Benefit cuts will cost the economy.

Benefits are not always significantly less than wages.

If you work full time on NMW then your take home pay each month would be around £1500.

If claiming then potentially you have

• £400 for single person over 25
• If assess as LCWRA then an extra £423
• If renting you can claim housing element of UC, amount depending on your area, but in my area for a 1 bedroom that is another £448
• If entitled to PIP then roughly £295 for lower rate

That’s £1566, so actually not vastly differently.

If you can claim enhanced rate PIP then £1711

If you have a child then another £292 per child for the first 2.

Who do you think is getting free utilities? Subsidy at supermarkets? Everything costs exactly the same for everybody?

A media effort of some sort would be good.

Moat if the people chipping into this debate have no idea who they are discussing beyond a conjures vision of a “shirker”.

I met a woman recently who has been fully dependent on a wheelchair since birth. She’s around 30. Thanks to DEI efforts in the HETV (High end television) sector, she’s built a career as a TV production coordinator, freelance, over the past three years. She manages this, not only because the industry has essentially put pressure on itself to hire from a wider pool of humans, but because her PIP, funds a WAV (wheelchair accessible vehicle) - a van with drive-in wheelchair access to the driver’s position, through the Motability scheme. So she can get herself around the country to shooting locations as anyone else can.

I also met two women, a couple of years apart, who were both suddenly disabled by cauda equina that wasn’t identified in time. Both had sought funding for a wheelchair, because the NHS, in most areas doesn’t fund electric wheelchairs for patients who have even minor ability to hobble around on sticks part of the time. (One was suing the NHS, which I suspect will have eventually left her in a much better position, but that’s a side issue. Meanwhile they both needed support finding chairs and help accessing work again). These are the kinds of people who need their PIP. There are other cases that come to mind that illustrate things perfectly but I can’t talk about those because I know about them through work. There does seem to be a sub-issue that lack of NHS care has recently been permanently disabling more Brits than normal. Can’t see any good statistics available on that, though.

In the meantime, we are told PIP assessors have perversely created a class of “shirkers”, “NEETs” etc who have been given PIP for essentially feeling a bit sad. Again, no good data publicly available, but if it’s true, why has been allowed to happen and what has it got to do with the far larger claimant group who need PIP for serious established disabilities?

I am astonished so many people are falling for this manipulation.

You can put all the onus on employers you want, but unless the people using the services that are being provided are willing to accept things done a little differently, it won't work.

I've got some diagnosed issues that mean I'm perhaps a little slower than someone who doesn't, and although deliver the service well and timely, there's as many people who think my delivery is too poor and I shouldn't be in that job, because it's different to their expectations, who shout at me, call me stupid, personally insult me, as there people who are absolutely fine with it.

It's not like I'm in a life or death role, or those few extra moments have a lasting and traumatic effect, I'm in a low paid service role that unless you get in dramatically and criminally wrong, is not even a minor inconvenience. Yet people increasingly won't tolerate it.

I used to do jobs away from the public, however I now have physical issues that mean I can't, so what do I do?

Gotta be out working because I'm able, but just not anywhere I might slightly inconvenience someone with my issues.

If we want disabled people, people with mental health issues, people with conditions like autism out working because they can, then society needs to actually accept that instead of thinking it's a great idea until it affects them ever so slightly and then it's all 'they shouldn't be doing that job!'.

Like? If they chop the lettuce in Subway they will still need top up benefits in order to pay rent and bills. We manufacture nothing so there are no factories. Mrs Thatcher decimated whole generations in mining communities. Any ideas?

I'm honestly just curious what the disability is? (I completely understand if you don't want to say)

There are so many jobs out there - I struggle to believe people cannot find jobs.

Agree with the poster who said that supporting adult children will fall onto families. My adult DS lost his PIP but he is not magically cured and in full time work so I now cover his costs at detriment to the rest of the household. If I had a big income it would not be a problem, I'm his mum, but I'm on universal credit top up myself and basically having to make the allowance cover an extra person. I have to take him to appointments etc plus my younger child also has SEN and no suitable childcare is available so working more is not an option for me at the moment. We don't like being in this situation and viewed as scroungers but I didn't ask for a disabled child or for my husband to decide to bow out of our family.

Where will they work? Morgan Stanley?

A good start would be allowing carers to claim allowances without being means tested or punished for working as well as caring.

Benefits are significantly less than wages. I still have to pay my bills. I don't get free utilities. I don't get a subsidy at the supermarket. Everything costs exactly the same for me.

Tell me you read the daily Mail and have no grip on the actual reality of living on benefits without telling me you read the Daily Mail and have no grip on the actual reality of living on benefits.

Do better 🙄

"I disagree. Benefits need to be cut. Absolutely ridiculous the amounts some folk are raking in."

Yes profoundly disabled people ( the people that are receiving the highest benefits ) are so lucky aren't they.

Do you realise that for most people who work, their wages also haven’t gone up every April, they are still earning the same amount and dealing with increased prices? That is a country wide issue in the cost of living crisis, it’s not something specific to those who are claiming benefits?

Have you anything analytical or substantive to say on the subject?

WHY do you think the criteria need changing? For that matter, why do you think the existing criteria aren’t being implemented properly?

It needs an employer-side effort, and a government-side effort be that compulsion or tax breaks or DEI-led recruitment.

Overwhelmingly it is easier to stay in work or resume work after disability, if you’re a professional or have a skill. Employers seem to feel it’s worth making adjustments for a professional with in-demand abilities or qualifications.

The end of the employment market that consists of many NMW employees is less keen to accommodate disabilities.

Historically, the disabled would have been left at home to rot, depending on the voluntary efforts of family. Which was a waste of skills and labour, a demand on the army of unpaid women who used to run everything, and generally a relic of the Victorian era.

Everybody needs food, clothing, shelter. You either have a system that enables nearly everybody to earn their own. Or you have a system that makes modest provision for those that can’t (or aren’t allowed to by capitalism).

PIP has absolutely nothing to do with work. It’s paid based on the difficulty level
a disability causes. That’s written into the criteria.

What has happened, though, is that increasingly, the third party, private sector PIP assessors have simultaneously become informally obsessed with the idea that disabled people in work somehow metaphysically aren’t truly disabled. That was the Tory-era effort to cut PIP by just denying people entitlement by incentivising assessors to pick holes.

Similtaneously, as part of a general societal move to vaguely “be aware” of MH, we are now paying more PIP for anxiety, handing out blue badges for anxiety, and now the discovery has apparently been made that a lot of those new additional people are NEETS. WHO knows whether that’s true? I certainly don’t trust political rhetoric and tax payers who are suddenly referring to all disabled people as “shirkers”.

Maybe we can't get everybody who can work, to work. Accepting there will be a few who slip through the net while we help the genuine cases may be the only thing we can do in the end. Focus on other ways to help the economy instead.

I do actually have to continue only eating food I can make from scratch, because convenience foods are way, way out of my budget. The reality of that means a perilous and painful experience in the kitchen as I cry through the pain trying to stir a sauce or end up throwing boiling water down myself because I don't have the grip. Sometimes I'm so tired when I finish, I end up accidentally leaving the hobs on all night. Sometimes I have to sit on the kitchen floor from sheer exhaustion trying to cobble bits together.

When I first became disabled, I could afford a takeaway or a ready meal to throw in the oven. Now all of that money goes on my electricity bill instead.

That's reality.

If we have no jobs, why do we need to import workers?

Cutting support for the truly disadvantaged? No, wrong on so many levels.

But getting the workshy/glass backs into work? Correct thing to do. Shame Labour were always so anti this when in opposition.

I doubt it, they're cutting benefits from people who can't work due to disability, so they won't magically become less disabled and get a job

Because I'm physically disabled. Which is why I'm on benefits. But apparently I don't have to worry, even though I've already missed most of my meals in the last 24 hours, and plenty more before that.

"The basic rate of universal credit (the main benefit for working-age people on a low income) is at 40-year low in real terms amid a cost of living crisis."

Apparently that's what Amnesty International have had to say this this April about the matter. The lowest in 40 years and people on benefits are still living the life of Riley?

Make it make sense.

Why are your hands incapable of making food?

You have been asked to expand on what you mean before. You keep parroting this, but refuse to say what benefit you think it should be replaced with. So I doubt you have a clue either.🥱

I agree with drastically changing PIP criteria. Or better still abolish it and replace it with a different benefit.

I know people need to reassure themselves that they're crowing for the punishment of only the truly unworthy, but that simply isn't reality.