What is in the Conservative Manifesto to help disabled children?

[kafkesque]

What are they going to do now that they have won?

[Borka]

I would guess they're going to be taking away help rather than giving any. I don't think there was anything in their manifesto about helping disabled people in any way, except for 'helping' them into work.

[kafkesque]

Special Educational Needs
Conservatives: The manifesto explains the steps that have been taken by the current government but no mention is made of plans for the next government.

Labour: Provide teachers with better training for working with children with special educational needs and disabilities.

Lib Dems: Improve the identification of Special Educational Needs and disability at the earliest possible stage, so targeted support can be provided and primary schools are better prepared for their intake of pupils.

Continue to promote the local integration of health, care and educational support for children with Special Educational Needs and health problems.

Greens: Recognise the right of every child who is disabled to a mainstream education and give local authorities democratic accountability in equality of access for children with special needs.

UKIP: The policy of closing special schools will be reversed.

Plaid Cymru: Review the provision for children with Special Educational Needs to ensure resources are used in the most effective way and work with local authorities to ensure all schools have appropriate access for physically disabled pupils.

SNP: The manifesto makes no specific mention of Special Educational Needs.

[Colaslushie]

I'm interested to hear this too.

[stressedoutnfedup]

conservatives are stopping dla, (pip) esa, child benefit, and carers allowance.not sure what's going to happen to us now, my dd is 21 and needs full time support, they will stop her dla, esa, and my carers allowance, i work p/t and dd pays all her dla for a support worker to allow me to work 12 hours a week.

[Colaslushie]

Oh god. When are they stopping all of this?

[Littlemisssunshine72]

Where is this information? I know there were leaked documents regarding stopping carers and taxi g DLA but have not heard that this is definite. A worrying time.

[fairgame]

stressedout my understanding is that they are not getting rid of those benefits as such but they are changing into universal credit. So they will still exist but under a different name.
I've heard rumours of taxing dla but i haven't heard of them scrapping carers.
Imo i think they will limit cb to 2 children and deeply cut tax credits.
Its all really worrying i wish they would just be blunt and say exactly what they plan instead of skirting around the subject. If you know what's coming at least you can be prepared, the not knowing makes me anxious.

[Littlemisssunshine72]

Exactly!

[LadyKooKoo]

Conservative party manifesto

Benefits
Freeze working age benefits for two years from April 2016, with exemptions for disability and pensioner benefits.
Lower the benefits cap from £26,000 to £23,000, but continue to have exemptions from the cap for those receiving Disability Living Allowance or the Personal Independence Payment.

Care
Guarantee that you will not have to sell your home to fund your residential social care.
Increase support for fulltime unpaid carers.

Hate crime
Review hate crime legislation, including the case for extending the scope of the law to cover crimes committed against people on the basis of disability.

Human rights
Scrap the Human Rights Act, and introduce a British Bill of Rights. The Bill will remain faithful to the basic principles of human rights, which the UK signed up to in the original European Convention on Human Rights.
Break the formal link between British courts and the European Court of Human Rights, and make the own Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK.

Into work
Aim to halve the disability employment gap by transforming policy, practice and public attitudes, so that hundreds of thousands more disabled people who can and want to be in work find employment.

• See more at: //www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/2015/april/election-manifestos-2015#sthash.l0HUX9rq.dpuf

[Huckcat]

The Conservatives have said that they need to reduce welfare spending by £12billion. A leaked DWP document outlined some suggested areas where cuts could be made. These included: scrapping statutory maternity pay, taxing DLA/PIP, increasing the bedroom tax and incorporating carer's allowance into universal credit (i.e. if you aren't eligible for U.C you would lose it).

They are definitely committed to lowering the benefits cap from £26,000 to £23,000 - but they have said there will be exemptions for those on disability benefits.

We may get more details in The Queen's Speech on the 27th May.

[kafkesque]

Will charities have to pick up the pieces?

[Colaslushie]

If they make changes to DLA and carers allowance etc, can they do it straight away or does there have to be a notice period of changes?

[chocnomorechoc]

If they want to tax DLA, then our DC would fall below the tax treshold. Guess this will rather effect (if it comes) working adults on DLA.

As for CA - don't think this will happen too soon. Most of us haven't even transferred to UC and god knows when this will happen.

[Rjae]

What benefits were cut under the recent government which affected disabled people and their families? It may give us an idea where further cuts will be made.

[unweavedrainbow]

They can't do anything straight away. It takes years for the DWP to do anything. They're still moving people over from Incapacity Benefit to ESA even though they started doing that in 2008. Moving people from IS/ESA/JSA to UC is going to take even longer.
Let me put it this way. I get DLA and I can clearly remember listening to the PIP announcement and feeling terrified. 5 years later and I am still waiting, still on the same amount of DLA and have been told that they might get to me at some point in the next 2 years.
There's going to be changes and they probably won't be good, but you'll know they are coming and have time to prepare for them.

[kafkesque]

They scrapped the Independent Living Fund which affected the most severely disabled people in the country and those that needed the highest level of support.

It saved a grand total of £300m, which in reality is peanuts.

[Rjae]

That's horrendous! Just looked into the ILF. How bloody short sighted.

[Colaslushie]

Does the fact that they've announced another budget for July mean that changes could happen sooner? Sorry if I'm being thick, I'm not sure how all this works.

[unweavedrainbow]

Theoretically, but moving people from one benefit to another/reassessing people/bringing in tax structures takes time. For most things, the very earliest you can expect things to change is next tax year (April 2016) and probably later than that as, as I said, things take time to implement. The only exception to this rule is the taxing of disability benefits but a) I'm not sure they're going to bother as it will save peanuts and create huge amounts of paperwork (plus be a disincentive for disabled people to work) and b) the most comparative recent change, Child Benefit, still took 3 months to come into force. As a rule of thumb, when making changes you have to give people notice to avoid both confusion and chaos plus public unhappiness. Don't worry, things aren't going to be cut off overnight without any warning. As I mentioned above, 5 years later I'm still waiting for my DLA to PIP assessment and it doesn't look like it'll happen anytime soon.

[Colaslushie]

Thank you rainbow.