To be sick of all the newspaper articles saying lies about DLA and PIP

[elliejjtiny]

To get any DLA or PIP you have to be significantly disabled. To get the higher rate of either part you have to be severely disabled.

A motability car is not free, it's rented. To get one you need to either be unable to walk 50 metres or have a severe learning disability, which is very difficult to get.

It's always happened but since the stuff in the news about changes to PIP it's got worse.

Articles in the newspapers claiming you can get a free car for bed wetting, which just doesn't happen. There will be children like my ds who get DLA because they have a number of problems including bedwetting but nobody gets high rate mobility for bed wetting on its own.

There are other articles about people claiming PIP and DLA for various minor sounding conditions and I am so fed up with it. I know from experience that the newspapers will have talked to people claiming PIP/DLA and twist everything they say to make them sound like a scrounger.

All these articles are giving off the message that anyone with any minor disability can claim loads of benefits.

@GivenUpOnSleep where is your proof that means testing (or effectively means testing) child benefit has cost the government more to administer than it has saved? I absolutely cannot find any evidence of this and I would love to see your definitive proof.

I’ve posted the figures for you twice now.

Absolutely agree. They’d never let such comments stand if it were racism or sexism involved rather than ableism. It’s inexcusable.

The source of the figures. As in the report where the data came from

To be fair there is an ‘all men are perverts’ thread going atm so..

I didn’t see it nor did I report it. I’ve been watching TV and have only just come back to this thread.

Nah, I'm too old to get much benefit from it. I was thinking about my children, actually.

Talking of Scotland, as you did in the previous comment you made quoting me, you do know that we pay more income tax here, do you, and that personal care for the elderly is 'free' ( paid for by the local authority)? I have paid my share of income tax over the years - for many years at higher rates than they are now - and continue to pay income tax on my pension. So I am a taxpayer and I would be as affected by higher taxes as anyone else.

In my view, it is a privilege to pay tax - in order to pay it, one has to earn it. Yes, there are some terrible injustices in the system, the worst being that parents are taxed on the money they spend on childcare to enable them to work. No amount of 'free' hours compensates for that. Yes care of children is another long term financial time bomb that needs to be sorted and that would get my vote too.

The disability budget is growing unsustainably but because of a huge increase in genuine disability. Which is also the reason that NHS spending is growing unsustainably too - it has grown exponentially since the NHS was founded but nobody's suggesting we just stop treating people unless they're wheelchair users or bed bound. People seem to be able to see that that would be both inhumane and counterproductive.

But why is there a huge increase in disability? What is the cause?

All of the figures in my posts have come from one of the following:

1. The Office for National statistics (ons.gov.uk)
2. Government accounts published by the National Audit Office (nao.gov.uk) and on the .gov website itself
3. Official Government press releases
4. OBR historical data
5. Paliamentary research papers available at parliament.uk
6. Independent economic reports that are publicly available such as the one I referred to commissioned by Jeremy Hunt

All publicly available data should you care to look.

A number of factors:

1. Longer life expectancy meaning many more people survive to old age but often with multiple degenerative health problems
2. More of the children who are born with disabilities or where premature birth has caused disability surviving than in earlier decades
3. A useless healthcare system with some of the worst outcomes for any developed country and a lack of preventative care, and where timely treatment is not accessible so treatable conditions deteriorate the extent they become disabling
4. Unhealthy lifestyles and food
5. Better survival rates for certain medical conditions than decades ago but in many cases not meaning the patient is fully restored to health
6. Better diagnosis of some medical conditions for which patients previously would have lived on the fringes of society in extreme poverty, been put in asylums, or - if they were incredibly fortunate - cared for by family but hidden away from society.

Advances in medicine and healthcare technology, ironically. We are saving the lives of many people who wouldn't have survived their illnesses, accidents, or premature births even a few decades ago. But they are often disabled by them. People surviving strokes and heart attacks and then receiving medication that keeps them alive for much longer but not in good health. Babies going on to live that would have been born too early to have been viable even thirty years ago. But having been disabled by not being in the womb long enough to develop to full health viability. If we could just acknowledge that the rise in need is real we'd have a better chance of tackling our response to it.

And on the mental health front, you have the people trying to care for these more disabled family members with less and less help from the state and no real prospect of any suitable employment. And young people seeing all this and wondering if they have any hope of a happy life. Plus the pressures of being young in the current economic and social climate with all the miseries brought by social media etc. Britain was found in one study to have the 2nd worse mental health of any country in the world. I think it was only Uzbekistan where people had poorer mental health. Even war torn countries like Ukraine and Yemen scored higher, alarmingly. The weather doesn't help!

Are you not able to have a care package provided by the local authority to support your husband with caring for you? I am physically disabled and have a care package, and many years ago my DM had a care package to help me with her care when she lived with me.

I am merely asking (again) specifically for the report or other data source that shows that that there is a net cost of billions associated with effectively means testing Child Benefit. As you are super super clever, it really shouldn't be too hard for you to post a link.

If we can consider rising SN rates in schools as well I’d add on

7.Introducing and doubling down on stressful practices within school that do not benefit any child and mean that more and more can’t cope, therefore ending up on the SN register and being more likely to suffer through school.

When my oldest started school the children like him (autistic but not “severely”) were just about able to cope. When my second dc started school there were a few not able to cope. When my youngest dc started school there were more who needed help and special attention.

What I’m trying to say (probably badly!) is that the children in these scenarios haven’t changed. Their mothers (like me) have had to step up to try to get our children’s needs met so they can access education in some meaningful way, and in return we have been vilified and told we’re the problem, and that our children are the problem - we’re the families who managed 20 years ago! In these particular cases, the children who are the butt of the “autism is over diagnosed” comments, and this number is growing.

I could quite agree, maybe they’re not autistic, or at least not at a level that would need diagnosis and support a few decades ago, but that doesn’t take away the issue that with increased targets and pressures within schools, with increased poor quality interactions with teachers whose teaching abilities were trusted until some point in the early 2000s who now have a much narrower way of teaching, with really lovely teachers leaving (a few years ago when I had to home ed one of my dc the fastest growing people joining home ed groups on fb were teachers - mainly mothers who decided that given their experience of teaching there was no way they were going to put their dc through school), with the rise in academies and their authoritarian rules, that work for a few, but backfire in many because they’re natural rebels or they’re utter stressheads.
And then these children who cannot cope become harder to handle because they’re so destroyed by this, and this impacts everyone in the family, and schools and LAs double down in their “they’re fine” attitude, even though pretty much all EHCPs are awarded, some after a lengthy, expensive and illegal fight from the LA. And eventually parent seek to explain what’s so wrong with their child, why can’t they cope, and autism fits, or ADHD, and explains everything they’re going through. And by that point usually the mother’s work is suffering so she has to cut down her hours to be flexible enough for her child, then you apply for DLA and get it because your child needs therapy to help them, but there’s no way of affording it because your wages have reduced so much.

And then you read threads like this where stupid people tell you that you are the problem, you’re feeding your child shit, you’re sitting them in front of video games all night, you are creating this fucking problem and expecting others to pick up the pieces. And ignore the elephant in the room that is the school procedures that have changed, OFSTED standards that actively harm children, and the growing number of children suffering because of it.

And then you’re surprised that this stupid bloody country is paying more and more in DLA and PIP, that councils are struggling under SEND costs (but are happy to ignore the huge amount of money that councils lost through their own inadequacies), and you have the fucking audacity to still blame parents and suggest they’re snowflakes who aren’t taking responsibility for their unruly, badly parented children.

Wait until the cohort of struggling children grows some more, maybe including your own. You may feel differently then.

Meanwhile the government is reaping what it’s sown and the vulnerable are being blamed.

It’s cheaper to blame parents the other things take money to fix.

Although I would argue it’s not actually cheaper if anyone was to look at the bigger picture both across different departments and in the long term.

From the HMRC webtie
"HMRC estimates the lost revenue resulting from tax evasion each year in its measuring tax gaps publication. Its most recent estimate is that tax evasion cost £5.5 billion in 2022–23, equivalent to around 0.7% of all taxes owed. Tax evasion is inherently difficult to estimate because evaders aim to keep it hidden.12 Feb 2025"
"Seven large tech groups estimated to have dodged £2bn in UK tax in 2021"
More sources:
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201314/ldselect/ldeconaf/48/4803.htm

Loads of the big companies pay inadequate tax or only started pahying fairly recently

Open your eyes @Wildflowers99 also I can show you how to use google if you need help.

Have you got any idea how little 5 billion is in relation to the numbers we are talking about? Disability benefits alone costs 50 billion a year. 10 times that amount. Then there’s the bigger UC and pensions.

There is zero point in engaging with the poster in question. Their basic position is "only work will set you free, hang the collateral damage, if you're poor it's your own fault and wealth transfer is a figment of the imaginations of immature and unintelligent contrarians".

In one word - austerity. The cuts in NHS spending, particularly on mental health care for children and young people, is coming back to bite us on the bum.

It's still going on, although I hope that the extra NHS appointments will help the waiting lists for surgeries that improve mobility, specifically. Waiting years for a hip replacement is an example of someone who may become permanently disabled through pain, age and loss of skeletal fitness, even though they might eventually have the op.

I couldn’t agree more and your post should be pinned at the top of every thread on here about education or SEND, EHCPs, etc.

I am in the process now of taking our Local Authority, such as it purports to be, to tribunal for the third time.

I don’t know how these people sleep at night and they should all be removed from post. I don’t see anything changing in education until a competent regulator is put in place which will prosecute schools and Local Authorities for every single legal breach reported (rather than expect parents to do it individually) and levy fines of sufficient magnitude to remove the peverse financial incentives that motivate this behaviour and removes from post all Local Authority staff involved. The TRA also needs replacing with a competent professional body that will suspend teachers pending investigation and strip them of professional qualifications when they are found to have broken the law, like in every other sector.

Meanwhile, the total education budget is only 7.4% of national spending. That needs to change, drastically, with the entire system overhauled.

The current system serves very few children well. The problem is clearly trying to force everyone into mainstream schools which work for a vanishingly small proportion of children.

Some children will never cope with the curriculum and need to be in specialist schools because they have learning difficulties or other physical disabilities.

Some children can’t cope with the environment and large class sizes due to autism for example, but are very academically bright and need small specialist schools with strong pastoral care, small class sizes, but that are very academic (these do not exist at all).

Other academic children would be ok with large classes but need less disruption so need to be in schools tailored to academic ability (e.g. the old grammar school model).

Some children have talents in music, sport, art or practical skills and the current curriculum almost entirely excludes these and doesn’t allow them to develop their talents and skills. Therefore, they become disruptive and stop others learning and leave school thinking they are stupid having not been given a chance to develop their strengths.

Some children have severe behavioural problems and should be in specialist provision for that so that they don’t prevent others from learning.

The very few children in the middle of the range with average intelligence, for whom the curriculum and environment is designed, could benefit from mainstream school as it stands if all the others weren’t forced to attend.

The solution is far more choice of schools catering for different children’s needs and talents, rather than this insistence that everyone is the same and this factory farming approach will work. It has been proved that it does not.

However, the Government’s most recent proposals by the clueless Education Minister are to move in precisely the opposite direction, doubling down on the ideology that we can pretend children are identical clones and that their needs can be met in mainstream school, meaning that very few children can thrive at all. She is actually proposing to try to restrict access to specialist provision even further and pile even more children into mainstream schools, making it even more impossible for teachers to cater for the hugely disparate needs of the children in their classes (which are double the size they should be).

Unless this country starts to invest properly in appropriate education for all of its children, with a much wider choice of schools that are appropriate for each child without parents having to fight protracted legal battles to secure it then the future of this country looks very bleak. This should be the first priority for public spending and yet we have an Education Minister proposing measures that will make the situation even worse and gaslighting parents releasing statements saying that she “wants to restore their trust”. She needs to start listening.

This country’s financial problems are due to decades of economic mismanagement. They are not the fault of children with SEND, or disabled people. They are the fault of incompetent politicians and an economically illiterate electorate who continue to vote for their ridiculous policies and give them a mandate for further stupidity.

Ahahaaaa I see. So me having even explained the calculation to you and provided the calculation and a detailed explanation wasn’t sufficient. Firstly you denied I’d done so, so I posted it again. Then you claimed I’d made the figures up and told you where to find them, even with website addresses, and this wasn’t sufficient either and you expect me to provide actual links to them?

You really are quite funny.

I don't agree with your calculations. They are based on incorrect assumptions. It would be simple to post a link to prove me wrong. Go on, I dare you .. link to the data that proves that it's costing the government billions to means test Child Benefit.

This is what most posters do, provide a link