusing my position, I butted in to remind him that he had actually been the minister responsible for introducing the current guidance on charging. Taken aback, he threw me a look of pure contempt, obviously unused to such a lack of camaraderie on the part of a fellow panellist, and replied that this did not fall under his current jurisdiction.
Maybe he was thinking back to his speech in Parliament in 2001 on making funding fairer, supporting carers and avoiding putting disabled people into residential institutions? At the time he stated: “I do not believe that making personal care universally free would help us in achieving any of those objectives”. It’s somewhat ironic that the person who introduced the current system for charging – in my opinion one of the biggest deterrents for anyone considering employment – has now been put in charge of getting more of us into jobs!
The current guidance, ‘Fairer Charging’, is a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. It states that charging should avoid creating disincentives to work by disregarding people’s earnings. Instead, social security benefits such as Income Support should be used to decide whether someone pays. But of course, entitlement to Income Support is based on people’s earnings. This is what is known as Sir Humphrey Appleby logic!
It was once estimated by the national ‘Coalition Against Charging’ that up to 40% of the money we pay in care charges is spent on administration. In other words, a significant proportion of our contributions go to pay the council employees to carry on collecting our contributions. Never mind the Sir Humphrey Appleby logic – It’s even starting to sound like a plot from the sitcom Yes Minister, isn’t it?
Worse still, if disabled people living in a residential institution decide to work, they are only allowed to keep £20 per week as the rest of their income must be directed towards the cost of keeping them there. It makes no difference whether they’re on minimum wage or earning more than the cost of their fees – twenty quid is all they get!
Nowadays we’re constantly getting reminders of the importance of saving for retirement. But for disabled people in my position, getting a savings account is the quickest way to a £200 bill landing on your doormat every week, since savings over a certain limit must be taken into account. Fairer charging? My arse!
Whether or not someone gets charged boils down to whether their primary need for assistance has been assessed as a health need or a social need, since healthcare is free but social care costs can be passed down to us. This is a completely artificial distinction. Personally I couldn’t give a monkey’s toss whether my needs are health or social; the fact remains that I need assistance to live independently and don’t see why I should have to pay for it!
At the start of this year a study of the Scottish system of free social care was published, showing that its replication in England, Wales and Northern Ireland would be both affordable and beneficial to disabled people, particularly those with low incomes.
Yet in February, the Welsh Assembly Government abandoned their 2003 election manifesto pledge of ending charging in Wales. According to BBC News, they blamed legal issues over definitions of the words “free” and “disabled”. How exactly can you misinterpret “free”?
At a conference last month, I had the dubious honour of sitting on a panel next to John Hutton, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. After he spoke on the forthcoming Incapacity Benefit reforms, the floor was opened for questions. A guy with Cerebral Palsy asked the question at the forefront of my mind:
“How on earth can disabled people be encouraged to take up employment when, once in work, they may face a bill of up to £200 per week for community care charges?”
‘Care charges’ are the contributions that disabled people have to pay if we need assistance with everyday tasks like washing, dressing, or eating a meal. Mr Hutton repeated the classic mistake made by many a politician when faced with a question from someone with CP – he pretended he’d understood what they’d said, when in actual fact he hadn’t. So he ended up giving a completely irrelevant response and hoping that nobody would notice.
Abusing my position, I butted in to remind him that he had actually been the minister responsible for introducing the current guidance on charging. Taken aback, he threw me a look of pure contempt, obviously unused to such a lack of camaraderie on the part of a fellow panellist, and replied that this did not fall under his current jurisdiction.
Maybe he was thinking back to his speech in Parliament in 2001 on making funding fairer, supporting carers and avoiding putting disabled people into residential institutions? At the time he stated: “I do not believe that making personal care universally free would help us in achieving any of those objectives”. It’s somewhat ironic that the person who introduced the current system for charging – in my opinion one of the biggest deterrents for anyone considering employment – has now been put in charge of getting more of us into jobs!
The current guidance, ‘Fairer Charging’, is a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. It states that charging should avoid creating disincentives to work by disregarding people’s earnings. Instead, social security benefits such as Income Support should be used to decide whether someone pays. But of course, entitlement to Income Support is based on people’s earnings. This is what is known as Sir Humphrey Appleby logic!
It was once estimated by the national ‘Coalition Against Charging’ that up to 40% of the money we pay in care charges is spent on administration. In other words, a significant proportion of our contributions go to pay the council employees to carry on collecting our contributions. Never mind the Sir Humphrey Appleby logic – It’s even starting to sound like a plot from the sitcom Yes Minister, isn’t it?
Worse still, if disabled people living in a residential institution decide to work, they are only allowed to keep £20 per week as the rest of their income must be directed towards the cost of keeping them there. It makes no difference whether they’re on minimum wage or earning more than the cost of their fees – twenty quid is all they get!
Nowadays we’re constantly getting reminders of the importance of saving for retirement. But for disabled people in my position, getting a savings account is the quickest way to a £200 bill landing on your doormat every week, since savings over a certain limit must be taken into account. Fairer charging? My arse!
Whether or not someone gets charged boils down to whether their primary need for assistance has been assessed as a health need or a social need, since healthcare is free but social care costs can be passed down to us. This is a completely artificial distinction. Personally I couldn’t give a monkey’s toss whether my needs are health or social; the fact remains that I need assistance to live independently and don’t see why I should have to pay for it!
At the start of this year a study of the Scottish system of free social care was published, showing that its replication in England, Wales and Northern Ireland would be both affordable and beneficial to disabled people, particularly those with low incomes.
Yet in February, the Welsh Assembly Government abandoned their 2003 election manifesto pledge of ending charging in Wales. According to BBC News, they blamed legal issues over definitions of the words “free” and “disabled”. How exactly can you misinterpret “free”?