Upset by way govmt is managing disability benefits change

I think the lady in question was an occupational therapist.

The second part of this post is the point I was making. It simply isn’t sustainable and there was a time where people cut their cloth accordingly and employing domestic help is a luxury. Carers and any help for the disabled is totally different and as I said I think these people should be given more but where do you draw the line with the example I have given.

Also given how hard it is where I am to find decent domestic help I’m pretty sure this lady letting her help go would necessarily push them onto benefits themselves.

Oh gosh yeah the “spoonie” community is fascinating and terrifying. Full of women who really are exaggerating their chronic illness symptoms (and in some cases I do suspect completely fabricating them), not for benefits but for attention/likes/pity.

Those people are extreme outliers though. I can’t say I’ve ever come across one of these spoonies in real life and most of them seem to be in america

I wasn't addressing you but the person you were quoting as they seemed to be questioning how someone could work but need help with stuff at home.

@Scaredofthesecuts Spoon theory unfortunately is completely tainted by how “spoonies” have conducted themselves online in the past ten years. But I’m very familiar with it as I’m severely disabled myself. This isn’t about how energy limiting disabilities work.

Many disabilities involve limited energy....including m.s.

Look up spoon theory.

This might help you understand why someone might have the energy for work but literally nothing else. It's not necessarily a piss take. Having help at home might be the only way someone can work.

I think this is a particularly interesting example because it highlights how benefits applications and use has changed over the years. Historically, someone who was working but maybe struggling to keep their house clean might well have employed a cleaner, whatever the reason for that struggle was (perhaps disability, perhaps an exceptionally long commute, perhaps a large number of children, or caring for an elderly parent…), but there wouldn’t have been a societal expectation that for just one of those situational factors (disability), the state should be stepping in to cover the costs. Instead, any of those hypothetical people would be expected to manage their own budget to pay for help they might need. For example, why choose to live in a house with a sizeable enough garden to require a gardener if you’re unable to pay for that out of your own wages?

I don’t think it’s necessarily unreasonable for the government not to want to subsidise people’s domestic help, when that help isn’t even at the level of personal care. I’m certainly not saying no one who works should receive PIP, as there are some very disabled people who do work and should receive it. But this example shows how it can sometimes be used to subsidise costs which may be related to disability, but for which a solid argument can be made that they ought to be met out of the person’s salary, as they would if the limiting factor was any other personal challenge.

But this lady maybe able to type at a computer or use her brain to problem solve but may have limb issues where she can't do her garden or clean.
However if she were to lose her payment. The gardener and cleaner would be unemployed and be on the new higher rate JSA or whatever it will be. From an government spending point of view it may even cost more in this situation.

Threads like this always remind me of this meme.

I think because everyone is struggling with the cost of living and anyone who seems to get “free” money to pay for a cleaner, taxis, takeaways are never going to have the majority of sympathy.

The idea that money saved goes towards services more people will benefit from makes it more acceptable. Which you can argue it won’t but it is something they need to invest in anyway.

I don’t understand the “online everyday comment”

I'll ask again. Ninety millionth time.

How do you "taxpayers" (that are online every day) think you will benefit from these changes?

How horribly smug and ignorant you are. Please do more research, that’s not actually what the government think at all.

No of course I don’t! I object to the rhetoric overstating how much benefit fraud the DWP actually report & it being used to imply anyone who is disabled & in need of welfare support is a scrounging, lying cheat committing benefit fraud. But it’s not everyone it’s 0.2%. This narrative is incredibly damaging & discriminatory to disabled people. Obviously.

Yes I do. As do the government

I haven’t missed any point. I was responding to a specific post that lazily suggested large scale PIP fraud.

Do you really think that ‘low level health restrictions’ are awarded PIP? Personal Independence Payments are for exactly that - to enable people to have a greater degree of independence than they would otherwise be able to due to their disability or serious, chronic health conditions.

It’s because it’s not really about saving money.

It isn’t really about tackling fraud. You’re missing the point and purpose of the changes. It’s about not subsiding the lives of people with low level health restrictions who are capable of work

Exactly.

Apparently, disabled people just don't want to

🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️🙇🏻‍♀️

But she didn't mean 'everyone' she meant disabled people unable to work need to make the sacrifices.

Sorry to upset your sensibilities let’s talk about it in the way that you think is best shall we? What makes you the arbiter of how people should feel about this? You’re not the only “vulnerable person” here you know. This is a forum for people to express their opinions - stop policing & patronising them.

I presume since they're happy for disabled people to go cold and hungry, they themselves are also prepared to do the same.

Go hungry for your country!

Of course not.

Whilst ‘everyone’ accepts that taxes need to rise, they tend to think someone else should be the one to pay it.

Whilst ‘everyone’ thinks that more disabled people need to return to work, they are less willing to accept that they might have to pick up the slack if one of their colleagues is not quite as productive as they are.

I’ve heard it all a million times.

yes, 'everyone' as long as it doesn't affect them because they don't have a disability/long term health condition. I bet they would like to do their bit if it comes to higher taxation in any shape or form. Just 'everyone with a disability'. They tend to forget to mention that little detail when they talk about everyone.

A PP said something along the lines of everyone having to make sacrifices to ‘get the country back on its feet’. I wonder if much higher council tax will be an acceptable sacrifice that they’re willing to make.

Whilst this is the ‘ideal’ it ends up being completely unworkable in practice.

This was supposed to be the intention when PIP replaced DLA in the first place. The ‘holistic’ assessment was supposed to not just assess functional disability but also the way it affected a person at a given time.

I’ll give an example of the way the original consultation for PIP was supposed to assess my disability - visual impairment.

The example gave two scenarios in the consultation. One was a woman blind from birth withe diabetes. She was assessed as needing help with taking medication and mobility but no other care needs as she had adjusted to her disability. She would have been awarded no care component but enhanced mobility. The second was a man who had suddenly lost all eyesight. He was considered to need substantial care until he ‘got used’ to his condition and so would be awarded enhanced care and mobility for a limited time.

This was in the actual consultation document and yet we can all see how utterly unworkable this would have been as an assessment.

PIP was a bad replacement for DLA which was suffering exactly the same upwards creep in award rates. Likewise, ESA was a bad replacement for Incapacity Benefit which GPs didn’t want to be responsible for turning people down for.

Access to Work is a joke. It made life way harder than it needed to be for me. Jobcentre+ made me feel awful about the support I needed to carry on with my job. Every year it was a battle trying to get my support package renewed. I had far less difficulty getting approved for ill health retirement (in a scheme where it is often said that if you have a pulse you are deemed fit to work) than I did annually getting my support worker approved.

It’s all a mess.

Ignorant comment with a sweeping statement and no sources to back it up.

What is this ‘sizeable chunk’, how are you qualified to determine whether there is ‘nothing wrong with them’?

Why do you think that disabled people are acceptable collateral in tackling benefit fraud?

I don’t believe everyone knows a sizeable chunk of people milking the system. I honestly don’t think you can