New benefits will be poorly targeted
When the new government came to power, Cameron warned of life changing cuts and reforms. Most of us, used to politician's hyperbole, translated that as things being a bit tight for a few months.
But then came the Emergency Budget, the Spending Review, and a trickle became a flood, with implementation strategies, consultation documents and white papers being issued faster than people could read them. Not to mention the Localism and Welfare Reform Bills. It's hard to keep up. Some in the disability and older people's lobbies (who have, at last count, six consultations to respond to by January) are talking about a cynical 'both barrels' strategy on the part of the Government. This involves overwhelming people with several new proposals all at once – at Christmas time, no less – giving them little time to respond, in the hope detail might get overlooked and things will pass unchallenged into legislation.
The government’s radical reforms to Disability Living Allowance won’t get an easy ride though. The DLA is a payment designed to compensate disabled people for the extra costs of living with a disability.
The Government is completely changing the DLA, and it will soon be known as the Personal Independence Payment (PIP). Apart from a snappier name, there isn’t much to celebrate. The PIP won’t be paid to those in residential homes or schools – so for example parents who currently use DLA payments to maintain an adapted car to take their children home, or to hospital appointments, will have this support cut off. The Government has literally confined those in residential care to barracks.
Perhaps the most worrying thing of all, however, is the proposed new ‘objective assessment’ for eligibility of PIP. It will assess the impact of a person’s condition or impairment as a way of calculating how much PIP a person receives. Yet the costs of living with a disability aren't always related to how complex a person’s disability is. Consider, for example, a disabled person living in an old, top floor flat, on the outskirts of town. Getting out is difficult, so the person stays home more. This means gas and electricity bills are higher, and the flat isn't energy efficient. Poor transport links means the person relies on expensive taxis. The kitchen isn't properly adapted, so someone has to be paid to come in to help do the cooking.
Now imagine a disabled person with the same condition, living in a purpose built flat, with adaptations, proper heating systems, and accessible transport. They are totally independent, can do their own cooking, can get out and about on the bus, and don’t pay a fortune for heating. In the new system, these two people will get the same amount in PIP. But their daily costs are vastly different.
Recent research by Demos helps to quantify this situation. Using survey data from the disability charity Scope, we were able to calculate the size of the relationship between the complexity of a person’s disability and their daily living costs. It wasn't very large. In fact, it was about the same as or slightly less than the relationship between costs and suitability of housing, type of transport used, and employment status. This confirms, as one would expect, that how much you have to spend because of your disability is effected by a range of lifestyle factors. But what this means for PIP – using just one of these factors to award benefits – is that it won’t be well targeted. Those with the highest disability costs won’t always be the ones getting the highest payments.
In the rush to reform, it is understandable that the government has opted for a relatively easy, measurable short cut for awarding disability payments. But it just won’t be accurate. The implication is that the Government will target scarce resources at the wrong people and disability poverty will increase. The ‘both barrels’ strategy could well see the Government shooting themselves in the foot.
Anthony Alan
The approach of this government to the ‘Big Society’ and to current changes in the Disability Living Allowance, Welfare reforms and ‘reablement’ of sick and disabled people, is too mechanistic.
Its core ideology remains one of continued privatisation and business involvement in the delivery of all of our services. This appears to have been conveniently buried beneath a maze of detailed government planning proposals and reports and fine words about community involvement, that ‘blind people with science’ and hide the key objective, which is cost cutting and facilitation of private profits.
A key example of this is the governments Business Improvement Package for local councils. Full of jargon, new initiatives and examples of regional ‘good practice’ it is designed to help councils ‘deliver the transformed services and value for money that communities want‘.
As part of nine Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships (RIEP‘s), North East Regional Excellence in Reablement was established ‘to help all authorities to maximise the efficiencies and improved service outcomes offered through the provision of reablement services.’
It reports that, Through the project, a clear Business Case has been developed. If the costs of delivering a reablement service are kept below £2,500 per service user, there are potential net savings of between £14.8m and £35.4m, if reablement is mainstreamed across the region.
Government is so keen on ‘giving power’ to the public and involving them in the process of change, that they are closing down the website containing the above information , ‘to protect its content’. They are restricting such information in future to a new ‘community of practice‘ site, where a personal profile of each user will need to be completed, before access can be gained to any detailed information.
It is simply not realistic to expect the vast majority of ordinary people, particularly those suffering chronic and disabling illnesses, to easily understand the complex maze of new initiatives and events. Nor is it realistic to expect them to cope with the speed of implementation of these changes in a way that allows and encourages any real participation and choice. Government are of course only to well aware of this. As Claudia Wood implies, it is not really their intention to allow too many people to discover and contest the underlying details of the policies before they are implemented..
A Disability Alliance Report issued on 6th December 2010, about changes to DLA, and Government’s proposal to cut the amount of DLA available by 20%, comments:
‘Despite the significant changes announced today and the massive impact on disabled people, DWP is running a very short (9 week) consultation over the Christmas period, in spite of Government guidance suggesting 12 weeks is appropriate, and the communication needs of many of the disabled people needing DLA. (www.disabilityalliance.org)
Many sick and disabled people are not surprisingly extremely concerned and justifiably suspicious about where this is all leading.
As a retired professional worker in local government, I have been involved in numerous rushed ‘consultation ‘exercises in the past where government or management policies are pushed through and rapidly implemented wholesale, regardless of concerns expressed or widespread opposition to them.
I fail to see how the current time-limited consultations are likely to be any different.
I believe that the current government spending cuts, radical re-structuring of the NHS and local councils, and rapid reform of the welfare system, are being implemented mainly on ideological grounds
They are being forcefully pushed through, to gain an unstoppable momentum, by a Prime Minister and a Chancellor who, after citicising Labour for wielding too much centralised power and control, did not even consult members of their own cabinet before publicly announcing their initial plans.
This is the same old ‘nanny state’ politics and hypocrisy and deceit of the highest order.
When a leading politician in the current administration ‘inadvertently’ reveals his concerns about the speed at which the coalition is trying to push through changes in the health service, local government and other areas, and lets the truth slip out that he views it as a "kind of Maoist revolution, in danger of getting out of control", surely the public should sit up and take notice.
I fear that many of the public are too concerned with whether they will be able to ‘carry on shopping‘ and too brainwashed by government propaganda about ‘benefit scroungers', to be alert to Cable’s wider concerns. Some will probably just call for his resignation for being disloyal and telling the truth.
Many of the proposed changes will undoubtedly go ahead now, with very minor changes and adjustments (already foreseen and factored in by the ‘dynamic duo’), to ameliorate and diffuse some of the most forceful and radical opposition.
These changes will happen as part of the ‘shock doctrine’ increasingly being adopted by men of power around the world, to reshape and remake our world to serve their own desire for great wealth at the expense of others. They have of course already convinced themselves, if not everyone else, that as ‘masters of the universe’ they alone drive the global economy and ‘make the world go round.’
(Such a description of his own ‘vision and mission’ was used by an unrepentant city banker in the recent BBC Panorama report ’Carry on Banking’ (20.12.10), about massive pay awards and bonuses still being given to many leading city bankers).
As usual, ordinary working people, the sick and the vulnerable will continue to suffer the consequences, experiencing the real emotional and psychological impact of these changes and a further deterioration in their quality of life.
The establishment’s thinly veiled authoritarianism (currently the proposed use of water cannons for student protests) and deceitfulness will prevail again - for a while.
In the 1980’s, the Conservative government’s view was that unemployment was a price worth paying for the radical reform of industry and the economy. Many people have been paying that price for the last 25 years, with thousands of families and their offspring stuck on long term benefits to disguise the real rate of regional unemployment and social disadvantage.
In moving so rapidly now to the Big Society through savage ‘front loaded’ spending cuts, social engineering and proposed radical shifts in power (or responsibility) to local levels, the present government may ensure that these same social groups and others experience a further decline in real quality of life for themselves and their children, for many more years to come.
As Harold Pinter observed, while exploring the importance of truth in Art and its perceived absence in politics (in his Nobel Prize lecture, Art ,Truth and Politics, in 2005), ‘Most politicians are interested not in truth but in power and the maintenance of that power. They feel it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives.
Anthony Alan, 21st December 2010