Disability Benefits

[LIVVI1234]

Can someone advise - I keep seeing everywhere, Labour supporters saying Conservatives plan on dropping disability benefits - is this true?

I have never actually seen this anywhere? I understand they didn't have many changes planned to the current benefits we already have, which isn't great but I hadn't heard they were dropping them.

I have 2 dc, one diagnosed ASD, Developmental Co-Ordination disorder & on a lifetime DLA award - middle rate care & lower rate mobility - dc1 was transferred to pip & given an lower rate care award for a year! (On reading the HP report, I think we were in different rooms, she lied, minimised & manipulated what was said)

DC2 has ASD, Learning Disabilty, GPeg fed, & a couple of other medical & physical conditions. He’s been taken off his lifetime DLA award, given higher rate care & mobility but has to be reassessed when he’s 26. Nothing is going to have changed for either of them, they both have life time disabilities.

DC1 has recently been diagnosed with Inflammatory Bowel Disease, really not looking forward to having to put him through the humiliation of being interviewed/assessed & lied about again

I've just had to do my Mum's review form. It specifically says 'has anything changed?' and gives tiny 2.5cm boxes to write in, but after googling, I found out that the decision maker doesn't have a copy of your old form when they look at it and if you say 'no change' it is seen as a positive thing and points aren't awarded. So I had to go through and write "when DM applied 2 years ago, she could.... Now she can't.... This is worse than the last time."

She scored 29 points last time for care and 12 for mobility (despite being technically mobile at the time she didn't have the capacity to walk alone). Now she's much, much worse. I'll be livid if they put my parents through the stress of appeal.

two thirds of cases are successful at appeal stage, I believe. If that doesn't tell us anything, then...

Kinda cruel that the mps probably spend more on a bottle of wine with their lunch than they give those looking after a disabled person ( family member) at £87a week it goes no where near covering the loss in earning when we have to give up work for years to provide 24-7 care needs.

I became unwell a couple of years ago and had to claim benefits. It has been an utter nightmare. Over 2 years on and I am still struggling to sort them out. I'm lucky that I've had help from my social worker otherwise I would have given up as it is just relentless and extremely stressful having spent over 2 years trying to make sense of the UC system. Every week we make phone calls, write on the journal, send letters and evidence and it is always 1 step forward and 2 steps back. The people at UC don't understand how it works themselves. Despite being in hospital when I made the claim (and someone from the Job centre visiting me), constant references to being in hospital made on the journal, speaking about it on the phone and asking them to phone me at the hospital and send forms to the hospital, last week they suddenly told me they had no idea I was in hospital and so therefore the housing costs I was trying to claim wouldn't be paid. Having to go for a mandatory reconsideration or whatever they call it. Just so drained by it and it has definitely affected my health and made my recovery slower and all the debt I'm getting into doesn't help.

@salsmum it's £66 carers allowance in the U.K.

shocking.

Now, now, @danni0509, be honest, it's £66.15 We should be grateful for those 15ps

Mine will stop with the end of dla because apparently after 15yrs of being a carer I suddenly miraculously dont need to do it anymore

Based on the minimum of 35 hours a week (haha!) then caters allowance works out at £1.89 an hour. It’s madness that’s it’s allowed.

But never mind we will get a £10 Christmas bonus. That makes everything alright

They tried to lower my son's on the basis that most teens have severe mental health problems and require a parent to collect them from school quite frequently. Also it is normal for teenagers to spends days awake, eat their clothes, self harm and obsessively count their clothes. All normal..

They took away his mobility allowance though. He gets middle rate for personal care only..

sammybins It recently topped over 75% - the DWP decision making process is completely unfit for process. Can you imagine any other scenario where people can get it wrong three-quarters of the time and not be subject to any kind of review or sanction? Imagine a surgeon who killed 75% of mothers or babies when they performed caesareans? Or an air traffic controller who crashed 75% of planes? These DWP staff have people’s lives in their hands just as much and yet nothing happens to them - because this is precisely how the government want it to work.

My friend had to apply for UC for her son.

This is an 18 year old who has the mental ability of a 9 month old baby, he can walk, but that's about it. He can cram food into his mouth with his hands, he can't communicate at all, he can't wash or dress himself and wouldn't even know what an oven is. Let alone cook a meal.

She had to wait 3 months for his UC to be awarded and when it was it was at a much lower assessment rate just to check to see if his catastrophic brain damage he suffered as a result of the hospital cocking up his birth had repaired itself........he's lucky. As in his dad works and his mum's his carer so not as reliant on income. But if that had been a single carer or a person living alone they'd have been fucked. The UC system is inhumane, it punishes people for their very existence.

Two people I know that were originally awarded lifetime DLA awards had them removed and had to apply for PIP, just like everyone else. Both had conditions that were never going to improve, only worsen. One was cerebral palsy; how they think that will improve, I don't know.

The other scandal with the number of people who succeed at appeal for PIP is that they stop the money while you wait on the appeal and use “oh it’ll all be backdated if you win at appeal” to make it ok that people are being forced to wait 18 months with no money, no access to motability or various other schemes

Oh and carers allowance goes to bollockery when disabled people become adults. If we claim it it gets taken off their benefits........and who the hell's going to do that ?? I'll soon be facing a situation where I'll be my son's full time carer still so tied up and unable to work (( more so as he's leaving his college soon and will be coming home to me )) but don't feel I can claim carers allowance. His dad does work, although just over part time hours as my son needs 2/1 care outside of the home. We do own our own house thank God that we bought in better times and worked our arses off to pay off but with the loss of tax credits we're going to be over £100 a week worse off.

My son has Autism, he can have extremely, violent outbursts but is well managed. He hasn't had one for years because we know what we're doing. As does his college. But leaving him with new, often barely trained carers is a huge risk. One that could have disastrous consequences for him. One bad meltdown could see him under a hospital order, stuck in one room for years. And I just won't do that to him, we really are stuck.

We had to go to appeal to get the highest rate mobility on severe mental impairment grounds for a teenager with the understanding of a 1 year old who has 2:1 support at special school and is deemed to have behaviour too challenging to go to the local authority respite centre. All evidenced but apparently behaviour was not severe enough to qualify
Overturned straight away on appeal.

@FoamingAtTheUterus Double check that as usually it only affects the premiums and SDP isn’t paid unless the person lives alone anyway so it might not have a financial impact on his benefit

Also even if you felt you should hand over any reduction to him it’s worth claiming because of the home carer protection toward your state pension

Lyralalala, he's entitled to the severe, disability premium regardless (( I think )) the annoying thing is if we were on full benefits it would be worth claiming as id get extra income support.........but dp needs to work. For his own sanity as much as ours.

This all just makes me want to cry. I also have a DC with ASD getting DLA. it’s all getting very concerning. My friend who is a carer to two disabled children (one on DLA one about to go onto PIP) has also had no money this month from UC as her husband who works full time was paid a day early in November, due to his normal payday falling on a weekend. She recently went for a mandatory reconsideration and was informed yesterday that she has lost the appeal as apparently she gets DLA for her children and carers allowance so she has money and should manage her money better and only see UC as a added top up. Words fail me.

@FoamingAtTheUterus To qualify for SDP you need to live alone or be classed as living alone. They’ll class someone as living alone if they have unrelated flatmates or if the other adults in the house are also on disability benefits. Double check, but the last information I had is that someone living with parents won’t qualify for the SDP as they can’t be classed as living alone

I'm an ex assessor. Left a few months back.

I ultimately left the job as its extremely corrupt, unethical and the working conditions we were put under and pressures to meet targets were very unfair.

But I do have some mixed views.

So the statistics of fraud are grossly wrong. Sorry I don't want to be one of those "well my friends cousins brother in laws aunties friend claims disability for her back but shes an Olympic gymnast" types. But we did get a lot of obvious lies or exaggerations. In my last week in the job this is three examples of what I encountered;

Girl completing a law degree and working part time as a note taker claiming she does not have the mental capacity to use a microwave and she can not read or follow a map, despite also being a driver and has never had any extra educational needs input.

Someone with a broken toe (yes, just that) claiming due to "worrying about his toe" he is not able to dress himself, needs reminded to feed himself, now unable to read as hes distracted by his toe and needs support to communicate and couldnt go out without some due to severe distress as he worries he could hurt his toe.

A lady with arthritis and chronic pain, crying in pain, walking about one step per minute while her son props her up into the room then claiming to be bed bound and peeing in a bucket, saying she has not left her house in months, then seen an hour later on my lunch break walking around Tesco's, walking normally holding multiple shopping bags.

I'll just emphasis though. This is still a small minority in the big scheme of things, the vast vast majority of people are genuinely in need and going through very tough times, and even the ones who are swinging the lead slightly I still hold a lot of empathy as when you get to the route of it they seem to be struggling severely in other aspects of life (mainly financially) and I think they are just desperate. But even so, that isn't the point of disability benefits.

The reason I give these antidotes though is just to show there definitely needs to be regulations in place and a systems to get the 'genuines' but PIP is wrong.

We were given very strict criteria to follow, and every month they would bring in more and more stricter rules that just restricts further and further those who get scored, you were then scrutinised for over scoring and monitored closely if you were 'too generous'. And if you do score anyone enhanced your report Is audited by another service and your report is pulled to pieces in an attempt to deduct. The senior staff are non clinical, they dont care If the claimant verbally abuses you or if someone became unwell in your assessment meaning its delayed you for an hour. They just demand you see certain amount of people in a set amount of time and take 0 exceptions. They are also the ones who get the bonuses. Its never the assessors.

So basically, I've seen first hand the criteria getting harsher month by month and the auditing process getting stricter by being forced to change scores more frequently. So yes, it's all definitely going down hill.

Although there will always be the ones who take the mick, ultimately I feel it's a lesser of two evils than the rest who are now being left to suffer, and unfortunately that wont change now thanks to the delightful considerate Tories.

How people can read this full thread and still say it's labour scaremongering. It's really not, all these stories are real people it's been happening to for years. The system is broken and sick/disabled people are in poverty.
If you are on these benefits or someone you know is and hasn't been affected, they'll be coming for you eventually.
Read @Talula1993 Previous post from
Someone who has worked amongst it. Criteria is always changing making it harder and harder for a successful claim. I'm all for regulations to stop fraud but come on this is really happening and has for years!

Yes definitely not scare mongering. Myself and my colleagues have been in utter distress and despair after being made to not score people who are extremely unwell (even terminal). It explains why the turn over in staff is up to 70% per year in some assessment centres.

There are ones that have a straight forward time with it if their conditions just falls clearly within the criteria, but anything variable or anything that doesnt follow a clear pattern. You'll have a tough time.

Example. Girl with learning disabilities, a lot of educational support, charity input, support worker, no qualifications, a lot of evidence to support this, she had a letter from the gp and because he described her as "insightful" that over rided e everything and her points were deducted based off that one comment.

Not scaremongering....maybe tory denial?