Sue Marsh reports on the Mail and Telegraph misreporting of disability benefits.
Sue Marsh blogs at Diary of a Benefit Scrounger
Oh how very depressing days like today are if you’re sick or disabled. Disability campaigners spend months trying to build up awareness of sickness (ESA) and Disability (DLA) benefits, only to have their work totally undone in just a few minutes by a government intent on twisting the facts to suit their agenda and a media who don’t even know the difference between the two benefits.
“Two million claimants on disability living allowance face being stripped of payments”, shouts the Telegraph, whilst listing a range of at best dubious claims from the Department for Work and Pensions.
The most persistent of these claims is that claimants are simply given DLA by the wheelchair-fairy based on no evidence and are never checked again.
This is nonsense. Claimants must fill in a 40-page form accompanied by evidence from consultants and health professionals. Their claims are reassessed regularly, usually every three years unless an indefinite award has been granted.
The Mail go further, claiming:
• Up to 500,000 are ready to start work immediately;
• People on lifetime benefit are more likely to retire or die than get a job;
• 38 per cent just need the right support to get back to work.
Sadly, the Daily Mail actually have the wrong benefit.
Letters aren’t, as they claim, being sent out today to people claiming DLA asking them to submit reassessments. Letters however are being sent to those claiming Incapacity Benefit summoning them to assessments for the migration to Employment Support Allowance (ESA).
In a staggering bit of misreporting, the Mail also claims:
“Out of the 1,626 people assessed in Burnley and Aberdeen a third of those questioned were taken off the DLA and instead put onto Jobseeker’s Allowance.”
No, that would be Incapacity Benefit too.
Of the 500,000 “ready to start work immediately”, the Mail forgets to point out that assessments have been called “unfit for purpose” by every main investigation into them, including the Citizens Advice Bureau and the government’s own advisory committee. whilst 40% of these “miracle cures” are being overturned at tribunals, costing the taxpayer £19.8 million.
Most people awarded DLA for life have severe, degenerative conditions that will never improve such as cerebral palsy, severe learning disabilities, total paralysis or kidney failure. The government seems unduly shocked that people with lifelong disabilities should receive awards for life.
Surely constant reassessment of those people whose conditions will never improve is the single most ridiculous waste of taxpayers’ money since someone decided MPs ought to get expenses on top of their already generous salaries?
Coalition plans to reform ESA and DLA are flawed and many of us spend our lives trying to inform people and fight for modifications to the welfare reform bill that could end up saving great distress.
This level of reporting is not only lazy, but it could be dangerous. Sadly, all the while the DWP are happy to twist the figures themselves; I can’t imagine things will improve.
121 Responses to “Right wing press need to check facts before screaming at disabled”
Anon E Mouse
gwenhwyfaer – I live about 25 miles from a valley’s town in South Wales called Merthyr Tydfil and my missus works in the area for Social Services.
She has service users who are fit to work but choose not to and claim stress – whatever. Despite numerous attempts to get them to go to interviews (and they are poor monetarily) they are simply too afraid to take the step and run to their GP’s for more anti depressants.
My business partner’s neighbours are now third generation workless in the family and he’s 53 years old.
From personal experience of a neighbour getting building work done on his house for cash three of the workers had been on IB since the mines closed in the 1980’s.
All I am trying to say is that I bet a lot of people know someone on benefits that shouldn’t be and that smears genuine claimants who should.
If people honestly need benefits of any type for any reason they should get them but to not check people’s eligibility is reckless…
gwenhwyfaer
I don’t support anyone obtaining anything by deception. But I’d rather see a hundred guilty men go free than one innocent wrongly convicted. That, as I understand it, is the principle of a just society.
As it is, the stats are rather more to the contrary – benefit fraud is somewhere around the 1% level, and we long since passed the point of diminishing returns. Indeed, almost the only people who will benefit from the ESA regime are those people claiming fraudulently. It’s the rest of us who are up the proverbial creek without a paddle. Or the use of our arms.
As for the necessity of this – there wasn’t any. I claimed IB in April 2008. When I claimed, I had to face the toughest ever PCA; and I was entering a regime of conditionality not unlike the ESA’s WRA grouping – except that they evidently had the discretion to silently drop me back into conditions equivalent to those of the Support Group if it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get any better. I say evidently, because that seems to be what has happened to me. Otherwise I’d have been reassessed twice so far already. And even that regime was rather too harsh; there was simply no reason to change it. The regime to which I was admitted could easily have been extended up towards longer claims over time. This mass rollout – which, as far as I can tell, is only achieving the inducement of a mass state of panic in one and a half million of the country’s most vulnerable citizens that could last up to three years – is both unnecessary and unjustifiable.
gwenhwyfaer
So you’re quite confident speaking about, and judging, people with whom your wife deals – presumably under condition of confidentiality – yet you won’t do basic research on what the rest of us are talking about?
Go away and stop trolling, before we make a concerted effort to discover your identity and report your wife for gross professional misconduct.
Mary Hallam
RT @FalseEcon: RT @leftfootfwd: Right wing press need to check facts before screaming at disabled: http://bit.ly/ehtIkb says @suey2y
Jason
RT @leftfootfwd: Right wing press need to check facts before screaming at disabled: http://bit.ly/ehtIkb says @suey2y