You know what, Ken, the fuckers could be spending all this money on proper support for disabled people to find ways to work. I've been asking for specific types of support for years - nada. Instead I get put through humiliating charades, which only exist to create a paper trail for the government's determination to tell me I'm not disabled.
You can only be disabled or not disabled; no transitional stages are admitted - this puts people off doing their physio or OT! When you're "not disabled" the government cuts your income by approx £20/wk and is entitled to demand that you put in a full week's work of their choosing.
The Work Programme, through which companies are paid between £4k and £14k for every claimant referred to them, is another funds-eating charade. The 'support' to get working involves paper-pushing, applying for jobs that the claimant won't get and, ultimately, being sent to work full-time without pay. I've asked for the support I could use to gently re-start my own business. They just said "We don't do that."
What will happen to me, like so many others, is that I'll eventually be sent on workfare placement. The first day will exhaust me. If I can get up the next day, I'll have severely impaired mental & physical function and will collapse. I'll need several weeks' complete rest to recover. As I will have failed in my duty, my benefits will be stopped (again), including HB, as punishment and I'll lose my home. Alternatively, the jobcentre will designate me unfit to work, as I clearly am, and tell me to re-apply for ESA. I won't get it because the DWP and Atos say I am fit to work. You would think these two sets of criteria would be linked - but they aren't. I would fall through the gap.
In October UC will be introduced. Should I manage to raise extra funds from somewhere, I might start trying to get my business going again as I can do it part time, in my own time. At the same time I will be hounded, by letter, text, email, phone and internet, to continually apply for full-time minimum wage jobs. I will be made to apply for full-time jobs and, if the DWP thinks it's found me one, made to do that instead of what I am doing.
This is costing billions. It's entirely predicated on the belief that all benefit claimants are workshy scroungers. The money is being spent on victimisation instead of supporting people back to work. The fact that they call their victimisation & harassment "support" doesn't make it so. The New Deal of the '00s, while flawed, did get people back to work by supporting them. It cost less than the welfare 'reforms' are costing. Why has this government not revisited that, instead of what it's doing?
As many of us have written, changes in local authority rules will mean no benefit recipient (working or not) can put down roots as they can be moved across the country at a few days' notice. Altogether, these developments are going to create a large class of displaced people who can be used as labour by any company that has a contract with the government or is in a contract chain with one that has. Clearly, kids going in and out of school, people missing medical appointments and sick people falling out of the system is going to piss everyone else off. I think this is the point where it will seem logical to create fixed institutions where the poor and the disabled can be more easily housed, monitored and put to work.
It is costing billions.
Why would a government spend all this money on chasing, disempowering and disenfranchising its most vulnerable citizens instead of trying to help them? It can only be ideological. Why would it go out of its way to feed misleading headlines to the media, if not to get the people on side with its mean-spirited ideology? These are similarities, like it or not (I don't!)