With all due respect to whoever has posted this as an example of Conservative benefits cruelty, it absolutely isn't about having your benefits cut because you can use a foodbank. If this ESA claimant used to rely on points for mobility to qualify - the photo is clearly an extract from an ESA85 form, completed by a Health Professional (their phrase, not mine) at a face-to-face assessment for this benefit - he would have forfeited those points regardless of where his 30 minute walk took him, be it to the shops, to church or even to his local Conservative Club. If you can reliably walk 200 metres or more, you cannot score points for ESA activity 1. If you are walking for 30 minutes, you are, in all probability, walking more than 200 metres. Therefore, no points; not under the 2011 descriptors, nor under the original 2008 New Labour set.
So, has justice been done here? Despite what I have written above, the odds are that it has not. I've seen enough ESA85s to know that they frequently contain fewer hard, objective facts than The Chronicles of Narnia.
The reference to walking to the foodbank was almost certainly drawn from the part of the assessment in which the Health Professional discusses the claimant's "typical day" with them. It's possible that the HP and their "customer" had an in-depth chat about this journey but, unless the claimant's mobility really is too good to matter for ESA, it's far more likely that the conversation went something like this...
HP: Where do you do your shopping?
C: I haven't been able to do any shopping for the last couple of weeks. I don't have enough money. I've been going to the foodbank.
HP: How do you get there?
C: I walk.
HP: How long does it take you?
[Meaning 'how long is the walk there']
C: About half an hour [Meaning 'it takes me half an hour to get there, wait for my three day food parcel and walk back']
It's also possible that the claimant did walk for 30 minutes, going out with his voucher on a 'good day' after perhaps being stranded at home unable to make the journey for a few not-so-good days. Or that the journey was made in stages, stopping to recover after a few tens of metres before gamely pressing on. It's unlikely that the conversation between him and the HP went into anything like sufficient depth to establish this. It almost never does.
Whatever the case, it's disingenuous to suggest he has been refused benefit for using a foodbank or that this is the fault of the present Government. What we've got here is a problem that's existed for over a decade: a crazy assessment system where a health worker with no prior knowledge of a sick or disabled person - and usually no special insight into their specific health conditions - carries out a cursory examination, asks a set of standard questions from a computer system which offers all-too-easy-to-select standard answers, makes some informal observations, overlays a layer of subjective unconscious prejudices and recommends points to the DWP Decision Maker on this deeply unsatisfactory basis.
Meanwhile the claimant makes rough guess answers to badly-phrased questions about their typical day - where they like to go, what they watch on TV - that they haven't expected to be asked and haven't actually thought about, as they thought this was a medical, not a first date. The resulting ESA85 is inevitably a travesty of the truth, yet almost always the key item of evidence on which the Decision Maker bases the award/fit for work decision, often in defiance of other sound medical evidence.
We now know too, thanks to a freedom of information request, that the DWP are under pressure of internal targets to uphold these decisions if challenged, forcing people to struggle and starve while they wait for a tribunal to hear their case, or abandon their ESA claim and instead try to navigate their way through JSA or Universal Credit, built-in delays, sanctions and all.
There is more than enough real hardship and cruelty here without spinning it. Shamefully, most of it pre-dates IDS and his successors.
