To let you all know that disabled are having their benefits cut

[AndNowItsSeven]

The DWP has today launched a consultation aimed at cutting the number of people eligible for the daily living component of personal independence payment (PIP) by up to 35%. The cuts will be aimed at claimants who qualify for PIP because of their use of aids and appliances and may include replacing awards with discretionary voucher payments.
The press release and consultation document published today claim that 35% of all daily living allowance awards are based solely on the claimant’s need to use aids and appliances.
This is flawed as
A)often disabled people require assistant, however Atos are only scoring then as needing an aid.
B) even if you disability needs listed in the pip form can be met by aids most people will have many other needs not mentioned on the form.
To suggest the only extra cost of being disabled for those claimants, is the cost of aids is absurd and insulting.
The consultation ends on 29 January 2016, conveniently over the Christmas New year Period.
Please if you can take the time to respond.

www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/484217/pip-consultation-on-aids-and-appliances.pdft

Ah we're hardworking poor and have the disabled son, so got the tory compassion double. ;o)

I am really hoping he avoids the face to face as I have spent a lifetime building his self esteem and to sit in a room with him and rip him to shreds would be a backwards step. Well devastating. Also, like many young autistic adults he is in total denial about how independent he is and what he can do. He will definitely lose the mobility component as he can actually walk.

I am really going to flood them with full information (as I always did with the DLA) in the hope he can avoid face to face and maybe get the doctor to request that they avoid it. He did get a huge, proper medical assesment (not done by a random physiotherapist etc like the ATOS ones, but by someone who was qualified to discuss autism) when he got DSA last year at uni, and that report is so in depth and comprehensive, I will submit that. He is physically quite healthy so his GP doesn't know him from Adam, which is another problem for many kids on the spectrum, I'd guess.

Oh come on Jeffrey, Dave understand what we go through as he had a disabled son

Owllady, indeed. ;o) Plus he personally once stubbed a toe when kicking a peasant.

Just to warn you they don't actually read the paperwork you submit if you have a face to face. They didn't read the reams of stuff I submitted.

However it can be used if it needs to go to appeal.

Joffrey all three of my friends dc with ASD, were awarded enhanced mobility pip on the grounds that due to anxiety/ social communication problems they couldn't undertake any journey alone.
If the above applies to your ds he will be awarded mobility.

Lunch they do read the paperwork, it was wrong of them not to in your case. However they will look and functional test on the day and award that more weight.

My son does travel around by train, going to see brothers, friends and going to social things with his friends but he always goes with someone, or if alone we take him to the station (or he gets a taxi) and a friend/brother meets the other end. So if he was asked he'd say he travels all over the place - but we are always working 'behind the scenes' to make sure he is not alone. He thinks he's doing things independently though and if asked by someone assessing him would insist he can do everything.

I have read online that the % of not face to face ones are increasing - but am not certain what I'd need to do to make it more likely he won't get face to face. I wonder if people on the spectrum have a higher chance of not being interrogated?

i dont understand these life time awards.....surely everyone should be assessed regularly.....only today in the paper theres a guy who has been on disability for years (couldnt walk apparently) but was working as a stripogram...i think the changes are to benefit true claimants and get rid of the fraudulent ones....and the fake carers....i know that wont be popular but it happens....a close relative had a carer....only the carer took the money but never did any caring.....kept an old wheelchair in her car to use the blue badge....the relative never had the benefit of it, try reporting it and it falls on deaf ears.....when relative died this 'carer' was most put out when they asked for the blue badge back....theres plenty of it going on, same as benefit cheat/single parents/ etc.....the government have to sort it out someway as in its current state the system is unsustainable...i know it prob adds to the stress of everything but everything seems to be a disability today, bad backs, depression.....there has to be a fine line somewhere!

Here we go with the 'I know someone' anecdotes.

'.i think the changes are to benefit true claimants and get rid of the fraudulent ones....and the fake carers....'

BULLSHIT. They are to punish the most vulnerable people.

You don't understand lifetime awards? You think conditions like Down's Syndrome go away? People with no legs grow new ones?

Lifetime awards are only given to people whose condition will not improve or is getting worse.

I know someone called Mary who had a canary, up the leg of her skirt!

I wonder if those who think that fraudulent claims for DLA/pip are rife have ever gone through the stress of having to apply?

I doubt it and I'm not prepared to list my daughter's disabilities just so someone can say, oh we don't mean people like her but it's people like her who are having to be reassessed
The dwp have her whole history since she was 3 and she's 16 now. They know all her specialists, they know all our life inside out. They've been out recently to see her, before she had major bloody surgery. The is not going to be a miracle in our case, there never will be. We are a good family, we work hard to make her and our whole family happy. It's just not fair. It took me three days to fill out the dla forms and a tenner to photocopy them. It was a few months ago. My daughter isn't wasting taxpayers money, the dwp are!

Potato the fraud rate for dla is less than 0.5% so forgive me for not believing pip is to weed out fraudsters. If you read the linked consultation the dwp admit the purpose of pip was to save 20% on disability payments.

I doubt any fraudster would find so stressful as they don't actually rely on the outcome, for them it's more of a bonus IYKWIM. Completely different if your whole livelihood depends on it.

But given that it is very difficult for a claim to go anywhere if you don't have 162 different forms of evidence for everything then a fraudulent claim isn't likely to get very far anyway

What is interesting is that most kids like mine with DLA (icluding those with DLA for life awards) were probably only able to get it after months or years of medical investigations. My son had reports written by top consultants, etc who had seen him and a specialist autism clinic where he was eventually fully diagnosed... Yet the PIP system accept boxes ticked by physiotherapists or similar. Who are not qualified to understand conditions like autism (and many, many others). So those of us who got, or whose kids got, DLA awards under the old system after input from highly qualfied, experienced consultants in the relevant field, may well lose it due to the opinion of... a physio?

I don't get why there isn't an outcry about this.

And presumably it is actually a system that would be easier to defraud, if unqualified people who are not experts in the field, are submitting medical information to decision makers.

Potatoface, if you have the cure for autism it would be wonderful if you'd share it with us? For Life awards made perfect sense. Before my son got his, I had to submit maybe 100 page plus forms every several years - repetitive nonsense, asking for the same info over and over. (At one point I seem to recall you had to give the same basic info at least three times on different parts of the form). I pointed out to them frequently that if they had the cure for autism, I'd love to know about it. Eventually they gave in and admitted his condition wasn't going to go away.

All PIP assessors are healthcare professionals with at least 2 years experience in their profession and most have a lot more than that before they are allowed to apply.

But I don't think a physiotherapist with 25 years' experience is entitled to pass an opinion on a person on the autistic spectrum when the previous system took account of detailed info from consultants in the area. I am aware they are ticking boxes for a civil servant somewhere else ultimately to tot up points and make a decision - but I'd still take a widely published and respected paediatric consultant's considered opinion, over a person with much less qualifications and experience in a totally, utterly, unrelated area. A passing lorry driver might have a more informed opinion, if he had grown up in an house with an autistic sister, for example. ;o)

blue the point is they aren't necessarily qualified in the area of medicine in which they are assessing. "Medical professional" can mean a midwife, nothing wrong with midwives, but should they be assessing outside their expertise? The argument the DWP/ATOS/Maximum use is that they are only concerned with what people can, the conditions are irrelevant , so any medical professional can do it, but that just isn't the case.

I can name three medical professionals (doctors and nurses) who refused to work with them because the training they went on was against their professional training.

There was a website detailing the training received, but that's now been taken down wonder why.

Sorry that should read "what people can do"

Do you think your GP is a specialist in every condition people ask him/her about???
Medical evidence provided from the GP and specialists IS read by the assessors and IS taken into account.

Blue if you were in an accident and needed immediate surgery would you be happy with an OT performing the operation. Would you trust them to carry out the procedure correctly because they were a hcp and had two days training as a surgeon. Two days is the training Atos assessors receive.

Blue no however my GP has trained for years in order to be suitable qualified to advise on different medical conditions. Not two days.

Well I know of a company who do these assessments, and their hps do 4 weeks of training on top of their own qualifications.