To think this will just increase pressure on the poorest/vulnerable?

[Zebedee55]

Sanctions increased, putting more (often unrealistic) pressure on parents, carers, and sick/disabled.🙁

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/universal-credit-sanctions-hunt-budget-b2298836.html

100% this.

My partner was initially diagnosed with anxiety and prescribed beta blockers, and got two weeks off work. They didn’t help.

Went back to his GP, diagnosed with depression and given antidepressants. Given a website to go on to do breathing exercises. Didn’t help. told to wait for 6 weeks. Signed off for this time. Didn’t help.

Went back to GP. Given different antidepressants and told to go for a jog. Signed off for another month. Got worse.

This went on for a year, with periods of working for a few weeks and being signed off for a month. Got referred to work occupational health and get counselling, which was fantastic. Lose job regardless.

Back to GP. Get put on waiting list for 6 sessions of counselling (yay!) and psychiatrist, and handed different tablets. Mental health crisis happens. I call NHS 24, the police, everyone.

Eventually, finally get to see psychiatrist after over 18 months. Get correct medication. Get a community psychiatric nurse. Get counselling. Get better. Get job.

My DC, 40s, do not expect to receive a state pension.

I'm a carer of a disabled child, two in fact. One on HRCLRM and one on MRCLRM. Youngest started school last school year and I had an amazing job offer lined up. I couldn't find anywhere to look after either of them for wrap around.

They both need full time 1-1 care and in ASC I would need to pay for these 1-1s.

I'm not an unintelligent, incapable person. I have two degrees but obviously two disabled DC was not planned for. We realised about oldest at the youngest's HV appointment when he was a few weeks old and the HV started questioning some of the things she was seeing DD do.

It is genuinely so demoralising, I lost absolutely everything when I had to become a full time carer. Employers won't be flexible and specialist childcare doesn't exist in an affordable manner.

I know they aren't targeting unpaid carers yet but I feel that will be inevitable and expectations to also work. Reliant on benefits we are actually comfortable, but I don't want that life for us and an trapped.

So two weeks out of 4, on a zero hours contract he could do. But he would also have to WFH, due to the terror induced by having to leave his house, and with minimal contact with other people, because he can barely string a sentence together.

It crossed my mind that doing some sort of assembly work at home might be feasible, then I remembered that his hands are fucked because of his Raynaud's.

"If you were working full time then you weren’t his carer were you?"

My husband works full time and is a carer for our son because our son needs 2:1 care. When my husband is at work I have to manage on my own ( even though it is not safe).

Free childcare from 1 year old so women can go back to work after maternity leave. Benefits capped to a year unless you are disabled. Free school meals for all kids during term time.

"Free childcare from 1 year old so women can go back to work after maternity leave."

There will never be suitable childcare for some children. For some children there aren't even school places.

Child-free by choice, thanks, so no need to consider any such thing.

But if everyone considered what would happen if they were unable to get childcare before having children, only the very well-off would be able to afford it and in a few decades there wouldn't be enough working-age people to provide essential services.

The UK birth rate is well under the generally accepted replacement rate of just over 2 children per woman, which has implications for our future workforce.

I suppose we could allow more immigration to fill the gaps, but Daily Mail readers would implode.

"If you were working full time then you weren’t his carer were you?"

My mum works full time and was a carer for her dad. This was registered with the GP. Being a carer does not mean you are there 24/7.
Some school age children are carers for their parents, yet still go to school etc.

Honestly, I wish I could block users and avoid their posts. Most of the crap coming from a certain poster is here just nasty and inflammatory.

I've often wondered how much it all costs, and one of these days I may get round to drafting an FOI request.

I'd also like to know how much it costs to hold an appeal tribunal, both to the DWP preparing their evidence and the tribunal service itself. I got the bundle for a PIP appeal the other day, it was over 200 pages. The cost of the staff time digging out all that must be significant.

MH seems to cover a lot of things that aren't necessarily short lived.
If someone has learning difficulties for example but that doesn't hinder their day to day living they are deemed as fit for work, this leads to a lifetime cycle of applying for jobs they're not competent to do, losing the job, repeat.
I don't feel this is fair on recruiters who want to find competent staff.
As much as I agree with the notion that everyone should contribute and take responsibility for themselves, not everyone can contribute to the same value and sometimes that's more of a hindrance to a business.

@LakieLady Yes, I agree. It must all be costing so much, and when it would seem that so many of the cases that goes to the tribunal end up winning, I wonder why the system was changed to PIP in the first place. All these costs to supposedly root out a small % of ungenuine claimants.

@Sendbobsandvagene Good thing that you have absolutely no power over who is allowed to come here then.

It's already happening in social care, at least in the part of East Anglia where my friend works in a dementia care home.

They have so much trouble getting staff that they are now employing staff from South Asia, mostly India, through an agency who sort out their visas and everything. The new staff are almost all nurses in their home country and are doing the necessary training to work as nurses here, which I believe takes 6-12 months.

What is bizarre about it is that the new staff are employed as senior carers, because they have a nursing qualification, and cost the employer >£16ph when the agency fee is tacked on, but have to be supervised by more junior staff because they don't know how to do all the reporting and record keeping that needs to be done, or how to use some of the equipment safely.

If they'd been prepared to paid their existing staff a few £££s more than the £11.20 they currently get, they might not have had an exodus of people to better-paid retail and other work. Now they've lost even more staff, because they got the hump at being paid less than the staff they're training and got out of care entirely.

It was changed to supposedly save money and something about needing to reassess everyone just in case they somehow get better.

So you want the UK to become a failed state?

Brilliant.

@SouthCountryGirl yes, including people with things like Parkinsons, MS and Down Sydrome. It was always intended to be punitive and nothing more.

Of course it is, which is why she's not worth engaging with.

But if everyone considered what would happen if they were unable to get childcare before having children, only the very well-off would be able to afford it and in a few decades there wouldn't be enough working-age people to provide essential services.

Sounds a bit like abdicating responsibility to me.
If you are considering having a child then you should be considering how you will finance that child, not expecting someone else to pick up the tab. You don't have to be rich to have a child, but you should have some form of back up plan in case things don't work out as expected.

So you want the UK to become a failed state?

We're already well on our way without assistance from the public, our current government are doing a great job there.

The new staff are almost all nurses in their home country and are doing the necessary training to work as nurses here, which I believe takes 6-12 months.

I wonder who is paying for this?

Honestly @Moonicorn is getting such a hard time for simply suggesting the obvious. That people take responsibility for their own lives.

I do understand that there are people with significant mental health issues that need support and will find it difficult to carry on working.

However, there will also be those people who claim MH and then use it as a cover to get out of working. The idea that all benefits claimants are innocent and genuine is as bizarre as the idea that they’re all gaming the system.

If someone has depression, we should, as a society, aim to support them through it. That doesn’t mean that they can live off the state for the remainder of their lives. It means having a system in place to financially assist and providing appropriate care to them. But they have to take actions to help themselves as well.

This idea that if you have a MH issue that you’re immediately rendered incapable of helping yourself is infantilising and frankly, patronising.

Just because someone had a MH condition doesn’t automatically mean they can’t work with correct support in place.

As a society, we seem to want it all. We want a ridiculously generous benefit system where no one has to take accountability for anything, we want all the public services to be robust and efficient AND we want to pay as little tax as possible for those outcomes. Expecting to get the world on a pittance.

@clairelouwho may I suggest you look up the data on benefit fraud as a % of the whole vs benefits left unclaimed as a % of the whole?

@Moonicorn is rightfully being called out on their utter unwillingness to accept that there are people who are genuinely not fit for work, that there are people whose lives are not the same as @Moonicorn's life and that there is a huge range of things that happen in people's lives to make them prohibitively different. That, and the total lack of compassion. Their unwillingness/inability to read up doesn't help them either.

I agree with you that if we want better services, we should pay more tax. That would be a good idea - move towards a high wage, high tax, high service economic model. People don't want that because they are inherently selfish.

Really. Moonicorn suggested that someone who is on a depot injection for bipolar get a job where they can work for the 2 weeks out of every month that they are feeling a bit more human. Never mind that they would probably still be unsafe to operate machinery or drive.

They implied that MH is someone's fault because they are not trying hard enough to get better.

Then there is using their own inpatient experience as a way to justify all they are saying like they are some sort of expert. I knew someone like that..... had a one time stay inpatient stay about 15 years ago, and now thinks everyone else who has had the same should be getting on with their life. Totally ignores the fact that a lot of the patients they were in hospital with probably have had loads of admissions since then.

I do agree there should be more support... but the reality is that there just is not any.