UK: Disability benefits (UC, ESA and PIP) - news and updates 2024 and 2025

Kitty said:
I'm not sure it is, TBH. Quite a lot of it seems to be more about them imagining that people housebound with anxiety and depression are a bit fed up, and that putting in a couple of grab handles and a raised loo seat will cover all the additional costs of people with mobility problems.
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I'm probably wrong, I haven't looked at the documents. Too overwhelmed.

NelliePledge said:
Others will probably have actual experience of this and maybe I’m wrong but the proposal around changing to vouchers to help with adaptations doesn’t appear in any event to be something new because the Disabled Facilities Grant already exists. Albeit that you have to apply to your local council for this and it’s no doubt very difficult to get. So using something already available,if not in exactly the same way, as some kind of new approach is disingenuous to say the least.
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The announcements seem to be about replacing the all the income from PIP with vouchers or/and very minor adaptations or aids.
 
I read the proposal - they actually do an easy read guide, these save me a bit of energy where the subject isn’t that important to me.
https://assets.publishing.service.g...lth-and-disability-green-paper-accessible.pdf

There’s a lot of “proposals” of how they “might” do things, hence why it’s all a bit unclear. Rishi mixing up “sick note culture” with PIP didn’t help, either.

So the PIP proposals is just a big list of
“What if we gave vouchers for some costs (“instead of PIP I guess)
“What if certain lifelong conditions didn’t need re-assessment?”
“What if councils provided services instead of people paying for them” - I paraphrase, but that’s the biggest red flag tome. Social care doesn’t exist and the Council isn’t going to provide a cleaner for me, so you need to keep paying PIP so I can pay my cleaner, thanks!
 
Work and health support scheme to help chronic sick back to work to be piloted
A joined-up work and health support service to help the long-term sick back into work will be piloted in 15 areas of England, Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride has announced.

The WorkWell programme is part of the Government’s sweeping changes to the welfare system, including a review of payments to people with mental health conditions, which prompted accusations of a “full-on assault on disabled people”.

From October, the £64 million pilot will connect people with a health condition or disability to local support services including physiotherapy and counselling to help them stay in or return to work.

Too often, people with disabilities or poor health fall out of work with no support. We have a plan to change that

Health Secretary Victoria Atkins
The service, launched by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the Department for Health and Social Care, will bring together medical assistance and advice on workplace support.

For example, a GP could refer a patient with a bad back to WorkWell, where an adviser may contact their workplace to make adjustments such as flexible working or relocating their office to the ground floor, and help them access physiotherapy.

Areas trialling the service include Birmingham and Solihull, Cambridgeshire, Greater Manchester, Leicester, parts of north London and South Yorkshire.
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Work and health support scheme to help chronic sick back to work to be piloted (msn.com)
 
Sly Saint said:
Work and health support scheme to help chronic sick back to work to be piloted
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If they hadn't scrapped the disability employment scheme in the first place, they wouldn't need to reinvent it. :rolleyes:

I know several former miners and steelworkers who benefitted from the old scheme following injuries or redundancies. Slightly implausibly, given their broad accents and rough diamond approach, one became an accountant, one an actor, and another an Anglican priest. But it takes time, skill and resources to support people like them, who struggle even to imagine how they could rebuild their self-respect, let alone succeed in taking on a totally different identity. The advisors sometimes pulled it off because they knew how the local economy worked, they built relationships with employers and training agencies, and—above all—their clients and their managers trusted their judgement.

None of that will be the case now. It'll be call centres staffed by people who've had four weeks of training, who know nothing about how the local economy and community works. And it'll be as much use as a chocolate fireguard to people who aren't actually capable of work in the first place.
 
For example, a GP could refer a patient with a bad back to WorkWell, where an adviser may contact their workplace to make adjustments such as flexible working or relocating their office to the ground floor, and help them access physiotherapy.
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This is the same level of brain-dead thinking that has led to the whole nonsense about GPs "prescribing" walks in the park and other stuff that has nothing to do with the role of health care. We keep seeing again and again how enjoying life is the best way for people to have quality of life and good mental health people need the time and financial freedom to do so, which is purely socioeconomic, not a slip of paper from some expert whose time is being wasted doing things that have nothing to do with their expertise.

If you want workplace accommodations for people who have disabilities you need to mandate it, by law. Having someone, some "adviser" from some cockamamie scheme like this, call a workplace is not a serious way of doing this. It will always be in the interest of an employer to simply find someone else who can do the same job, or actually more of it if they're healthy, for the same salary without having to spend anything on accommodations.

This is a deeply unserious thing, and it fits right in with the whole biopsychosocial ideological project and its foolish therapeutic recreation and activity coaching nonsense. It's spending resources for a problem on mindless nonsense that ignores the problem, which leaves them having spent resources on ignoring a problem, which they could have done without having spent resources. But of course what this means is that the purpose of that system is not to get disabled people back to work, but rather as a cover-up for systemic failure that leaves them neglected.
 
Revealed: people with cancer, arthritis and amputees among 40% denied UK disability benefits

"The government is rejecting more than 40% of applications for disability benefit from people with multiple sclerosis (MS), cerebral palsy and arthritis – and one in four applications from amputees, the Observer can reveal.

Analysis of personal independence payment (Pip) disability benefit data for England and Wales shows that thousands of applicants with illnesses such as cancer, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and emphysema were turned down by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) between August 2023 and January 2024."

https://www.theguardian.com/society...disability-benefits-cancer-arthritis-amputees
 
PIP whistleblowers expose ‘horrific’ target system used to decide benefit claims
The system to decide people’s personal independence payment (PIP) claims is “horrific” and “target-driven”, former assessors have warned.

The whistleblowers said intense pressure to hit daily targets for the number of disability benefits cases they dealt with affected the quality of their assessments, while the lack of training in complex health conditions made it difficult to write fair reports.

One claimed the system “sets disabled people up to fail”. Another said it was “psychologically… the worst job I have ever had”.

PIP is in the spotlight after the Government said it was considering a radical overhaul of the system. Disability charities fear the changes will make proving eligibility even harder and see many people’s payments cut.

The unbearable pressure to get through disabled people’s benefits claims as quickly as possible forced Nicola to quit her job as an assessor last year, she claimed.

“It was incredibly stressful,” said the trained mental health nurse, who was expected to carry out three PIP assessments a day, as well as writing up the reports sent to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for a final decision.

She told i: “The clients were often crying on the phone and the calls went on longer than an hour due to how much they wanted to tell me.

“I’ve gone back to work for the NHS because it was the better option.”
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PIP whistleblowers expose ‘horrific’ target system used to decide benefit claims (msn.com)
 
lunarainbows said:
Merged thread


The govt are saying that the PIP cost to the public is too much. They are talking about vouchers instead of cash payments. Having tiers of funding so that your GP has to certify how severe your condition is and how much funding you need every month for expenses related to your disability and health condition. One-off payments for aids and adaptations instead of ongoing payments. And I also think this rhetoric is feeding into society and more people will vilify and hate disabled and sick people. There’s so much there, I really worry that this is the start of a really downhill road.

Is anyone else worried like me? PIP is a lifeline for our family.
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This whole thing is based on a lie anyway. All other disabled based benefits have been disappearing year by year as they rolled them into Universal Credit etc. PIPs/DLA was always supposed to be about an extra amount to meet the extra costs of being disabled but eventually became part of many peoples basic income to meet their monthly basic expenses for rent and bills etc as housing benefit got cut and cut down way below average rents and they stopped paying mortgage payments for someone who became disabled and Severe Disablity payments etc.

Also PIPs is what qualifies many people to have their spouse etc claim carers allowance for having to give up a job to look after them or a disabled child. With this voucher nonsense for a ramp or a walking stick crap they are literally doing a slight of hand and removing upto to half of the household income from disabled people, families and children and removing the non employment status from carers so now they will find themselves still having to care fulltime for people with complex needs and yet will be told they must get a fulltime job and will not be eligible for benefits like Carers Allowance themselves.

This whole thing sets of a chain of disappearing money from disabled people who are already using PIPs to meet their basic household bills and buy the basics for their children etc due to the whole family becoming impoverished due to loss of earning capacity often affecting not just the disabled person but their spouses due to extra caring responsibilities. It's also cruel that they are just basically saying that if you are disabled for life you will now live on basic dole money UNTIL YOU DIE and for many young people that is 60 years or more. So, one, you have to live not only with the knowledge that your life is going to be spent with great difficulty, pain discomfort and great limitations but you will also be in an impossible financial situation FOREVER and no landlord will want to rent to you because of your much reduced income, (which already happens now for people on disability benefits) no one will ever lend you money for a mortgage which you are never going to get anyway.

Take PIPs away from most disabled people and you wont even meet your rent payments at the end of the month. You would be left with a Universal Credit payment of around £700 a month IF you get the top up for disability, yet only, £350 if you don't and then maybe an extra £500 a month to help with you £700-£800 rent MINIMUM for a one bedroom accommodation. So a total income of £1200 or as little as £900 a month if you are lucky to meet rent and utilities of at least £900-£1000 before food and other basics, and this is the lifelong future of every disabled child and adult with complex needs in the country if this new PIPs scheme goes ahead.

The Government is not telling the truth on what this actually is and how this sleight of hand has been a drip drip, stealth effect, over the last few decades. PIPs hasn't been used solely to add to the extra costs associated with illness and disability for most people for years now. These changes are a theft of ESSENTIAL household income NOTHING ELSE.
 
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Inquiry to begin into DWP’s treatment of ill and disabled people on benefits

"The treatment of chronically ill and disabled people by welfare officials, including benefits decisions subsequently linked to the deaths of vulnerable claimants, is to be formally investigated by Britain’s human rights watchdog.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) said it would examine whether ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) had acted unlawfully by failing to protect claimants with learning disabilities or severe mental illness."

https://www.theguardian.com/society...atment-of-ill-and-disabled-people-on-benefits
 
I'm still inclined to ignore the green paper as a desperate attempt to look good to a certain constituency of voters, but pwME who still receive income-related ESA probably do need to be prepared for the migration process to UC starting four years earlier than planned.

It's been put in train already and might continue even if an election is called for the autumn. DWP expects the majority of claimants to receive a migration notice by December; we've seen before that their timelines usually come apart at the seams, but I think I'll assume that I might be caught up in it for the last few months before I reach state pension age.

Once the migration notice has been sent, there's a fixed deadline to make a UC claim. This is currently three months from the date of the notice, and is the point at which ESA payments end. For claimants who receive additional premiums such as Enhanced or Severe Disability, missing the deadline would mean the transitional protection (the guarantee that people migrated from ESA will be no worse off under UC, at least at the outset) would be lost. The Enhanced and Severe premiums add up to a little over £100 a week, so it's not a trivial loss.
 
I'm so angry about journalists' failure to interrogate the Tory plan to take £12bn out of disability benefits to cut National Insurance payments.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8005jp0g71o

All the debate is about whether it is feasible to raise that amount of money in this way, not the ethics of doing so, or the effects on claimants. There's no calling out of the erroneous assumptions the Tory's position is based on.

https://www.disabilitynewsservice.c...-potentially-misleading-says-stats-regulator/

I've put in a complaint to the BBC and will try to do the same for the other broadcasters.
 
DWP halts benefits of 184,000 people in 'unacceptable' move
A tax expert has slammed figures revealed by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)that show 184,000 people have had their benefits stopped as part of a migration to Universal Credit. A series of 'legacy' benefits are being moved over to Universal Credit by the DWP.

Claimants who have been receiving Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Income Support and income-based Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) are being moved over. But tax expert Andy Wood has highlighted the "potentially severe impacts" of the move.

He said: “According to a recent update from the DWP, 824,050 individuals in 540,070 households received migration notices between July 2022 and March 2024 across England, Wales, and Scotland. The vast majority (821,430) were tax credit claimants.

“The transition to Universal Credit is replacing six legacy benefits, including Working Tax Credit, Child Tax Credit, Housing Benefit, income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), Income Support, and income-based Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA).

“Of the 824,050 individuals issued migration notices between July 2022 and March 2024, 400,940 (49 per cent) have successfully transitioned to Universal Credit, with 60 per cent of those households receiving transitional protection to maintain their payment levels. An additional 238,990 (29 per cent) are still in the process of switching. Meanwhile, 184,120 individuals (22 per cent) have not transitioned and have had their legacy benefit claims closed, according to the DWP.
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DWP halts benefits of 184,000 people in 'unacceptable' move (msn.com)
 
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