Those acting as patrons for disability charities, like Zac Goldsmith, Kim Malthouse and James Cleverly , have come under sustained pressure to resign as patrons of charities after they voted for the cut.
Graeme Ellis, a Conservative member and 'owner' of the Conservative Disability Group website, was so enraged that he resigned from the party and closed down the website,
A mere week after the vote, Tory MPs lined up to give their justification for voting to cut the benefits. A cynic might say that it took a week to get their story straight.
Alun Cairns (MP for Vale of Glamorgan), Johnny Mercer (MP for Plymouth), took to the media to justify their position. Gavin Barwell (MP for Croydon Central) relied on his blog and a few snide comments on Twitter. They appear to be speaking from a script because there are some common themes emerging. The arguments are surprisingly (not) similar to the arguments from the IDS propaganda machine. The main threads of their arguments are:
They are spending more on disability support than Labour did,
The changes are being made to a specific group of people that are actively seeking work,
Current recipients of ESA and disabled or sick people who are unable to work are wholly unaffected by this area of welfare reform and
New claimants with the most severe conditions will get just as much in a year’s time as they do today.
All of these are questionable (to say the least)
I will be honest, I am not sure if it's true that they are spending more than Labour on disability. Maybe the extra costs are associated with the costs of assessment, appeals for wrong assessments, tribunals. Maybe the costs are higher because, in spite of the endless rewriting of the regulations to 'un-disable' people, they are remaining stubbornly disabled and still eligible for benefits. That's a bit I will have to check. What's clear though is that in spite of this alleged increase in support, a lot of disabled people are struggling
The idea that people in the WRAG group should lose money to help them back into work is quite astonishing. It denies the very real struggles that disabled people face just to maintain an existence. The costs of being ill or disabled are well documented. Transport costs, heating, clothes, support with household or personal tasks eating are often much higher. This series of cuts simply ignores these costs.
And people in the WRAG group are *not* necessarily supposed to be 'actively seeking work'. In the first place, a lot of these claimants actually have jobs that they can't do because they aren't fit to do them. They are *supposed* to be taking part in work related activities. For some, this might mean that they are participating in a condition management programme. For others, it might be meeting with an adviser to talk about what things might help them to return to work.
The thing about using current claimants as a benchmark for the 'noone will suffer' tale is that a lot of 'current claimants' will be future new claimants. This points to a monumental misunderstanding of what 'disability' means. Disability is not always (or ever) a fixed state.
In spite of everything you may hear, most people claim disability benefits on a temporary basis.
The impact of an illness or disability can vary widely from day to day. There are a lot of people who suffer from long term, fluctuating conditions. Such people may well have jobs and be paying tax and national insurance.
The thing about a fluctuating condition is that it fluctuates. Today you might be on ESA, tomorrow you might be well enough to return to work. You might well be working for the next year before your illness flares up again leaving you unfit for work. You would become a new claimant and would be faced with £30 a week less than you're currently getting. For a lot of people, the ESA claim is a recurring stress in their lives so multiple new claims are to be expected.
As far as PIP is concerned, the 'new claimants' issue is even more outrageous. People who are still on DLA will be reassessed for PIP and will automatically be new claimants. Bear in mind also that DLA was not designed as an out of work benefit - it was intended to enable people to live independently and where possible work. It was designed to meet all those extra costs.
The last point is a blatant lie. Eligibility for ESA or PIP depends not on your condition, no matter how serious it is, but on the way that your condition affects you (according to the DWP assessment) and how long it is expected to last. Thus you have the ludicrous situation where people with very severe conditions (like a terminal illness) are expected to participate in work related activities, even if they are so ill that they can barely lift their head off the pillow. The assessment only assesses your 'performance' on a range of tasks (eg can you put a pen in your pocket, can you lift an empty cardboard box, can you press a button). There is no evidence that suggests that these tasks are in any way related to a person's ability to find a job and to remain in employment.
Let us be clear: Jonathan Portes (from 32 mins) is quite right when he says that the government has set out to cut the cost of disability benefits by 20%. They assumed that 1 in 5 people on disability benefits are frauds, scroungers, swinging the lead. We don't really know where this 20% figure came from. What we do know is that, in spite of their best efforts to rewrite the rules to make people suddenly become well, the number of disabled people hasn't changed much.
Frank Shivers, the NI Tory spokesman, says that 'something must be done' and that current spending is 'unsustainable'.
In that sense, he is right. Something *must* be done. The Tory way is to remove the 'disincentives' (ie benefits) but there is no robust evidence that £100 per week is a disincentive to work. In fact, the evidence from the last Labour government is that when there is work available, employers will take a chance on employing a person with a disability and disabled people will work when the jobs are available.
'Something' cannot be simply to impoverish people further. We do have options. We could abolish the work capability assessment and find a way of assessing what people can actually do in terms of employment. We could offer training to people so that they can build work round their illnesses and disabilities.. We could reorganise work so that people can work part time and still earn a living.
Instead of doing something constructive though, Gideon has established a £22 million war chest to fight claims from people who have been wrongfully denied benefits. It is the Tory way: 'whatever the evidence, we're right and you're wrong'
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