November 12, 2009
We’re changing our blog name to BENEFITS CULTURE – let’s seize the phrase the tabloids use to bash us!
Please update your bookmarks, links, RSS feeds, etc etc to:
http://benefitsculture.wordpress.com/
and head there for our latest posts.
At some point this will be matched by an exciting new design.
November 10, 2009
Dave (“normal, average delusional and paranoid man”) writes an excellent blog on trying to combat the stigmas which surround diagnoses of mental illness.
He says he is relatively well at the moment, and would like to make the return to work.
As I have, perhaps, written before, it is a continual bugbear of mine that those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia find it hard, nay almost impossible to find paid work, not only because of the stigmas which surround the diagnosis, but because there seems to be so little support out there for people like me to return to work. Despite a known high rate of willingness to work amongst those with mental ill health and despite many of us experiencing long periods of well-being (I would say I have been mentally fit at least since 2006) it seems that many of us, at relatively early ages, are put on the economic scrap heap
So, Dave wrote to Tory leader Dave Cameron and asked what exactly the Conservatives proposed to offer to help people in his position.
The answer?
OK, so far, so vague. If I wanted to return to work, exactly what support would I get, other than being just moved to a different area of the benefits system, one which, it must be remembered, pays less in benefits than Incapacity. Nowhere is there mention of measures which might actually make a difference, like those suggested by Professor Graham Thornicroft, such as support from job coaches (employment advisers), providing structured psychological treatment, encouraging health and social care agencies to see the experience of mental illness as a positive attribute when hiring staff, developing new roles in which former service users are employed in a mental health team, and the introduction of “reasonable adjustments” as cited in the Disability Discrimination Act.
The above changes might actually make a difference to me in experiencing some form of success in the open market. On the other hand, the Tory policy of simply, if it was that I were found fit to work, moving me on to Job Seeker’s Allowance, would seem only to result in me receiving less money. The stigma which surrounds my diagnosis would remain, the difficulties in finding paid work perhaps not alleviated. So, what would the Tories do for people in my situation? According to this response, not near enough.
As usual, the politicians issue simplistic answers which do nothing to combat the real problems faced by people with various disabilities. They offer plenty of stick, in the form of threats to reduce our income, but nothing in the way of carrot, in the form of meaningful reform of the way people with disabilities and mental health problems are treated (in or out of the workplace). Like the Labour party, the Tories’ response is to increase the stress of living with a disability, which is entirely counterproductive as stress is one of the things guaranteed to make any kind of mental illness even worse.
November 10, 2009
The media likes to complain about how much welfare and benefits cost the British taxpayer, but they tend to neglect to mention that the figures they quote include contribution-based pensions.
For instance, in the middle of the decade the annual “welfare” cost was around £100 billion. Sounds big, right? Well, over £42 billion of this was contribution-based pension payments (you know, the kind you spend your life paying in to in the first place). £10 billion was benefits for the disabled. In progressively smaller amounts there was also child benefit, income support, housing benefits, and JSA.
At that same time, corporate tax avoidance cost the UK taxpayer £85 billion, and business fraud racked up a £14 million price tag. Government fraud in Whitehall cost us £5 billion, tobacco smuggling 3.5. VAT fraud on mobile phones, 2.5, and welfare fraud £2 billion.
So here we have another example of how the media and politicians distort the truth and attack the least able, rather than pointing their ire at the ones who really cost us the most money.
The government also hands out billions of pounds each year in “corporate welfare” via the Department for Trade and Industry, but we don’t hear a lot about that from the mainstream press, do we?
I’d also like to bring a letter to the Guardian to your attention.
Even though the government says that benefit fraud has been more than halved, it can’t resist grabbing a headline to ease through tough benefit changes which are unconnected (Lie detector tests to catch benefit cheats, December 3). If this wasn’t bad enough, in my experience as an expert witness in benefit fraud cases, most benefit fraud is exaggerated.
Investigations I have carried out for the courts at the request of defence lawyers have shown that the amounts allegedly defrauded are frequently nowhere near as great as alleged. I have exposed many cases with inflated allegations and cases where people are still entitled to the money which they are alleged to have fiddled.
– Flawed evidence on benefit fraud
November 8, 2009
One of the media’s latest gloating claims has been that most people on incapacity benefit in the UK “could do some work”. And I can hear these people now, were they to read this – “you can blog, why don’t you go out and get a job?”
My first reaction to these people is that that’s between me and my doctors, including the ones who assessed me for incapacity and agreed I qualified. Yes, you might not guess it from the way the papers write about the topic, but amazingly enough you already have to be assessed by professionals before you’re given incapacity benefits (which now have a confusing number of names, as the system is being switched over to something called ESA).
Since the point of this blog is to discuss these issues, I’ll overlook the rudeness of these interrogators for now, and give a few of the many valid answers to this question.
Why don’t you go out and get a job?
My disability doesn’t mean I can’t ever do any kind of work – I do voluntary work once a week, I write this blog, I enjoy taking photographs. What it does mean is that I cannot work often or reliably enough to perform in a job, as they’re arranged in today’s society. I do not know when I’m going to be too unwell, or how long that will last. I also get exhausted very easily, and half a day of voluntary work needs to be followed by a couple of days of doing nothing to recover some energy. I’m often exhausted, because just keeping up with everyday tasks like laundry and dishes and paying bills is overwhelming when you’re disabled, physically or otherwise.
Having some skills and abilities doesn’t mean you can exercise them in a job. It doesn’t mean you can show up on a day to day basis, partake in the expected social interactions (especially if you have to deal with customers with a chirpy smile on your face), and not quickly become so ill you can’t get out of bed. It doesn’t mean employers would want you, either, even for relatively menial work – I know someone who was fired from a job as a cart collector for Tesco, because he looked too glum. He committed suicide about a month later.
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that someone who’s been on incapacity benefit for a couple of years gets better, and is able to return to work, which is what the government wants us to do. They apply for positions, if they’re really lucky they get an interview, and what happens? Oh look, they have a gap in their history of paid employment, no one wants to give them a job. If you want to remove barriers to work, how about starting with the ones caused by the people in the position of power, instead of constantly attacking the powerless?
There are many more aspects I could cover here, of course, and they’ll be brought up in future posts. For instance, along with energy goes time. Doctor’s appointments, psychiatrist’s appointments, CPNs, support groups and CMHTs, even if you have the energy to do more than all that you’re going to need a job that doesn’t mind giving you frequently time off for it. People with physical disabilities face other factors too, like the extra stress and effort of finding accessible transport, arranging aides and assistants, even things as simple (to most of us) as people understanding it takes you 20 minutes to go to the loo.
Being able to work is about more than just your physical ability to perform a task. It’s also about being able to get and keep a job that’s appropriate to your abilities, without making yourself more disabled and more unwell.
November 8, 2009
We are not surprised that Conservative leader David Cameron has no idea what life is like when you rely on incapacity benefit, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised in his complete fail at basic maths, either.
The Tories say they intend to reassess everyone on Incapacity Benefit to see if they are fit for work, within three years of a Conservative election victory.
Aethelread the Unread takes a look at the maths and works out what that would cost.
So, let’s review. David Cameron is proposing
a minimum £14,565,600 increase in the annual public sector wage bill;
a 148% increase in the number of publicly-funded medical examination centres;
an unknown increase in the number of civil servants in the DWP to process the additional paperwork;
an unknown increase in the number of civil servants required to process an unquantified number of appeals against the removal of benefit.
This is all based on the presumption, for which he has advanced no evidence, that a staggeringly high proportion – one fifth – of those receiving Incapacity Benefit are capable of work, and that these hundreds of thousands of fraudsters (assuming they exist) will be flushed out by this process. This is despite the fact that every single IB claimant has already been through multiple medical assessments of the kind he is proposing, and has been repeatedly found to be incapable of work.
Of course, a good politician would never let anything like the facts get in the way of a policy suggestion designed to thrill the readers of the Daily Mail.
And of course, people on incapacity benefits are a safe group to take a stab at – we are inherently unlikely to be able to gather together in large enough numbers to make any kind of publicly visible protest. Even if we were well enough, we probably couldn’t afford the travel costs, and would be too afraid of having our benefits stopped to risk putting our heads above ground. Most of us have to spend all our energy and other resources getting through life day by day. Politicians are safe to pontificate and lie about us, knowing they’re very unlikely ever to have to walk past groups of us protesting, and if they did there would be Daily Mail readers aplenty to shout out “why don’t you just go and get a job?”
And that will probably be the subject of my next post.
November 7, 2009
It’s not easy to speak up about being on benefits, because of the enormous level of stigma and prejudice attached to being on any kind of incapacity or income support. So we applaud YouTube user nomoreharassment, for making a series of videos about incapacity benefit and her experiences.
She says:
Not everyone on IB is a lazy worthless scrounging piece of sh** despite what you may read in the papers, this is me talking a little about the reality of the situation for most claimants (genuine ones), ordinary decent people who are ill through no fault of their own, who have the same thoughts feelings and aspirations as everyone else does – which I’m sure other people in my position will agree with.
November 6, 2009
The Guardian tells us “Critics of new medical tests aimed at getting claimants off benefits and into work say they are target-driven measures that penalise genuinely ill people”.
And a blogger with chronic fatigue wishes good luck to the 500,000 turfed off incapacity benefits.
November 6, 2009
In her Open Letter to David Cameron, blogger Crimsoncrip takes the Conservative leader to task for the way he talks about people on incapacity benefits.
Officially economic inactivity is not being employed, and not looking for work. The frequency with which it is bandied about by some, makes it seem less ‘clean’, than that, as if perhaps those who meet the definition do not contribute to society, or the economy.
Crimsoncrip goes on to talk about some of the ways people with disabilities contribute, such as volunteer work, a good deal of which is done by people on benefits who can manage a few hours of work a week.
There’s another point to consider here. Unless you take yourself completely out of society, no one is economically inactive. You spend money, you are economically active. People on benefits spend money (and pay VAT or sales taxes), in fact usually they have so little money they do the most economically active thing possible, spending it right away rather than saving it. The money we get goes right back into the economy.
People who’ve lived on benefits for a while usually can’t get much in the way of credit even if they want to, so we have less tendency to do the things that really damage the economy, like running up ridiculous huge debts which banks sell on to other people until the whole thing crashes and the government gives the banks billions of dollars or pounds. We, quite simply, are not the ones shitting all over the pot in this situation.
Paid work isn’t possible for some disabled people, because of their condition, or because they can’t find an employer to employ them within their limitations. This does not mean we don’t want to work, but equally we don’t see removing benefits, or restricting them, and forcing us on to activity programmes, as a real alternative either. We want to be in control, and make this decisions for ourselves, without fear of penalty if we decide we can’t manage. We don’t need to be forced to be responsible, and productive, within our limits many of us, are responsible active citizens, who make a real contribution to society. Why is that contribution not recognised?
Yes, Mr Cameron, why?
Being on Benefits 