Everyone knows how keen the Prime Minister is on sorting out threats to the nation – Saddam Hussein, international terrorism, the war on drugs – and how much safer the world is thanks to his tireless work. But now the Government has turned to evils that lie closer to home. Good, honest, hardworking able-bodied people face a scourge which makes Saddam and Osama look like amateurs. We’re talking about all those naughty disabled people who will insist on claiming welfare benefits.
They’re the ones to blame for the rises in public spending and taxes. So the Government is going to take fearless action against that insidious ‘sick note culture’ that we’ve been hearing so much about just recently. After all, everyone knows that Incapacity Benefit is more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine: after a few weeks, you’re hooked, and if you’ve been on it for more than six months, you’ll probably be on it for life.
First, the Government’s going to deal with those evil dealers in benefits. By cutting off the supply of addictive payments at source, they hope that fewer people will become dependent. So Incapacity Benefit and Income Support for people unable to work will be phased out by 2008, to be replaced by two new benefits: Rehabilitation Support Allowance and Disability and Sickness Allowance. New claimants won’t be able to get onto these benefits unless they participate in interviews designed to get them off these dangerous payments and into work. In practice, this probably means that junior staff in Job Centres will be deciding on whether or not someone with complex health problems is fit to work.
We can only applaud the Government’s far-sightedness. After all, the existing benefits are so tempting to naive and vulnerable disabled people. Who wouldn’t want the weekly payment of £84.28 that comprises the average Incapacity Benefit? It’s so alluring, given that it’s one sixth of the average weekly wage.
Of course, this drastic action is fully justified. There are one million disabled people out there who want jobs and are able to work, so let’s not worry about the two million other disabled people who are unable to work due to pain or fatigue. And it’s so sensible of the Government to take the cheap option of restricting the supply of benefits; much better than actually doing something effective to help disabled people get into work. The UK comes fourth from bottom in the EU table of spending on labour market programs for disabled people as a proportion of gross domestic product. Government investment in disabled workers is only half that of countries such as Greece – and twenty times less than places like Sweden.
Second, the Government plans to make it much harder for people to get hold of these dangerous benefits by investing in new technology to help weed out welfare addicts. For example, last December, The Independent newspaper claimed that the Government had secret plans to introduce lie detector tests for Incapacity Benefit claimants, which would be used during telephone calls to discuss their application (further details from the Benefits and Work forum) without the claimants themselves heing aware of what was going on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Government was apparently anxious that news of its experiments with lie detectors should not be widely publicised. After all, careless talk costs lies.
Another exciting innovation is the Government’s proposed new “computerised Awards Management system”. This is intended to “provide structured, IT based guidance to decision makers at the point of need” – which is Civil Service jargon for “providing new excuses for challenging or denying DLA claimants in ingenious ways”. What the Department of Work and Pensions call “better decision outcomes” is, of course, jargon for “fewer claimants”. In the old days, there was a cumbersome Awards Handbook, which a civil servant had to leaf through to work out which impairments entitled people to receive benefits. The DWP has apparently now brought in computer giant IBM to help it develop an “‘Appeals Wizard’. Sadly, this is nothing to do with Gandalf, but everything to do with stopping disabled people successfully appealing against decisions not to award them benefits.
And the really cunning thing is that whereas in the past the criteria were written down in the handbook, which ordinary people at least had a chance of getting hold of, they will now be embedded in software, which is conveniently exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. So we’ll all have to guess the right answers to the questions in order to get the support to which we are morally and legally entitled.
But I know what you’re thinking. You’ve listened to the political speeches, and you know what an evil cynical world it is out there. For years, those nasty disabled people have been claiming payments to which they aren’t entitled, and if it goes on any longer, they’re going to swamp all the good, law-abiding, hard-working citizens of this fair land.
Well, no, actually. Despite all the talk of ‘sick-note Britain’, the number of people in receipt of Incapacity Benefit or Severe Disablement Allowance fell from 2,099,800 in May 1997 to 1,782,100 in May 2004, which represents a decrease of just under 318,000 people. Furthermore, the government’s own official review of Incapacity Benefit found that the level of fraud was less than 0.5% (figures from the Trades Union Congress Defending Incapacity Benefit document).
But as we know, it’s the spin that counts, not the reality. Both Labour and the Tories are committed to cost savings and tax reductions. And scapegoating disabled people is one of the easiest ways of doing it.
Thanks to those nice people at Benefits and Work for the research underlying my column this month.
Tom is the Director of Outreach at the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Institute in Newcastle. His non-fiction books include Genetics Politics: from Eugenics to Genome and The Sexual Politics of Disability.
Everyone knows how keen the Prime Minister is on sorting out threats to the nation – Saddam Hussein, international terrorism, the war on drugs – and how much safer the world is thanks to his tireless work. But now the Government has turned to evils that lie closer to home. Good, honest, hardworking able-bodied people face a scourge which makes Saddam and Osama look like amateurs. We’re talking about all those naughty disabled people who will insist on claiming welfare benefits.
They’re the ones to blame for the rises in public spending and taxes. So the Government is going to take fearless action against that insidious ‘sick note culture’ that we’ve been hearing so much about just recently. After all, everyone knows that Incapacity Benefit is more addictive than heroin or crack cocaine: after a few weeks, you’re hooked, and if you’ve been on it for more than six months, you’ll probably be on it for life.
First, the Government’s going to deal with those evil dealers in benefits. By cutting off the supply of addictive payments at source, they hope that fewer people will become dependent. So Incapacity Benefit and Income Support for people unable to work will be phased out by 2008, to be replaced by two new benefits: Rehabilitation Support Allowance and Disability and Sickness Allowance. New claimants won’t be able to get onto these benefits unless they participate in interviews designed to get them off these dangerous payments and into work. In practice, this probably means that junior staff in Job Centres will be deciding on whether or not someone with complex health problems is fit to work.
We can only applaud the Government’s far-sightedness. After all, the existing benefits are so tempting to naive and vulnerable disabled people. Who wouldn’t want the weekly payment of £84.28 that comprises the average Incapacity Benefit? It’s so alluring, given that it’s one sixth of the average weekly wage.
Of course, this drastic action is fully justified. There are one million disabled people out there who want jobs and are able to work, so let’s not worry about the two million other disabled people who are unable to work due to pain or fatigue. And it’s so sensible of the Government to take the cheap option of restricting the supply of benefits; much better than actually doing something effective to help disabled people get into work. The UK comes fourth from bottom in the EU table of spending on labour market programs for disabled people as a proportion of gross domestic product. Government investment in disabled workers is only half that of countries such as Greece – and twenty times less than places like Sweden.
Second, the Government plans to make it much harder for people to get hold of these dangerous benefits by investing in new technology to help weed out welfare addicts. For example, last December, The Independent newspaper claimed that the Government had secret plans to introduce lie detector tests for Incapacity Benefit claimants, which would be used during telephone calls to discuss their application (further details from the Benefits and Work forum) without the claimants themselves heing aware of what was going on. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Government was apparently anxious that news of its experiments with lie detectors should not be widely publicised. After all, careless talk costs lies.
Another exciting innovation is the Government’s proposed new “computerised Awards Management system”. This is intended to “provide structured, IT based guidance to decision makers at the point of need” – which is Civil Service jargon for “providing new excuses for challenging or denying DLA claimants in ingenious ways”. What the Department of Work and Pensions call “better decision outcomes” is, of course, jargon for “fewer claimants”. In the old days, there was a cumbersome Awards Handbook, which a civil servant had to leaf through to work out which impairments entitled people to receive benefits. The DWP has apparently now brought in computer giant IBM to help it develop an “‘Appeals Wizard’. Sadly, this is nothing to do with Gandalf, but everything to do with stopping disabled people successfully appealing against decisions not to award them benefits.
And the really cunning thing is that whereas in the past the criteria were written down in the handbook, which ordinary people at least had a chance of getting hold of, they will now be embedded in software, which is conveniently exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. So we’ll all have to guess the right answers to the questions in order to get the support to which we are morally and legally entitled.
But I know what you’re thinking. You’ve listened to the political speeches, and you know what an evil cynical world it is out there. For years, those nasty disabled people have been claiming payments to which they aren’t entitled, and if it goes on any longer, they’re going to swamp all the good, law-abiding, hard-working citizens of this fair land.
Well, no, actually. Despite all the talk of ‘sick-note Britain’, the number of people in receipt of Incapacity Benefit or Severe Disablement Allowance fell from 2,099,800 in May 1997 to 1,782,100 in May 2004, which represents a decrease of just under 318,000 people. Furthermore, the government’s own official review of Incapacity Benefit found that the level of fraud was less than 0.5% (figures from the Trades Union Congress Defending Incapacity Benefit document).
But as we know, it’s the spin that counts, not the reality. Both Labour and the Tories are committed to cost savings and tax reductions. And scapegoating disabled people is one of the easiest ways of doing it.
Thanks to those nice people at Benefits and Work for the research underlying my column this month.
Tom is the Director of Outreach at the Policy, Ethics and Life Sciences Research Institute in Newcastle. His non-fiction books include Genetics Politics: from Eugenics to Genome and The Sexual Politics of Disability.