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Fellow frothers, please take the time to read the email exchange below

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 12:58 PM, MrsMicawber <MrsMicawber@gmail.com> wrote:

Matthew - the whole idea of making work pay by lowering benefits is not seeing the wood for the trees. Surely raising the minimum wage in accordance with rising living costs would be more to the point?

MrsMicawber

HA8 xxx

From: MrsMicawber [mailto:MrsMicawber@gmail.com]
Sent: 14 December 2011 12:12
To: OFFORD, Matthew
Subject: Re: Working parents need childcare support now

Dear Matthew,

I wrote to you on 14 September, and unfortunately, you did not reply.

Besides cutting childcare assistance, the government has now decided that the benefits paid to families of disabled children should also be cut.

Seeing as Barnet Council can afford to pay its Chief Executive a starting salary of £200,000, I think there are some questions to answer as to why the most vulnerable in Britain are having to shoulder the burden of the recession.

I hope you can provide some meaningful answers.

Yours sincerely,

MrsMicawber

HA8 xxx

Today I finally got this reply

On Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 3:30 PM, OFFORD, Matthew <matthew.offord.mp@parliament.uk> wrote:

Dear MrsMicawber

Thank you for your email and my apologies for the delay in responding to you after the Parliamentary recess period.

I agree that the care we give children living with a disability has in the past sometimes fallen short of what we want to see. That is why we want to see a modernised NHS which delivers care truly based around their needs.

Under the proposed plans the Secretary of State for Health will hold the NHS to account for delivering improvements in outcomes. The draft NHS Outcomes Framework, which was published last December, specified that the NHS Commissioning Board will need to deliver improvements in the quality of life of those living with long-term conditions and improvements in children’s and young people’s experience of healthcare – including children living with a disability. I am confident that this focus on outcomes, which is prioritised throughout the Health and Social Care Bill, will deliver the improvements in care we all want to see.

You may also be interested to know that, in March, the Government published its Green Paper ‘Support and aspiration: A new approach to special educational needs and disability’ which outlined a significant shift in the approach to helping children with disabilities. Included in the proposals were plans to include parents in the assessment process and introduce a legal right, by 2014, to give them control of funding for the support their child needs. The Paper also proposes to replace statements with a single assessment process and a combined education, health and care plan so that health and social services is included in the package of support, along with education.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact me.

Yours sincerely,

MATTHEW OFFORD MP

Member of Parliament for Hendon

To which I promptly replied:

Dear Matthew,

I take it your response was a standard one as you have failed to address the points I raised in my two original emails. Please take the care to read them over again and respond appropriately.

Can I take it from your advice that responsibility will be shifted from local councils to the NHS? How and why is that a good idea, when the NHs is already struggling with so many new responsibilities, caused by people living longer, more premature babies surviving and more people requesting cosmetic procedures for emotional reasons?

I look forward to your comprehensive reply.

Yours sincerely,

MrsMicawber.

You have raised quite a lot of unrelated issues over the two emails. Reading it for the first time I see you are raising the following points...

1. Two contrasting points of view on how to make work pay.

2. Cutting childcare assistance.

3. Cutting benefits to families with disabled children.

4. The Chief Exec of Barnet Council's remuneration.

The tone of your missives suggests that unless he responds with an email saying words to the effect of "We're crap, I'm sorry, I'll go and change government policy right away" you won't be happy.

Under the circumstances, he's just fobbed you off in the hope that you will go away.

I'm sorry, but in this instance, irrespective of the points you have made, YABU.

MrPants I do think he is crap

I Objected to his view on making work pay by presenting my own. He didn't respond, so the next time I had an issue with him, I raised both again. I also suggested, (perhaps in a fairly petulant manner, granted, but then again this government has made some very controversial decisions and has broken some very important promises) that if the cuts I was objecting to were indeed as necessary as his government expressed them to be, perhaps staff remuneration when it is up there in the hundred of thousands, should also be cut and the extra funds go to those less fortunate/to service the constituency.

We are all in this together, are we not?

<tootles off to google shit statistics on Barnet hospital and Baarnet parking policies>

My MP, Bill Wiggin, also replied to my email about disability cuts with an impassioned defence of the NHS reforms. Either he didn't read my letter or he assumes that DLA is only about meeting treatment needs.

The NHS can't get a lame or blind person to the train station; it can't pay the delivery charge for a housebound person's shopping; it can't spend long hours training an autistic child.

Did you know that PIP (the new DLA) will consider someone ineligible for help if they can propel their own wheelchair? Never mins if they have to propel it uphill in a storm to wait for an unreliable bus with no chair lift, they still don't need a taxi, according to the govt. Did you know PIP considers you mobile if you can walk 90 metres on the flat? Even if that's all you can walk.

Annoyingly, I was also quite rude to Wiggin when I replied. So that's a conversation I won't be having with him (not that he'd listen.)

Why are MPs voting on these issues if they don' or won't understand them? The mind boggles. Propel your own wheelchair, ffs? Are you supposed to be able to do that when its icy out, too?

I know. Personal Independence Payment seems to mean "Fuck off and be independent"

Looking at the way Freud's behaved over the past week - and listening to his vague, rambling air-spout in the Lords this afternoon - it's all about the government scoring points, and has no basis in figures or reality.

I imagine the Tories having spent their shadow years muttering amongst themselves about "wimps" and "scroungers" and "Layabout Labour" until they finally believed everything could be solved by abandoning vulnerable voters to the fates and market forces. The fact that they're creating a completely motionless economy, in which the poorer classes will simply get bigger and get stuck, seems to have escaped them entirely.

I want to bang their pompous little heads together. And leave them in a damp, mouldy bedsit to recover 'independently'.

I think they are working from a narrow, one size fits all view that benefits should be a temporary stop gap.

Yes, even the Lords debate over ESA time limits contained the implication that claimants will get better. Not all of them will.

Although the WRB looks like naivete or the triumph of dogma over common sense - I don't believe it can be. The Govt has some of the best minds available to it; receives advice from those who make the policies and those who execute them. They can't be ignorant ... so they must be cruel

They can't be ignorant ... so they must be cruel very powerful sentence.

And he suggests the NHS 'reforms' will help? He has no idea what its in the bill then. Or at least the person who wrote the letter has no idea.

And the Secretary of State will hold the NHS to account? How exactly can that happen given that the Secretary of State bows out of his current responsibility to provide a comprehensive health service if the bill goes ahead?

I am spitting, frothing and many other verbs.

These people have no idea what they're doing. Or they don't care. Either way, they're culpable.