DWP - Disability Welfare Prospects
by Eugene Grant
The Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has taken the helm at his new Department. Amid the fallout from one of the worst financial crises in recent memory, it is, one might argue, hardly an enviable job.
Over the coming months, as the cuts start to bite, addressing disability poverty will be a key progressive test for the former Conservative leader. Already IDS has announced plans to reassess current incapacity benefit claimants – all 2.6 million of them – to determine their employability, with the aim of moving those ready to work onto other benefits. This is a bold move; IB is a prickly political issue. Some claimants are certain to have serious illnesses and disabilities. However, many other recipients will not be disabled: it is well known that during the 1980s large numbers of out-of-work benefit claimants were moved to IB in order to keep the unemployment count down.
But the real challenge here for IDS is tackling disability inequality in an age of austerity – ensuring the most disadvantaged are squeezed the least as the public purse-strings are pulled tight over the coming months. People with disabilities entered the downturn on very unequal footing in terms of employment, education, income and savings. Now, after one of the worst financial crises in recent memory, less than half of all disabled people are employed.
A good first step for IDS to demonstrate his progressive credentials would be to redistribute a large section of the revenue saved from ex-IB recipients who move into work towards active labour market programmes for the disabled. Britain’s record of spending on such schemes is poor and has remained almost static for twenty years. In 2006, Britain spent just 3.9 per cent of its total labour market programme budget on disabled people; Denmark spent 28 per cent. Indeed, adopting the Danish Flexjobs approach, in which the state subsidises part of the salary costs of a disabled employee, could be one programme well worth funding.
Speaking at the launch of his welfare reform programme, IDS made a personal commitment to equal opportunities and social justice. If he, Chris Grayling and the rest of the Tories are true to their word, they should think very hard about where – or rather, on who – the axe falls during the hard times ahead.
Robert
Of course like always you miss the real problems, when the person is seriously disabled lets say no legs, one arm, he goes along to get a job as a shelf stacker, how likely is he to get the jobs.
The fact is if I was an employer why would I want to employ a crippled retard, of spastic, and before you tell me I cannot use words like this, these are the words employers use to me when I go for a job, and I do not take affront to this because I know they are right.
I've spent ten years looking for work my disability paraplegia, the amount of applications I've written using a private form 806 up to now, replies four.
The door I've knocked on are dozens and dozens the interviews I've had three, I had employers tell me why the F@ck would he want to employ somebody like me.
Who are these great employers, tell me I'll go straight down and get a job now.
Andrew Preston
I wonder who is going to make the big profits from re-assessing 2.6 Million claimants, the private medical companies?
Or is it going to be directive policy, with little real medical assessment, but definite, declared or otherwise targets for how many people to remove from disability benefit?
Because to mind, 2.6 Million re-assessments would take an awful long time, unless of course, some people have the idea that elections give them the power to do just as they wish.
Exile
Unfortunately IB claimants, who in the main are in their 50s and 60s and have left the labour market due to illness, are unlikely to be first in the queue for whatever full time jobs exist.
How about making it easier for people to, as it were, enter the edge of the job market, through the tax credit system - extending it to part time workers, and giving discounts off NI for employers taking on ex-IB claimants.