(This was not pay-walled for me, sorry if it is for you.) Disability benefits in England are paid by the Department for Work and Pensions. Anything involving DWP is incredibly complicated. To give...
(This was not pay-walled for me, sorry if it is for you.)
Disability benefits in England are paid by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Anything involving DWP is incredibly complicated. To give you some idea of how complicated: Benefits are paid to claimants by the minister for the DWP. That person is obviously busy, so the DWP employs Decision Makers who look at the facts of a claimant's life, and they apply the law to pay or deny the benefit. Those benefits are defined in law. Those laws are complex and scattered over acts and statutes and statutory instruments and case law. To make life easier for the decision makers the DWP has created a guide. This is called "The Decision Makers Guide" for some benefits, and "Advice for Decision Making" for other benefits. The DMG has 14 volumes. Volume one is over 900 pages.
Disability benefits come in two main types: "in work" benefits and "out of work" benefits.
The in work benefits are Disability Living Allowance and Personal Independence Payment. (DLA is old, PIP is the replacement. PIP started to be introduced in 2013). Employment status is not relevant to claiming in-work benefits. You can be working full time and still claim PIP. And your need for the financial support is probably greater if you are working. For example, if I have a job but struggle to use my hands I have to get up, get washed, get dressed in formal work clothing, and then travel to work. I might need to hire a care assistant to support me to do this. But if I'm not working the government says I can take more time, and I can wear tee-shirts instead of button up shirts.
The out of work benefits are legacy Employment and Support Allowance. You cannot start a new claim for a legacy benefit. ESA had two versions - contributions based, and income related. To get a contributions based benefit you needed to have paid a National Insurance for a certain amount of time - you're allowed to have savings and earnings. Income Related ESA is means tested. You can't have more than a certain amount of savings, and your earnings have to be below a certain limit. ESA has different groups - one group is for people who have limited capability for work. This group of people were expected to take part in activity that would help them return to work - this might have been interview practice, or voluntary work, or CV writing groups or etc. Not taking part without good reason would have resulted in a sanction. The other group was for people who were not able to do those activities. They were not expected to work, nor to prepare to return to work. Both groups were allowed to work if that was possible under the "permitted work" system. There were/are strict earnings limits and time limits (no more than 16 hours per week, and maximum earnings could not be more than 16 * national minimum wage hourly rate). Legacy contributions based ESA got replaced by New Style ESA. Legacy income related ESA got replaced by Universal Credit.
ESA paid more than UC does. The government made a pledge: no one will be worse off as a result of claiming UC. That was a lie. The way they bodged it was to say "if you have an existing claim, and we force you onto UC, you will get the same income you currently get". This process is called a "managed migration". However, most people go through what's called a "natural migration" - something about their circumstances changes, and they close their claim, and later have to claim again. The income protection pledge does not apply to those people. As an example of a change that can force natural migration: Bob claims ESA and Housing Benefit. Bob lives in SeaTown. Bob moves from SeaTown to CountryVille. Bob's housing benefit was paid by SeaTown, so they close his HB claim. He is now trapped! The DWP's own language is "the lobster pot". He goes to CountryVille and tries to open a new claim for housing benefit, but he can't because it's a legacy benefit and you can't make a new claim for a legacy benefit. He needs the money to pay rent, so he applies for the housing portion of UC. But you also cannot have a blended claim of UC and a legacy benefit, so his claim for ESA is closed, and a claim for US is opened. And because it's a natural migration income protection does not apply.
To claim either an in-work or out-of-work benefit your disability is assessed. There is a very high bar to claiming the in work benefits. (I had rectal cancer, major surgery, and chemotherapy, and I would not have been able to claim PIP). The assessments for each benefit are different.
(I told you it was complicated).
So, government are looking at the bill for paying all these benefits and they've decided it's too high, and that one way to reduce it is to get more people with disabilities back into work. But their approach is incoherent.
The want to change the assessment for out of work disability benefits to be the tougher assessment used for PIP. This means that people with short term but significant sickness will be only be in UC if anything, and people with long term relapsing and remitting conditions are stuffed, and people with long term significant conditions that don't quite meet the high threshold are also stuffed. This is made worse by the fact that UC probably does not pay enough to live on.
But the assessment for PIP does not look at whether you can work or not, and so to use it to decide whether to pay sickness benefits makes no sense.
There is also a protection: if interacting with the DWP significantly increases suicide risk your requirements to interact with them are reduced. Government is proposing to remove that protection. (I don't understand how they think this will survive legal challenge, because the protection came about after a case went through the courts).
tldr it all sucks and this government is fucking awful.
It is totally understandable why the UK government would like to reduce government spending. The UK spends a huge (roughly £327bn per year) amount on social protection, compared to a mere £4.5bn...
It is totally understandable why the UK government would like to reduce government spending. The UK spends a huge (roughly £327bn per year) amount on social protection, compared to a mere £4.5bn for university funding – something is clearly going very wrong here.
Long-term the best way to go around reducing this spending is to improve the (shockingly) poor health of the general population. We need (but probably will not) to tackle obesity, lack of exercise etc.
The main issue with those kinds of numbers are of how muddied they are with the social benefit classified as "Pension Credit." There are so many PC reciepents who simply do not need the cash going...
The main issue with those kinds of numbers are of how muddied they are with the social benefit classified as "Pension Credit." There are so many PC reciepents who simply do not need the cash going to them every week, but get it because it wasn't means tested. Pension Credit would give you a decent bit of cash weekly AND entitle you to full Housing Benefits & Council Tax benefits almost overnight (That's £1200ish per year, per household taken from councils via local taxation every year. Let alone the rental costs.)
I used to do Fraud Investigation for a Housing Benefits department and there were at least six millionaire-types who got PC 'because'. It was infurating to have to get these folks on something we knew was horseshit. Let alone the old buggers who'd suddenly declare their six rental properties and place in Spain that they didn't "realise we have to!" on the regular...
It then doesn't help that the overall cost of administrating and punishing huge sums of out of work folks adds to the costs. Costs that the Tories are constantly blaming on others, rather than actually reading research and pushing people into systems that make them borderline suicidal for being treated like kids... or don't claim at all (Which was the intention at all.)
The UK used to be a shining bastion that said "If you have a kid and you're struggling, don't worry... we'll help!" or "You've injured yourself and need a bit of support? Come here, we'll help!" or "You've lost your job? Don't fret it, here's some cash to keep you going!" Then those people got demonised as 'welfare queens', 'job shy' and 'grifters' by the Daily Mail and its ilk and now we've got a system that actively penalises you for DARING to be out of productive work.
Not to mention that many of these benefits don't help anyone at all. Punitive attitudes like "the bedroom tax" took huge sums of benefits off people who couldn't work anyway (kids / disability, etc...). And then you've got the change from 50% to 30% focus on LHA to ensure that only the very worst landlords ended up getting anything from Housing Benefits.
There's a system we used to have that helped people, it worked to ensure you got cash and it was a bit of a laugh to "be on the dole" sure. But you knew you'd get cash for clothing, food, rent and heating. Now we've got a system that just hates you for daring to not be productive, It's also one that actually costs even more due to the insane, vindictive and negligent DWP and it's JC+ middle management.
The Conservatives in the past 14 years have turned a nation that at least pretended to care, into one where spitting vitriol and repulisve remarks is considered good faith. I hate what this nation has become, the DWP is just the crux of the issue.
As I understand it, pension credit costs roughly 2.5 billion per year. I agree that these things could be better administrated but I do think that the state should aim to reduce welfare spending...
As I understand it, pension credit costs roughly 2.5 billion per year. I agree that these things could be better administrated but I do think that the state should aim to reduce welfare spending by decreasing inequality and trying to increase wages.
It's all the gubbins that comes with PC that causes so much cost. Not to mention SRP which just. Blows currently welfare spending out of the water... Again, because it isn't means tested....
It's all the gubbins that comes with PC that causes so much cost. Not to mention SRP which just. Blows currently welfare spending out of the water... Again, because it isn't means tested.
Honestly, I don't mind welfare spending. The purpose of the state should be to support it's people. The problem is they've been supporting their people for 14 years and it's trashed every social safety net we as Joe Public had. I'm a high rate tax payer and I don't mind paying more to make sure they folks don't suffer unnecessarily if the worst happens.
But paying those taxes just to see it spaffed on administration costs or going to private entities who do the same job as public but for six times the amount? Not a chance.
A small anecdote to highlight the inefficiency of disability payments: I was on them for a few months, and as part of it they will pay your rent. My rent was £50 per week (I just had a room in a...
A small anecdote to highlight the inefficiency of disability payments: I was on them for a few months, and as part of it they will pay your rent. My rent was £50 per week (I just had a room in a shared house, so it was low). They said the minimum rent payment they were allowed to pay was £60.
Only £10 a week extra, but it’s things like this that cause costs to blow out. Absolutely absurd system.
there's also a lot of predatory charities, at least in my neck of the woods, offering supported accomodation. I was in a 'temporary shorthold accomodation' for 6 years (lol) where the rent was...
there's also a lot of predatory charities, at least in my neck of the woods, offering supported accomodation. I was in a 'temporary shorthold accomodation' for 6 years (lol) where the rent was being picked up by the government under housing benefit @855/mo with an extra 87/mo in service charges. this was for a single cramped room in a house of 8 rooms. but because each room was its own "property" they were claiming that from every single tennant. it also meant that if you were to get into work, you would have to foot the entire bill yourself unless you limit yourself to 17 hours a week. as apposed to where i am currently where it is roughly 375/mo + counciltax and bills for a 1 bed, my own kitchen, living room, bathroom, AND A GARDEN all to my self. this last year has mostly been spent jumping between callcenters and retail jobs while i try to get onto an apprenticeship, but most importantly - unlearning all the ptsd behaviours i picked up living in a vertiable crackhouse
the charity was supposedly providing social services but that ammounted to essentially fortnightly visits to the property to check that nothing was destroyed, and monthly room checks (mostly to check for contraband) and even though the house was filled with CCTV in the common areas - they refused to use it to settle 'civil' disputes such as getting pushed down the stairs, having your food stolen from the kitchens, getting harrased by 'banned' guests that were smoking whatever smells like burning plastic in the laundry room.
they actively withheld doing my application to this 'homefinders scheme' and after years of making it seem like they had to be the ones to intiate the application, i finally managed to be an advocate for myself and talked to someone from the council who ACTUALLY helped me navigate and work on a path to leave the accomodation. im not sure what the status of the investigation is but i know that there were several GDPR violations, health and safety violations (for 3 years there wasnt a single fire safety test and we didnt have heat for 2 winters) as well as harmful advice (when i had finally secured a tennancy in a council house - they wanted to kick me out the day i signed the tennancy agreement even though it wouldnt come into effect until 3 weeks later, so i had to lie and say that i hadn't signed it yet, and even have a text message of them suggesting i rent a moving van and live in that for the timebeing as i would need to be out of the property the second i sign the new agreement)
I was essentially stuck in an adverse position where i would risk getting sanctioned if i wasnt looking for work, but i would be homeless within a month if i actually landed a job over 17 hours/week. and all because i was a troublefree tennant that they didnt want to let go (i would also take the bins out and clean the kitchen even though i took to using a toaster oven and microwave in my room to avoid getting assualted in the kitchen)
this is a bit of a venty ramble but it just pains me to think that this was a CHARITY acting like slumlords. but because it was supported accomodation - they were granted more than the max rent for housing benefit and would actively refuse to carry out their duties because and i quote "its not my job to spend the entire day going through cctv". and because the turnover for support workers was insanely high and they were spread thin managing an absurd amount of properties - i can only imagine the scale of it is much worse than this one property.
Jesus, that’s so awful. I’m sorry to hear you had to live there so long! The system is fucked (by Tory design) and getting worse (by Tory design). I hope you find yourself in a much better...
Jesus, that’s so awful. I’m sorry to hear you had to live there so long! The system is fucked (by Tory design) and getting worse (by Tory design). I hope you find yourself in a much better position over the next year
(This was not pay-walled for me, sorry if it is for you.)
Disability benefits in England are paid by the Department for Work and Pensions.
Anything involving DWP is incredibly complicated.
To give you some idea of how complicated: Benefits are paid to claimants by the minister for the DWP. That person is obviously busy, so the DWP employs Decision Makers who look at the facts of a claimant's life, and they apply the law to pay or deny the benefit. Those benefits are defined in law. Those laws are complex and scattered over acts and statutes and statutory instruments and case law. To make life easier for the decision makers the DWP has created a guide. This is called "The Decision Makers Guide" for some benefits, and "Advice for Decision Making" for other benefits. The DMG has 14 volumes. Volume one is over 900 pages.Disability benefits come in two main types: "in work" benefits and "out of work" benefits.
The in work benefits are Disability Living Allowance and Personal Independence Payment. (DLA is old, PIP is the replacement. PIP started to be introduced in 2013). Employment status is not relevant to claiming in-work benefits. You can be working full time and still claim PIP. And your need for the financial support is probably greater if you are working. For example, if I have a job but struggle to use my hands I have to get up, get washed, get dressed in formal work clothing, and then travel to work. I might need to hire a care assistant to support me to do this. But if I'm not working the government says I can take more time, and I can wear tee-shirts instead of button up shirts.
The out of work benefits are legacy Employment and Support Allowance. You cannot start a new claim for a legacy benefit. ESA had two versions - contributions based, and income related. To get a contributions based benefit you needed to have paid a National Insurance for a certain amount of time - you're allowed to have savings and earnings. Income Related ESA is means tested. You can't have more than a certain amount of savings, and your earnings have to be below a certain limit. ESA has different groups - one group is for people who have limited capability for work. This group of people were expected to take part in activity that would help them return to work - this might have been interview practice, or voluntary work, or CV writing groups or etc. Not taking part without good reason would have resulted in a sanction. The other group was for people who were not able to do those activities. They were not expected to work, nor to prepare to return to work. Both groups were allowed to work if that was possible under the "permitted work" system. There were/are strict earnings limits and time limits (no more than 16 hours per week, and maximum earnings could not be more than 16 * national minimum wage hourly rate). Legacy contributions based ESA got replaced by New Style ESA. Legacy income related ESA got replaced by Universal Credit.
ESA paid more than UC does. The government made a pledge: no one will be worse off as a result of claiming UC. That was a lie. The way they bodged it was to say "if you have an existing claim, and we force you onto UC, you will get the same income you currently get". This process is called a "managed migration". However, most people go through what's called a "natural migration" - something about their circumstances changes, and they close their claim, and later have to claim again. The income protection pledge does not apply to those people. As an example of a change that can force natural migration: Bob claims ESA and Housing Benefit. Bob lives in SeaTown. Bob moves from SeaTown to CountryVille. Bob's housing benefit was paid by SeaTown, so they close his HB claim. He is now trapped! The DWP's own language is "the lobster pot". He goes to CountryVille and tries to open a new claim for housing benefit, but he can't because it's a legacy benefit and you can't make a new claim for a legacy benefit. He needs the money to pay rent, so he applies for the housing portion of UC. But you also cannot have a blended claim of UC and a legacy benefit, so his claim for ESA is closed, and a claim for US is opened. And because it's a natural migration income protection does not apply.
To claim either an in-work or out-of-work benefit your disability is assessed. There is a very high bar to claiming the in work benefits. (I had rectal cancer, major surgery, and chemotherapy, and I would not have been able to claim PIP). The assessments for each benefit are different.
(I told you it was complicated).
So, government are looking at the bill for paying all these benefits and they've decided it's too high, and that one way to reduce it is to get more people with disabilities back into work. But their approach is incoherent.
The want to change the assessment for out of work disability benefits to be the tougher assessment used for PIP. This means that people with short term but significant sickness will be only be in UC if anything, and people with long term relapsing and remitting conditions are stuffed, and people with long term significant conditions that don't quite meet the high threshold are also stuffed. This is made worse by the fact that UC probably does not pay enough to live on.
But the assessment for PIP does not look at whether you can work or not, and so to use it to decide whether to pay sickness benefits makes no sense.
There is also a protection: if interacting with the DWP significantly increases suicide risk your requirements to interact with them are reduced. Government is proposing to remove that protection. (I don't understand how they think this will survive legal challenge, because the protection came about after a case went through the courts).
tldr it all sucks and this government is fucking awful.
Here is an archive link for those that encounter the paywall.
It is totally understandable why the UK government would like to reduce government spending. The UK spends a huge (roughly £327bn per year) amount on social protection, compared to a mere £4.5bn for university funding – something is clearly going very wrong here.
Long-term the best way to go around reducing this spending is to improve the (shockingly) poor health of the general population. We need (but probably will not) to tackle obesity, lack of exercise etc.
The main issue with those kinds of numbers are of how muddied they are with the social benefit classified as "Pension Credit." There are so many PC reciepents who simply do not need the cash going to them every week, but get it because it wasn't means tested. Pension Credit would give you a decent bit of cash weekly AND entitle you to full Housing Benefits & Council Tax benefits almost overnight (That's £1200ish per year, per household taken from councils via local taxation every year. Let alone the rental costs.)
I used to do Fraud Investigation for a Housing Benefits department and there were at least six millionaire-types who got PC 'because'. It was infurating to have to get these folks on something we knew was horseshit. Let alone the old buggers who'd suddenly declare their six rental properties and place in Spain that they didn't "realise we have to!" on the regular...
It then doesn't help that the overall cost of administrating and punishing huge sums of out of work folks adds to the costs. Costs that the Tories are constantly blaming on others, rather than actually reading research and pushing people into systems that make them borderline suicidal for being treated like kids... or don't claim at all (Which was the intention at all.)
The UK used to be a shining bastion that said "If you have a kid and you're struggling, don't worry... we'll help!" or "You've injured yourself and need a bit of support? Come here, we'll help!" or "You've lost your job? Don't fret it, here's some cash to keep you going!" Then those people got demonised as 'welfare queens', 'job shy' and 'grifters' by the Daily Mail and its ilk and now we've got a system that actively penalises you for DARING to be out of productive work.
Not to mention that many of these benefits don't help anyone at all. Punitive attitudes like "the bedroom tax" took huge sums of benefits off people who couldn't work anyway (kids / disability, etc...). And then you've got the change from 50% to 30% focus on LHA to ensure that only the very worst landlords ended up getting anything from Housing Benefits.
There's a system we used to have that helped people, it worked to ensure you got cash and it was a bit of a laugh to "be on the dole" sure. But you knew you'd get cash for clothing, food, rent and heating. Now we've got a system that just hates you for daring to not be productive, It's also one that actually costs even more due to the insane, vindictive and negligent DWP and it's JC+ middle management.
The Conservatives in the past 14 years have turned a nation that at least pretended to care, into one where spitting vitriol and repulisve remarks is considered good faith. I hate what this nation has become, the DWP is just the crux of the issue.
As I understand it, pension credit costs roughly 2.5 billion per year. I agree that these things could be better administrated but I do think that the state should aim to reduce welfare spending by decreasing inequality and trying to increase wages.
It's all the gubbins that comes with PC that causes so much cost. Not to mention SRP which just. Blows currently welfare spending out of the water... Again, because it isn't means tested.
Honestly, I don't mind welfare spending. The purpose of the state should be to support it's people. The problem is they've been supporting their people for 14 years and it's trashed every social safety net we as Joe Public had. I'm a high rate tax payer and I don't mind paying more to make sure they folks don't suffer unnecessarily if the worst happens.
But paying those taxes just to see it spaffed on administration costs or going to private entities who do the same job as public but for six times the amount? Not a chance.
How are they going to prevent accidents and diseases that cause long-term disabilities? Anxiety? Serious mental disorders?
Sure, not every problem can be solved this way, but the UK has a very unwell population so there's a lot of room to improve.
A small anecdote to highlight the inefficiency of disability payments: I was on them for a few months, and as part of it they will pay your rent. My rent was £50 per week (I just had a room in a shared house, so it was low). They said the minimum rent payment they were allowed to pay was £60.
Only £10 a week extra, but it’s things like this that cause costs to blow out. Absolutely absurd system.
there's also a lot of predatory charities, at least in my neck of the woods, offering supported accomodation. I was in a 'temporary shorthold accomodation' for 6 years (lol) where the rent was being picked up by the government under housing benefit @855/mo with an extra 87/mo in service charges. this was for a single cramped room in a house of 8 rooms. but because each room was its own "property" they were claiming that from every single tennant. it also meant that if you were to get into work, you would have to foot the entire bill yourself unless you limit yourself to 17 hours a week. as apposed to where i am currently where it is roughly 375/mo + counciltax and bills for a 1 bed, my own kitchen, living room, bathroom, AND A GARDEN all to my self. this last year has mostly been spent jumping between callcenters and retail jobs while i try to get onto an apprenticeship, but most importantly - unlearning all the ptsd behaviours i picked up living in a vertiable crackhouse
the charity was supposedly providing social services but that ammounted to essentially fortnightly visits to the property to check that nothing was destroyed, and monthly room checks (mostly to check for contraband) and even though the house was filled with CCTV in the common areas - they refused to use it to settle 'civil' disputes such as getting pushed down the stairs, having your food stolen from the kitchens, getting harrased by 'banned' guests that were smoking whatever smells like burning plastic in the laundry room.
they actively withheld doing my application to this 'homefinders scheme' and after years of making it seem like they had to be the ones to intiate the application, i finally managed to be an advocate for myself and talked to someone from the council who ACTUALLY helped me navigate and work on a path to leave the accomodation. im not sure what the status of the investigation is but i know that there were several GDPR violations, health and safety violations (for 3 years there wasnt a single fire safety test and we didnt have heat for 2 winters) as well as harmful advice (when i had finally secured a tennancy in a council house - they wanted to kick me out the day i signed the tennancy agreement even though it wouldnt come into effect until 3 weeks later, so i had to lie and say that i hadn't signed it yet, and even have a text message of them suggesting i rent a moving van and live in that for the timebeing as i would need to be out of the property the second i sign the new agreement)
I was essentially stuck in an adverse position where i would risk getting sanctioned if i wasnt looking for work, but i would be homeless within a month if i actually landed a job over 17 hours/week. and all because i was a troublefree tennant that they didnt want to let go (i would also take the bins out and clean the kitchen even though i took to using a toaster oven and microwave in my room to avoid getting assualted in the kitchen)
this is a bit of a venty ramble but it just pains me to think that this was a CHARITY acting like slumlords. but because it was supported accomodation - they were granted more than the max rent for housing benefit and would actively refuse to carry out their duties because and i quote "its not my job to spend the entire day going through cctv". and because the turnover for support workers was insanely high and they were spread thin managing an absurd amount of properties - i can only imagine the scale of it is much worse than this one property.
Jesus, that’s so awful. I’m sorry to hear you had to live there so long! The system is fucked (by Tory design) and getting worse (by Tory design). I hope you find yourself in a much better position over the next year