AIBU to feel horrified at the number of Motability vehicles being provided?

and you think that is going to save money?

I'd have no choice but to seek out hospital transport, social care etc instead which....also costs the state money.

Lots of people have condtions and disabillties
But they dont automatically make them eligible for disabillity benefits
PIP is very spcific and if you dont meet the criteria you dont gst it regardless of diagnosis.

We can't continue going the way we are going with more and more people claiming to be disabled in some way and requiring public assistance. Sooner or later some politician is going to have to stick their head about the parapet and say enough is enough and people are just going to have to get on with supporting themselves and their families as best they can.

Spending on working age welfare, as a percentage of our GDP, has remained more or less unchanged over the last 5 decades. It's about 4% of our GDP and that includes disability, housing, unemployment, maternity, and a few other things. If it's been affordable for decades, why is it suddenly unaffordable now? PIP and its precursor DLA together only account for about 0.8% of GDP. And the vast majority of cases are incredibly well evidenced and unambiguous. If you removed the tiny number of fraudsters it still wouldn't make any significant difference to national spending.

Its not jealousy. Its exasperation.

Exasperation at a system that is far too easy to manipulate, costs too much, and is far too easy to turn into a way of life.

Saying so doesn't mean that you're punching down, unless we all want to shut our eyes and maintain that it does not go on at all.

OK. Sorry for misunderstanding your post. Your original comment didn’t say you weren’t talking about disabled people.

On our 3rd motobility car.....and if she's been 'given' a top of the range car then she'd have to pay a big deposit on it. Only the very small cars are deposit free. My daughter's boyfriend, who is an amputee, needs a bigger car to get in and out of easily. He had to pay a £5k deposit.
As for a big reveal....what a load of tosh! We get a call saying " Your car's ready" and we go and pick it up.....

I wasn't talking about disabled people at all! I was talking about non disabled people.

I asked practically the same thing. I thought that I must be missing something.

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. Can you explain @LittleMi55Nobody?

If she gets higher rate mobility PIP she either takes the cash or exchanges it for a leased car. Why would her choice one way or the other involve morality?

Some disabled people can’t use public transport but are perfectly capable of walking.

Some people live a long way from the hospital(s) they are under which makes journey times very long. They would be even longer by public transport.

Neither of these are unusual circumstances.

Sorry, I have just read your pp that says you aren’t talking about those with enhanced mobility component of PIP. Like the pp, I thought you were. Although there are disabled people not in receipt of the enhanced mobility component of PIP who the above applies to still.

Sorry, I lost track of the conversation, and I thought you were saying disabled people should be getting the bus.

You don't think it is unusual for people who can walk not to be able to use public transport to get to hospitals?

I'm not talking about people on higher rate mobility though. I am talking about why people who aren't disabled and can walk don't need cars as much as those that do!

It's quite unusual not to be able to walk far and also have to regularly visit three hospitals that require walks and bus changes. If you can't walk far are you not eligible for standard PIP to help pay for taxis etc.

I am guessing you don't understand how the Motability scheme works given you don't even know what it is called.

Why do you think that?

It isn’t.

I fully appreciate many people struggle financially. I'm a minimum wage worker myself watching the CoL creep up...

However, how would serious disability improve their lives? When we talk about Motability cars, you realise we are automatically restricting the discussion topic to people with extremely serious levels of disability? To participate in the Motability scheme, you have to be awarded higher rate on the Mobility section. To get higher rate, you have to be assessed at 12 points or higher, and you're not getting that for a bit of anxiety. Having that level of disability itself comes with increased financial costs.

How can you resent people with such severe issues for being awarded £80 a week and being able to choose how they spend it?

No she hasn’t. You either have the higher rate payment or a car. So if she’s taking the higher payment she’s no better than anybody else.

It's not unusual at all. People who are disabled enough to be awarded higher rate mobility tend to have a lot of hospital appointments, and public transport infrastructure is poor.

Even if you live in a town or city, it's common for a 15/20 minute car journey to take over an hour on the bus, because you have to catch a bus into the bus station in the town/city centre, and then catch a different bus out of the centre to your intended destination.

Say two people are both earning NMW, around £25,000 pa. One is able bodied, the other is considerably disabled. The extra costs of the disability are £1,000 pcm or £12,000 pa. Even if they received the higher rate PIP for care and mobility, they’d get £10,119 pa - so the disabled person is still nearly £2,000 pa worse off!

I take it “normal” people wouldn’t like to be the one £2,000 pa worse off, so what are they complaining about?

To be fair, they're fed a lot of it by bad actors in the right wing media. But the fact that they choose to lap it up like gospel does speak to character.

Yes, most of my clinic appointments are fairly local, but I travel to London from the Midlands for two of my clinics.

My son is three different locations. 4 if you also include physio/hydro.

One of those locations is 30 miles away. Some people really have no idea.

Quite. How sad for them, that they harbour such an emotion, towards a group of people, who are already disadvantaged, without the lens of envy, being directed at them, as well.