To be concerned about what Liz Kendall is up to with disability benefits?

[Locutus2000]

The Times reporting just how enthusiastic Labour are about targeting the disabled.

I can only hope they are getting the worst ideas out there first, if not I dread to think what is coming in the upcoming review.

I was confident Labour would at worst be no worse than the Tories.

I was wrong.

Free archive link here.

Anyway, if you think the pressure on the public purse is high now, just wait until the baby boomers start needing care.

This was quite a nice thread. Not the topic but sensible debate. The odd person has tried to pull in frothing, bot, and gotcha and have been swiftly ignored. Hopefully people can be more grown up about what is happening because we are in for a bumpy ride. People are going to have to accept that Labour are in charge and their current policies will speed up the dismantling of the welfare state. Don’t start pulling your own thread down.

I'd like to see Rachel Reeves try to live with someone with mental health issues before she starts cutting their benefits. Dh and I both worked full time since late teens, paid our tax and NI contributions for over 35 years each, then he suddenly developed psychosis, severe depression and GAD. I have had to give up work to become his full time carer as he cannot be left alone. Many times I've felt like just walking away but I know he'd end up in some kind of nursing home (which would cost the government a heck of a lot more than my measly carers allowance) or he'd just kill himself. I'm not talking about someone who feels a bit low occasionally, I'm talking about someone with severe mental health issues. To all the people who think it's so easy to get LCW and LCWRA, ESA, PIP etc for mental health issues, I bet none of them have ever tried. It's a completely humiliating, soul destroying process that doesn't just happen once, you are reviewed time and time again, you can never relax and any excuse is found by the DWP to stop your payments. We do get support from the local CMHT, Psychosis team and Social services but it's sporadic and the amount of staff leaving these jobs is shocking. There just aren't enough staff to go around, they frequently don't turn up, don't know dhs history as they have such a massive workload and in the last 2 years with the CMHT, 3 of dhs caseworkers have left due to stress. Instead of reducing the benefits of people who are mentally ill, which seems to be the way things are heading, massive improvements need to be made to mental health services, therefore enabling people to get better quicker.

I don't want the thread derailed at all, but it wasn't me who started the personal attacks.

Yes, agree.
Low paid workers are seeing almost zero benefit for all their hard work. I think so much of this comes down to housing costs.

Sorry, should read Liz Kendall!

Oh please, this is the woman who claimed for her heating bills on her second home while cutting the winter fuel allowance.

It's not the decisions which annoy me as much as the hypocrisy.

50% of pensioners in care currently pay for themselves (total population paying in all ways = 300,000. So 150,000 council funded. )
3% of 18-64 year olds in social care pay for themselves ( total population paying in all ways = 150,000. So 145,500 council funded )

The later is rising exponentially with increased mh issues.

apologies for the derail but I do think the numbers are worth noting to bring the discussion back on thread

I was a community nurse back in the 2000s, at the time where NHS satisfaction was at an all time high, economy good and everyone was happy.

Even then we were being warned about what would happen to social care in the 2020s onward with an aging population living longer and longer. Nobody listened.

Edit: reply to @FreedomandPeace

I think it will be less than you think. Baby boomers are phenomenally asset rich at population level. 1 in 4 over 65s lives in a household with net assets of over a million pounds. The threshold for self funding is only £23k in savings!

At that time of course no one considered or perhaps even knew that mental health issues would rise to the levels they are now.
Increasing year on year.

This is a whole social care issue which needs to be tackled and of course there’s little we can do to change the number and age of people living today.

Some figures since 2000

At that time of course no one considered or perhaps even knew that mental health issues would rise to the levels they are now.

We knew the care crisis was going to be catastrophic, the huge jump in sickness benefits combined with a collapsed NHS we did not see coming.

It's horribly bleak.

The car is not free, but you know this already.

Is this true? I was under the impression it was, but I don't know very much about it

My FIL has a motability vehicle. He gets it instead of a different mobility benefit. But if you're paying for the car out of benefits, which are also "free" money, does that not make it essentially free?

Or do you need a source of income independent of any benefits in order to have a motability car?

@EasternStandard I have already responded to another poster and suggested that I feel the cliff edges in the system - all of them, the ones relating to benefits too - need to be dealt with. And yes, I can see the connections - but how is repeating the mistakes of the past going to improve anything? What would you suggest, if not more of what we've had for the last 14 years? Businesses need to change their working practices to allow people who want to work but cannot do so full time in a rigid structure to work. That will take a mixture of carrot and stick. The NHS needs both funding and reform so that waiting lists come down and people get treated and well enough to work again rather than waiting for years getting worse and more disconnected from work and all its benefits.

None of this is easy to achieve - but what would you do by way of an alternative bar more of the same?

We;ve been over this. If the benefits being used to make the car 'free', then child benefit makes food for your children 'free', pensions (which are also benefits) make living costs for pensioners 'free'. You can't have it both ways,

I think potentially "we" (as a country) could recover all of that money and more by just taxing the rich and closing tax loopholes. But as usual, it's the most vulnerable in society that are blamed.

I agree with you, it is all free money, perhaps with the exception of pensions. Even pensions though, it's just a lie that you have to work all your life to qualify, you don't. Plenty of pensioners today would have worked (paid, out of the home work) hardly a day. I come from a family of generational benefits claimants, many are now claiming pensions.

She’s said she wants to reduce the adults on sickness benefits for bad backs/mental health, and for so many children on DLA for various things. 🤷‍♀️

She’s also said she wants working age adults to improve their hours worked/hourly rate, so they need many less top up benefits. 🤷‍♀️

I don’t know how successful this might be for them. It’s been said for decades.🙄

As @pointythings has detailed in her post, and not forgetting that plenty of people also work, and receive PIP. Not that it should make any difference to the fact that it is not a 'free car'.

I really hope they don't. I am genuinely terrified by it all. I am on LCWRA, but no PIP, so if only people on PIP can get the higher rate of UC, then I will be absolutely fucked.
The £800ish I get from LCWRA is all I get. If that is halved, I would not be able to afford to live. So what would be the point.

If someone uses their child benefit to pay for the lease on a car, does that mean the car is "free"?

Try not to worry too much xenobitch, I know easier said than done, but let's wait until the green paper comes out. Until that happens, everything is speculation. I think Reeves and Kendall will, or hope they will, remember what happened when Osborne went too far in his proposals. He got his arse handed to him by his own party. I think quite a lot of Labour bankbenchers won't take kindly to too much cruelty to disabled people.

This idea has been discussed as well.
The more we make living here or investing here less desirable for the more wealthy the more that just leave.

We need them to pay those higher rate taxes and provide employment.
If an even higher % leave, what then…..who pays as only as very small % of the population pay into the system more than they take out in their lifetime.

A policy that makes the UK less desirable is simply cutting your nose off to spite your face.