I was far from surprised to read yesterday of evidence that an increasing number of retired people are failing to claim the benefits to which they are lawfully entitled.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2013/feb/21/pensioners-state-benefits-failing-to-claim
If true - and the survey is relatively small - this is sad news. Benefit underpayment is the unsung scandal of these tough times, while apparently endless column inches can be found for overpayment and fraud tales; more disturbingly, this suggests the current generation of pensioners are at least as conscious of a stigma attached to Social Security Benefits as the previous one.
Almost twenty years ago I started work for a Home Improvement Agency, a project assisting older and disabled people to arrange repairs and adaptations to their homes. Part of my role was to check benefit entitlement, and then to advise and assist with claims where appropriate. A successful claim for a qualifying benefit might lead to entitlement to free energy efficiency work, grants for minor repairs and reduced contributions to the costs of larger projects, so much more than extra weekly income was at stake. Despite this, I would often struggle to persuade clients that making a claim was the right thing to do. Even the elderly woman who couldn't afford to switch the heating elements of her electric fire on, but had the light on for the illusion of a warming glow, needed patiently reassuring that there was nothing shameful in claiming Council Tax Benefit and Attendance Allowance.
'Means-tested' was a phrase to be avoided at all costs, even if what you were advising them to claim was a means-tested benefit. But these were the children of people who, if they fell on hard times, might have had their homes inspected to ensure they hadn't frittered funds away on luxuries and trivialities, before some well-meaning but judgmental middle-class inspector awarded them emergency relief. Their own children, raised with the Welfare State and the promise of support from the cradle to the grave are now pensioners and should be able to stand clear of the shadow of the workhouse, but for some reason the reticence to claim lives on.
There appear to be several barriers. The complexity of the benefits system hinders many people identifying their entitlement, regardless of age, but I believe there's more to it with older people. It probably doesn't help that, according to the papers' own figures, 74% of Daily Mail and 76% of Daily Express readers are aged over 45, with the Express giving it's over 65s readership as 40% and the average age of its readers as 59. So in the run-up to and years of retirement, these poor misguided souls exist on a diet of shirkers and scroungers stories, often contrasting these 'undeserving' characters with 'our pensioners' stoically coping with hardship. Today, for example, the DM has a suitably shocking tale combining those twin evils of benefit claiming and animal cruelty while the DE continues to focus its self-righteous malice on a woman 'on benefits' with eleven children.
And day after day, you'll find the same. Our 'local rag' from the Mail's stable, has already run three stories about an alleged benefit fraudster before her case has even concluded, though doubtless it's pure coincidence that the woman in question is black, of non-UK nationality and has a potentially amusing surname for trolls to mock. Another story concerning a pensioner still delivering the aforementioned 'local rag' well into her eighties predictably attracts comments contrasting her to 'lazy workshy youngsters' - exactly what it was intended to do, I suggest.
For all their best efforts to combat these attitudes, organisations like Citizens Advice, Age UK, Disability Alliance and the Pensioners Convention are fighting an unequal battle against such a hostile press. Their reasoned voices will always be drowned out by tabloid hysteria from those same papers who will point the finger of blame at Social Workers, Civil Servants and Modern Society in general every time a 'poor but proud' older person dies from hypothermia, without asking if perhaps their 'independence good: benefits bad' message wasn't at least equally to blame.
Friday 22 February 2013
Wednesday 13 February 2013
Losing sleep
It doesn't take many minutes of web-surfing to discover that there are huge numbers of people feeling frightened and angry about one of the most notorious measures the present Government have introduced as part of their 'Welfare Reform' agenda, namely the so-called 'Bedroom Tax'.
Although that's a catchy expression, 'Bedroom Tax' is somewhat misleading as what we're actually talking about isn't a tax at all; the 'under-occupation penalty' is a reduction in Housing Benefit entitlement set to affect tenants in Social Housing from April.
The Government's justification for introducing the measure, which will reduce entitlement by 14% of eligible rent for one additional bedroom and 25% for two, is that firstly, it will control the spiralling cost of Housing Benefit and secondly, it will make better use of the limited supply of Social Housing available. Naturally, being a measure from the ConDems, it will do this by putting various poor and vulnerable families through months of uncertainty, additional financial hardship and misery - and in many cases throw them out of the homes they've occupied for decades -rather than tackling the root causes of either problem. They'll also be giving Housing Associations and Councils who still own and manage housing stock an almighty headache as they attempt to shuffle their tenants into small enough properties to avoid the 'Bedroom Tax' and when they fail (which they will, because most have 'too many' larger properties and 'too few' small ones) they'll have an even bigger headache dealing with rent arrears and the grim prospect of evicting the very people it was their mission to help and house.
And Local Authorities, who administer Housing Benefit, will end up looking the villain of the piece, whereas if the Government had waited to tie these changes in with the introduction of Universal Credit, the DWP would have carried the can and the buck would have stopped more sharply at No 10.
I'm not going to run through a long, detailed list of the type of people likely to suffer as a consequence as those with the most plaintive and, at least from a media perspective, 'deserving' stories are already finding their way into the press. But we're talking about disabled people needing rooms for special equipment or for carers to stay in during bad times, separated parents who aren't the principal carer for their children, families with grown up kids working away from home on short-term contracts, and more mundane situations, such as couples who want a bedroom each because one (or both) snores like a jumbo jet taking off. But you'll see plenty of similar cases in your local paper soon enough.
Before I go on, I'm going to take a brief moment to remind readers that, contrary to the impression given by Government ministers and the usual suspects in the press, Housing Benefit is paid to working people on low incomes and not just people out of work. Just in case you're still swallowing the shirkers/strivers rhetoric. I'm sure you're not. What I'm going to try to do is debunk the Government's argument about 'fairness' and parity with the private sector, and suggest some logical alternatives.
Firstly, the myth that this simply brings provision for Social Housing tenants into line with that for people in the private sector. The only thing the 'Bedroom Tax' has in common with the Local Housing Allowance scheme for private tenancies (introduced by Labour in 2008, but made tougher by the ConDems) is the calculation of how many 'bedrooms' a household requires. There, the similarity ends.
In the private sector, Housing Benefit is paid based on the 'Local Housing Allowance' (LHA) for a property of the size required by the claimant's family or household. This was, when the system was set up, the median price for rented accommodation in any given district, but has subsequently been moved down to reflect the cost of the lowest third of private rented housing, limiting the availability of affordable private rented housing to benefit claimants. Prior to the introduction of LHA, councils were still expected to cap Housing Benefit for private tenants to a level commensurate with the size of property a household required, and set the rent at a rate judged appropriate by a rent officer if it appeared excessive for the type. But it was never utterly inflexible as councils did have the discretion to allow higher payments in exceptional circumstances - for example where a larger property was needed due to disability.
So, private tenants claiming Housing Benefit have limited access to housing due to the level at which LHA is set and also a built-in 'under-occupancy' provision stating how many rooms they need. However, if they are fortunate enough to find a three-bedroomed house or flat for the same price as the LHA for a two-bedroom property in their area, they can receive Housing Benefit based on their full rent. It even used to be the case that if they could track down a property for less than the LHA for the size they required, private tenants could keep up to £15 per week of the difference; but that's gone now, of course, along with any idea that you might actually try to reward benefit claimants for making canny financial decisions. Though to be fair, there was always the risk that what this would actually do was lure poor families into cheap but substandard accommodation, or encourage landlords to set their rents at LHA levels where previously they had been below.
So it's a tough regime for private tenants - especially when you add reduced security of tenure into the mix - and many must look enviously at their peers in Social Housing, especially if they have been shuffling from one shorthold tenancy to the next waiting in vain for a Council or Housing Association allocation to come their way. If you're that family, it's going to look very unfair to you that a couple whose adult children have left home is now living in a three-bedroom Council House all on their own. And maybe it is, but being equally unpleasant to another family is hardly 'fairness' and anyway, the root cause of this 'unfairness' isn't the couple in the Council House, it's the fact that when the people next door to them bought theirs, they got it at a knock-down price and even then the Council couldn't use the proceeds to build a replacement.
Social landlords are not reckless and wasteful with their housing and they have always tried to fit the house to the tenant as best they can. As a Housing Officer in the 1990s I was regularly involved in arranging all-expenses paid moves for willing pensioners from big family houses into retirement bungalows, for example. Much under-occupied housing could be freed up if there was more good-quality, secure, affordable accommodation close to their existing support network for older people though interestingly, doubtless mindful of the bad press persecuting pensioners would get, not to mention the power of the 'grey' vote, pensioners are completely exempt from these 'Bedroom Tax' proposals.
Most tenants don't want a property that's too big for their needs either. It costs more to heat and furnish than something 'just right'. And while there will be squeals of disapproval from some that 'The Public Purse' is paying for the spare bedrooms needed to house children staying with a separated parent, better that perhaps than pick up the less visible but probably higher costs of estrangement and anxiety that are the alternative.
Arguably, then, the problem of excessive Housing Benefit cost solves itself if you allow - indeed fund and encourage - Social Landlords to build the range of housing the communities they serve require, and to buy and renovate existing properties, enabling those who want to to 'downsize' (possibly even providing positive incentives for them to do so, such as assistance with removals and setting up their new utility accounts) and others from the over-priced private sector housing to move into better-value, more secure tenancies. The last time I looked, there were no shortage of contractors willing and able to do this work looking for projects, and tradespeople 'signing on' who could be working, earning and incidently, not claiming Housing Benefit.
Or you could be really radical and introduce rent control back into the private rented sector. Because what you won't get ministers telling you is that a substantial chunk of this 'out-of-control' welfare bill isn't going to the 'shirkers' and 'scroungers', it's actually lining the pockets of landlords and, where the shortage of accommodation is most acute, those pockets are likely to be on some very expensive items of clothing.
Instead, when you confront a minister with the hardship this is going to cause, you get the suggestion that tenants might manage the extra expense - and alleviate the housing crisis - by taking in lodgers. In some cases, that might indeed be a practical proposition, but in plenty of others it's quite impractical (eg. where rooms are needed for visiting carers or children), fraught with complications for benefit entitlement and an outright danger to some vulnerable households. One of the local Councils in this district ran a high profile anti benefit-fraud campaign only last autumn encouraging neighbours to report people they believed were co-habiting - and I'll look at how fine the line can be between sharing a home and 'living together' in a future blog - so that's almost certainly not a sensible tactic if you're single (note that you can be 'living together' in a same-sex relationship).
And if you've read the book which inspired the title of this blog, you'll probably remember what happened to the Eastons when they decided to try and balance their budget by taking in a lodger, who seemed thoroughly decent and respectable, at first...
(SPOILER ALERT - it didn't end well.)
And if you haven't read 'The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressell, it's probably time you did!
Although that's a catchy expression, 'Bedroom Tax' is somewhat misleading as what we're actually talking about isn't a tax at all; the 'under-occupation penalty' is a reduction in Housing Benefit entitlement set to affect tenants in Social Housing from April.
The Government's justification for introducing the measure, which will reduce entitlement by 14% of eligible rent for one additional bedroom and 25% for two, is that firstly, it will control the spiralling cost of Housing Benefit and secondly, it will make better use of the limited supply of Social Housing available. Naturally, being a measure from the ConDems, it will do this by putting various poor and vulnerable families through months of uncertainty, additional financial hardship and misery - and in many cases throw them out of the homes they've occupied for decades -rather than tackling the root causes of either problem. They'll also be giving Housing Associations and Councils who still own and manage housing stock an almighty headache as they attempt to shuffle their tenants into small enough properties to avoid the 'Bedroom Tax' and when they fail (which they will, because most have 'too many' larger properties and 'too few' small ones) they'll have an even bigger headache dealing with rent arrears and the grim prospect of evicting the very people it was their mission to help and house.
And Local Authorities, who administer Housing Benefit, will end up looking the villain of the piece, whereas if the Government had waited to tie these changes in with the introduction of Universal Credit, the DWP would have carried the can and the buck would have stopped more sharply at No 10.
I'm not going to run through a long, detailed list of the type of people likely to suffer as a consequence as those with the most plaintive and, at least from a media perspective, 'deserving' stories are already finding their way into the press. But we're talking about disabled people needing rooms for special equipment or for carers to stay in during bad times, separated parents who aren't the principal carer for their children, families with grown up kids working away from home on short-term contracts, and more mundane situations, such as couples who want a bedroom each because one (or both) snores like a jumbo jet taking off. But you'll see plenty of similar cases in your local paper soon enough.
Before I go on, I'm going to take a brief moment to remind readers that, contrary to the impression given by Government ministers and the usual suspects in the press, Housing Benefit is paid to working people on low incomes and not just people out of work. Just in case you're still swallowing the shirkers/strivers rhetoric. I'm sure you're not. What I'm going to try to do is debunk the Government's argument about 'fairness' and parity with the private sector, and suggest some logical alternatives.
Firstly, the myth that this simply brings provision for Social Housing tenants into line with that for people in the private sector. The only thing the 'Bedroom Tax' has in common with the Local Housing Allowance scheme for private tenancies (introduced by Labour in 2008, but made tougher by the ConDems) is the calculation of how many 'bedrooms' a household requires. There, the similarity ends.
In the private sector, Housing Benefit is paid based on the 'Local Housing Allowance' (LHA) for a property of the size required by the claimant's family or household. This was, when the system was set up, the median price for rented accommodation in any given district, but has subsequently been moved down to reflect the cost of the lowest third of private rented housing, limiting the availability of affordable private rented housing to benefit claimants. Prior to the introduction of LHA, councils were still expected to cap Housing Benefit for private tenants to a level commensurate with the size of property a household required, and set the rent at a rate judged appropriate by a rent officer if it appeared excessive for the type. But it was never utterly inflexible as councils did have the discretion to allow higher payments in exceptional circumstances - for example where a larger property was needed due to disability.
So, private tenants claiming Housing Benefit have limited access to housing due to the level at which LHA is set and also a built-in 'under-occupancy' provision stating how many rooms they need. However, if they are fortunate enough to find a three-bedroomed house or flat for the same price as the LHA for a two-bedroom property in their area, they can receive Housing Benefit based on their full rent. It even used to be the case that if they could track down a property for less than the LHA for the size they required, private tenants could keep up to £15 per week of the difference; but that's gone now, of course, along with any idea that you might actually try to reward benefit claimants for making canny financial decisions. Though to be fair, there was always the risk that what this would actually do was lure poor families into cheap but substandard accommodation, or encourage landlords to set their rents at LHA levels where previously they had been below.
So it's a tough regime for private tenants - especially when you add reduced security of tenure into the mix - and many must look enviously at their peers in Social Housing, especially if they have been shuffling from one shorthold tenancy to the next waiting in vain for a Council or Housing Association allocation to come their way. If you're that family, it's going to look very unfair to you that a couple whose adult children have left home is now living in a three-bedroom Council House all on their own. And maybe it is, but being equally unpleasant to another family is hardly 'fairness' and anyway, the root cause of this 'unfairness' isn't the couple in the Council House, it's the fact that when the people next door to them bought theirs, they got it at a knock-down price and even then the Council couldn't use the proceeds to build a replacement.
Social landlords are not reckless and wasteful with their housing and they have always tried to fit the house to the tenant as best they can. As a Housing Officer in the 1990s I was regularly involved in arranging all-expenses paid moves for willing pensioners from big family houses into retirement bungalows, for example. Much under-occupied housing could be freed up if there was more good-quality, secure, affordable accommodation close to their existing support network for older people though interestingly, doubtless mindful of the bad press persecuting pensioners would get, not to mention the power of the 'grey' vote, pensioners are completely exempt from these 'Bedroom Tax' proposals.
Most tenants don't want a property that's too big for their needs either. It costs more to heat and furnish than something 'just right'. And while there will be squeals of disapproval from some that 'The Public Purse' is paying for the spare bedrooms needed to house children staying with a separated parent, better that perhaps than pick up the less visible but probably higher costs of estrangement and anxiety that are the alternative.
Arguably, then, the problem of excessive Housing Benefit cost solves itself if you allow - indeed fund and encourage - Social Landlords to build the range of housing the communities they serve require, and to buy and renovate existing properties, enabling those who want to to 'downsize' (possibly even providing positive incentives for them to do so, such as assistance with removals and setting up their new utility accounts) and others from the over-priced private sector housing to move into better-value, more secure tenancies. The last time I looked, there were no shortage of contractors willing and able to do this work looking for projects, and tradespeople 'signing on' who could be working, earning and incidently, not claiming Housing Benefit.
Or you could be really radical and introduce rent control back into the private rented sector. Because what you won't get ministers telling you is that a substantial chunk of this 'out-of-control' welfare bill isn't going to the 'shirkers' and 'scroungers', it's actually lining the pockets of landlords and, where the shortage of accommodation is most acute, those pockets are likely to be on some very expensive items of clothing.
Instead, when you confront a minister with the hardship this is going to cause, you get the suggestion that tenants might manage the extra expense - and alleviate the housing crisis - by taking in lodgers. In some cases, that might indeed be a practical proposition, but in plenty of others it's quite impractical (eg. where rooms are needed for visiting carers or children), fraught with complications for benefit entitlement and an outright danger to some vulnerable households. One of the local Councils in this district ran a high profile anti benefit-fraud campaign only last autumn encouraging neighbours to report people they believed were co-habiting - and I'll look at how fine the line can be between sharing a home and 'living together' in a future blog - so that's almost certainly not a sensible tactic if you're single (note that you can be 'living together' in a same-sex relationship).
And if you've read the book which inspired the title of this blog, you'll probably remember what happened to the Eastons when they decided to try and balance their budget by taking in a lodger, who seemed thoroughly decent and respectable, at first...
(SPOILER ALERT - it didn't end well.)
And if you haven't read 'The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressell, it's probably time you did!
Tuesday 12 February 2013
Nothing to lose but our chains...?
I had planned to write a blog on the 'bedroom tax' today, but events have overtaken me with the staggeringly good news that Cait Reilly, the geology graduate who challenged a decision that required her to leave her voluntary work at a museum and work unpaid at a Poundland store, or lose her Jobseeker's Allowance, has won her case in the Court of Appeal.
So much was wrong about this. For Miss Reilly, what she was doing voluntarily was self-evidently making her more potentially employable in her field of expertise than stacking shelves and cleaning floors at Poundland. The 'taxpayer' paid Miss Reilly her JSA - so she worked 30 hours for what would have been the legal minimum wage for little more than ten - and Poundland got a 'slave' at the State's expense, arguably giving them unfair commercial advantage over companies not involved in the scheme.
And somewhere out there was a worker who would have been quite happy to work in Poundland - albeit for a fair, living wage - but instead was on JSA and depending on their family circumstances possibly also Housing, Council Tax Benefit and Child Tax Credit, instead of working, paying tax, buying more than the absolute bare essentials and contributing to the economy.
So you've got to hand it to the Court of Appeal - this really is a fantastic judgment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21426928
It always frightens me when I hear ordinary working people stating that claimants should have to work for their 'dole money', seemingly oblivious to the risk their own job might come under were that to be the case. Hopefully, this shuts down the nasty, grasping schemes run by the A4es of this world and forces the present Government, and future ones of all political shades, to look at genuine job training and job creation.
As Cait Reilly herself put it: "I agree we need to get people back to work but the best way of doing that is by helping them, not punishing them."
So much was wrong about this. For Miss Reilly, what she was doing voluntarily was self-evidently making her more potentially employable in her field of expertise than stacking shelves and cleaning floors at Poundland. The 'taxpayer' paid Miss Reilly her JSA - so she worked 30 hours for what would have been the legal minimum wage for little more than ten - and Poundland got a 'slave' at the State's expense, arguably giving them unfair commercial advantage over companies not involved in the scheme.
And somewhere out there was a worker who would have been quite happy to work in Poundland - albeit for a fair, living wage - but instead was on JSA and depending on their family circumstances possibly also Housing, Council Tax Benefit and Child Tax Credit, instead of working, paying tax, buying more than the absolute bare essentials and contributing to the economy.
So you've got to hand it to the Court of Appeal - this really is a fantastic judgment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21426928
It always frightens me when I hear ordinary working people stating that claimants should have to work for their 'dole money', seemingly oblivious to the risk their own job might come under were that to be the case. Hopefully, this shuts down the nasty, grasping schemes run by the A4es of this world and forces the present Government, and future ones of all political shades, to look at genuine job training and job creation.
As Cait Reilly herself put it: "I agree we need to get people back to work but the best way of doing that is by helping them, not punishing them."
Thursday 7 February 2013
Scapegoats
There has been an amusing Facebook post doing the rounds of my friends' pages concerning the recent confirmation that the skeleton found under the car park at Leicester Social Services is indeed most likely that of King Richard III. The joke being that, despite his deformed spine, numerous battle wounds and being dead for more than five hundred years, Atos would still find him 'fit for work' if he were sent to them for a medical. Indeed, I see the Prime Minister was mocked in Parliament with the same witty suggestion only yesterday.
I'm not at all sorry to see Atos finally being subjected to both gallows humour and serious journalistic scrutiny, but Atos are merely a symptom and not the disease. It would be extremely easy for this Government - or the next - to gain a quick fix of good press by unceremoniously terminating their contract at the next unsatisfactory audit of their performance. There would be a collective sigh of relief from many quarters were this to happen, but it would be of only limited benefit - no pun intended - to sick and disabled people.
The grim truth is that the problem with Employment and Support Allowance isn't Atos, it's the Work Capability Assessment for which they are employed to provide evidence. Sure, Atos often do a lamentably poor job of assessing the unfortunate claimants sent to them; in my work as a welfare rights adviser I saw some excruciatingly bad decisions often based on such stupidity as, for example, having a Registered Physiotherapist assigned the task of assessing someone with profound mental health problems. On other occasions, what proported to be a clinical judgment was very clearly influenced by negative value judgments about the claimant, especially where addiction played a part in his or her ill health. There were (and still are) errors, contradictions and outright lies in too many Atos-produced reports. And people have paid the price for this with their lives.
But while eliminating incompetence and unfairly subjective assessments would certainly save a great many seriously ill people the distress and anxiety of losing benefit and/or facing an appeal, and the 'taxpayer' the unnecessary costs of those appeals, it wouldn't leave us with a fair or logical system. The real flaws are within the ESA descriptors and, as with DLA, the sharp edges between entitlement and ineligibility, and between the two 'groups' into which ESA recipients are divided.
Admittedly, ESA does allow some room for the exercise of common sense by retaining an exceptional circumstances clause, allowing a claimant to be deemed unfit for work and unfit for work-related activity if necessary to prevent a serious risk to his or her physical or mental health, or to the physical or mental health of another person. Despite this, ESA remains a blunt instrument. Score 15 or more 'points' and you have 'limited capability for work' and entitlement to ESA. Score fewer and you are 'signing on' for Jobseekers Allowance, potentially even if you have completely lost the use of one arm and hand, or have no vision at all (but can get around familiar places with a guide-dog or cane) or even 'cannot learn anything beyond a simple task, such as setting an alarm clock'. While it would be unreasonable to argue that people with these disabilities are automatically unfit for any work, clearly the very term that describes their prospects is 'limited capability for work' - but in ESA law they have no such thing as these limitations each score a meagre 9 points.
A similar sharp edge divides the 'Work-related Activity Group', who receive a lower rate of benefit and are required to carry out 'work-related activity' as a condition of entitlement, from the more severely disabled and higher paid 'Support Group'. In ESA alone, the difference between the two components is up to £20 per week, but there can be other advantages - for example, in Stoke-on-Trent people in the 'Support Group' will potentially eligible for 100% Council Tax Support, while those in the 'Work-related Activity Group' will generally receive no more than 70%. The intention is to protect the most severely disabled, but the consequence is to put a greater financial burden on those with the lower income.
And the difference between the two groups, rather as with the components of DLA, can be miniscule. A claimant unable to lift a 0.5 litre carton of liquid goes into the Support Group. Someone who can, but couldn't manage to lift something fractionally heavier, does not. It's the Support Group if you have, on a daily basis, uncontrollable episodes of aggressive or disinhibited behaviour that would be unreasonable in any workplace, but although 'frequent' episodes of the same will also score 15 points, that puts you into the Work-related Activity Group. 'Occasional' episodes score 9 points and, unless supplemented by other point-scoring issues, will see you off to the Jobcentre to 'sign on'.
Is there a better way to support sick and disabled people? Prior to the introduction of the points-based predecessor of ESA, Incapacity Benefit, Invalidity Benefit treated each claimant as an individual and asked a simple question - what job is there within a reasonable daily journey, that this person could do? To answer it required a full appraisal of the claimant's capabilities so it was possible to differentiate between people with the same disabilities but different work experience and intellectual ability, and at different points in their working life. A points-based system that doesn't consider these issues effectively discriminates against older, unskilled workers by failing to recognise that even a relatively minor physical disability might make them unemployable. It also underplays the impact of variable conditions on employability.
The failing of the Invalidity Benefit principle was that there had to be a job the claimant could do, but not a vacancy for it. In my former home town, the job often cited as appropriate was 'lift attendant' while the one old-fashioned department store with a staffed lift remained, on the basis that the person so employed could readily move between sitting and standing, so could ease backpain, and needed only minimal upper limb strength to push buttons. The odds of there ever being an actual vacancy for the post were vanishingly small, but so long as the job existed, anyone fit to do it was theoretically fit for work.
So might the answer be a sliding-scale system, involving a Decision Maker with sound knowledge of local employment conditions making an assessment of the proportion of jobs in their area within the capacity of any given claimant, based on a full assessment of the claimant's health, skills, experience, education and re-training potential, and an 'employment disadvantage' percentage payment added to a new earnings-replacement benefit that would replace both ESA and JSA? And with similarly adjustable requirements to seek or prepare for work, based on the claimant's actually ability to cope with them and the probability of there being a job for them?
It would be tricky to assess, certainly, but arguably fairer than the present arrangements, and if you coupled it with access to good training, sound advice and compassionate support from properly skilled Jobcentre staff, it could do what ESA clearly fails to - namely, support people with limited capability for work into appropriate jobs, where those jobs actually exist, and provide an income applicable to the claimant's need where they do not.
I'm not at all sorry to see Atos finally being subjected to both gallows humour and serious journalistic scrutiny, but Atos are merely a symptom and not the disease. It would be extremely easy for this Government - or the next - to gain a quick fix of good press by unceremoniously terminating their contract at the next unsatisfactory audit of their performance. There would be a collective sigh of relief from many quarters were this to happen, but it would be of only limited benefit - no pun intended - to sick and disabled people.
The grim truth is that the problem with Employment and Support Allowance isn't Atos, it's the Work Capability Assessment for which they are employed to provide evidence. Sure, Atos often do a lamentably poor job of assessing the unfortunate claimants sent to them; in my work as a welfare rights adviser I saw some excruciatingly bad decisions often based on such stupidity as, for example, having a Registered Physiotherapist assigned the task of assessing someone with profound mental health problems. On other occasions, what proported to be a clinical judgment was very clearly influenced by negative value judgments about the claimant, especially where addiction played a part in his or her ill health. There were (and still are) errors, contradictions and outright lies in too many Atos-produced reports. And people have paid the price for this with their lives.
But while eliminating incompetence and unfairly subjective assessments would certainly save a great many seriously ill people the distress and anxiety of losing benefit and/or facing an appeal, and the 'taxpayer' the unnecessary costs of those appeals, it wouldn't leave us with a fair or logical system. The real flaws are within the ESA descriptors and, as with DLA, the sharp edges between entitlement and ineligibility, and between the two 'groups' into which ESA recipients are divided.
Admittedly, ESA does allow some room for the exercise of common sense by retaining an exceptional circumstances clause, allowing a claimant to be deemed unfit for work and unfit for work-related activity if necessary to prevent a serious risk to his or her physical or mental health, or to the physical or mental health of another person. Despite this, ESA remains a blunt instrument. Score 15 or more 'points' and you have 'limited capability for work' and entitlement to ESA. Score fewer and you are 'signing on' for Jobseekers Allowance, potentially even if you have completely lost the use of one arm and hand, or have no vision at all (but can get around familiar places with a guide-dog or cane) or even 'cannot learn anything beyond a simple task, such as setting an alarm clock'. While it would be unreasonable to argue that people with these disabilities are automatically unfit for any work, clearly the very term that describes their prospects is 'limited capability for work' - but in ESA law they have no such thing as these limitations each score a meagre 9 points.
A similar sharp edge divides the 'Work-related Activity Group', who receive a lower rate of benefit and are required to carry out 'work-related activity' as a condition of entitlement, from the more severely disabled and higher paid 'Support Group'. In ESA alone, the difference between the two components is up to £20 per week, but there can be other advantages - for example, in Stoke-on-Trent people in the 'Support Group' will potentially eligible for 100% Council Tax Support, while those in the 'Work-related Activity Group' will generally receive no more than 70%. The intention is to protect the most severely disabled, but the consequence is to put a greater financial burden on those with the lower income.
And the difference between the two groups, rather as with the components of DLA, can be miniscule. A claimant unable to lift a 0.5 litre carton of liquid goes into the Support Group. Someone who can, but couldn't manage to lift something fractionally heavier, does not. It's the Support Group if you have, on a daily basis, uncontrollable episodes of aggressive or disinhibited behaviour that would be unreasonable in any workplace, but although 'frequent' episodes of the same will also score 15 points, that puts you into the Work-related Activity Group. 'Occasional' episodes score 9 points and, unless supplemented by other point-scoring issues, will see you off to the Jobcentre to 'sign on'.
Is there a better way to support sick and disabled people? Prior to the introduction of the points-based predecessor of ESA, Incapacity Benefit, Invalidity Benefit treated each claimant as an individual and asked a simple question - what job is there within a reasonable daily journey, that this person could do? To answer it required a full appraisal of the claimant's capabilities so it was possible to differentiate between people with the same disabilities but different work experience and intellectual ability, and at different points in their working life. A points-based system that doesn't consider these issues effectively discriminates against older, unskilled workers by failing to recognise that even a relatively minor physical disability might make them unemployable. It also underplays the impact of variable conditions on employability.
The failing of the Invalidity Benefit principle was that there had to be a job the claimant could do, but not a vacancy for it. In my former home town, the job often cited as appropriate was 'lift attendant' while the one old-fashioned department store with a staffed lift remained, on the basis that the person so employed could readily move between sitting and standing, so could ease backpain, and needed only minimal upper limb strength to push buttons. The odds of there ever being an actual vacancy for the post were vanishingly small, but so long as the job existed, anyone fit to do it was theoretically fit for work.
So might the answer be a sliding-scale system, involving a Decision Maker with sound knowledge of local employment conditions making an assessment of the proportion of jobs in their area within the capacity of any given claimant, based on a full assessment of the claimant's health, skills, experience, education and re-training potential, and an 'employment disadvantage' percentage payment added to a new earnings-replacement benefit that would replace both ESA and JSA? And with similarly adjustable requirements to seek or prepare for work, based on the claimant's actually ability to cope with them and the probability of there being a job for them?
It would be tricky to assess, certainly, but arguably fairer than the present arrangements, and if you coupled it with access to good training, sound advice and compassionate support from properly skilled Jobcentre staff, it could do what ESA clearly fails to - namely, support people with limited capability for work into appropriate jobs, where those jobs actually exist, and provide an income applicable to the claimant's need where they do not.
Friday 1 February 2013
Fraud and Error
It seems virtually impossible for a politician of any persuasion to mention 'Welfare' these days without, in the same breath, making some reference to 'fraud'. This drip, drip approach has had much the same impact on public attitudes to benefit claimants as the word association game played by the right wing press did with 'asylum-seeker' and 'bogus' - eventually, they could dispense with the 'bogus' because 'asylum-seeker' had become a toxic phrase on its own. We're a long way down that road already with 'Welfare' with a frighteningly high number of people perceiving it as a 'bad thing'.
So, how common is benefit fraud? When politicians throw a figure with lots of zeros on the end at us, it's almost invariably the sum for 'fraud and error'. Note the order they always say those words - 'fraud and error'. You hear 'fraud' first, you're thinking 'fraud' when the big scary number gets quoted. But the truth of the matter is that the bigger proportion - actually two-thirds of the total - is 'error' and that a good proportion of that - approximately a third - is official error, not than claimant error.
For 2011/12 across all benefits, the official Government figure was £3.4 billion overpaid due to 'fraud and error', or 2.1% of total benefit expenditure. Offset against this is £1.3 billion of underpayments, 0.8% of total expenditure. £840m of overpaid benefit was recovered by the DWP or Councils in that year.
So, for each £100 spent on benefits, approximately 70p is therefore overpaid due to fraud. We don't have a detailed breakdown for what that fraud looks like. In the media, it looks like a bloke who said he couldn't walk running a marathon or a woman who said she was a single parent when she had a boyfriend living with her. In reality, I suspect the really big bucks are being lost to landlords putting in fraudulent claims from phatom tenants in areas where rents are expensive, and other organised crime. We certainly know from the official stats that the proportion of fraud in Disability Living Allowance claims is actually lower than the average across benefits as a whole at 0.5%.
I'll come back to this issue in a future post, as there are also matters about the way allegations of benefit fraud are dealt with by the Courts, but I'll leave this one with this thought. The key difference between 'fraud' and 'error' is intent; if the intention is to deceive, then the action is fraud. We have a Government intent on persuading us all that abuse of the Social Security system is a much greater problem than it is in reality, and they are doing so by using figures they know are three times higher than those for dishonest claims alone.
So who exactly is guilty of fraud?
So, how common is benefit fraud? When politicians throw a figure with lots of zeros on the end at us, it's almost invariably the sum for 'fraud and error'. Note the order they always say those words - 'fraud and error'. You hear 'fraud' first, you're thinking 'fraud' when the big scary number gets quoted. But the truth of the matter is that the bigger proportion - actually two-thirds of the total - is 'error' and that a good proportion of that - approximately a third - is official error, not than claimant error.
For 2011/12 across all benefits, the official Government figure was £3.4 billion overpaid due to 'fraud and error', or 2.1% of total benefit expenditure. Offset against this is £1.3 billion of underpayments, 0.8% of total expenditure. £840m of overpaid benefit was recovered by the DWP or Councils in that year.
So, for each £100 spent on benefits, approximately 70p is therefore overpaid due to fraud. We don't have a detailed breakdown for what that fraud looks like. In the media, it looks like a bloke who said he couldn't walk running a marathon or a woman who said she was a single parent when she had a boyfriend living with her. In reality, I suspect the really big bucks are being lost to landlords putting in fraudulent claims from phatom tenants in areas where rents are expensive, and other organised crime. We certainly know from the official stats that the proportion of fraud in Disability Living Allowance claims is actually lower than the average across benefits as a whole at 0.5%.
I'll come back to this issue in a future post, as there are also matters about the way allegations of benefit fraud are dealt with by the Courts, but I'll leave this one with this thought. The key difference between 'fraud' and 'error' is intent; if the intention is to deceive, then the action is fraud. We have a Government intent on persuading us all that abuse of the Social Security system is a much greater problem than it is in reality, and they are doing so by using figures they know are three times higher than those for dishonest claims alone.
So who exactly is guilty of fraud?
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