Motability cars - should they be UK made?

[Pandersmum]

Motability cars are currently in the news with suggestions VAT will be added. I realise they are a lifetime to some and a perk to others. They are a huge annual cost to the tax payer.

AIBU to think that all motability car choice should be limited to those manufactured in the UK? This would support British manufacturing worker jobs and increase UK business tax revenue whilst still providing cars for those who need them?

What equivalents for a type one diabetic with no spleen that don’t cost over £700 a month, don’t refuse to pay out for the first 24 months and aren’t limited to two years salary?

DB lives in the US, and one of his girlfriends hit here $1,000,000 cap for insulin in her late 30s. So then it was Medicaid for her.

This was 15 years ago (they have long since split). I have no idea how she'd be coping now they have scrapped Medicaid.

Generally any health insurance (all your BUPAs and that jazz) will run a mile from anything which even hints at a chronic condition. And even if you take out health insurance before you develop or acquire a chronic condition you will find that any costs that are a result are excluded.

As someone lucky enough to have a chronic progressive disease, I have had well over 30 years to know exactly how health insurance works. Which is you pay your premiums, and the shareholders and directors do alright thank you very much. Anything else is merely a chance outcome.

🤣 luckily you don't know anything about my personal circumstances.

I think you would be shocked to find out that I indeed have a condition that limits the type of job I can do and therfore the amount of money I can earn.

What I am trying to do is show you the pitfalls of the entitlement for benefits. Which rightly is currently well embedded into our laws.
But able bodied Joe Blocks only sees the shiny new car in the drive of their disabled neighbour... they read in the press that the benefits bill in gazillions and needs to be capped... they add 1+1 and hey presto it's 3 gazillions!
... and then Joe Blocks goes to the polls in the next GE. That's where the real danger lies.

You can get insurance on the off chance you get disabled and critically injured for life?

No.

Pleased to have sorted that out.

Because not everyone can afford it.

Sometimes you also suddenly can't work because it is your child who becomes ill.

Seems to be a few folks here who (not to my surprise, if I'm honest) struggle with how insurance works.

When I worked in insurance doing strategy and future scanning, the death of the insurance industry did crop up ... it's an inevitable consequence of modern technology (now you know what all that "AI" will be used for) enabling insurers to increasingly segregate risk factors and either decline policies that are too risky, or to add exclusion clauses to ensure their losses are capped.

When this happens, private insurance will pretty much disappear and we either go back to "Bad luck old chap" or look to the state for cover.

An idea of what that may look like is the houses that cannot get insurance due to being on a flood plain.

What cars are still totally British made? 🤷‍♀️🙄

https://shopping.mattel.com/en-gb/collections/matchbox ???

Yup. I get a lump sum for certain very serious illnesses, and 75% of my salary until pension age if I become too ill to work. It’s about £75 a month. Get it through work.

How exactly would your foolproof plan work for someone like me who has been severely physically disabled since birth, born without eyeballs and with multiple joint deformities. I'm interested in how you suggest an unborn baby could get the relevant insurance? Are there many policies that would insure a fetus against the risk of being born disabled and who exactly should pay the premium do you think.
While I have life insurance, at a high premium due to my disability, no insurer is willing to offer me critical illness cover due to my pre-existing conditions. where does your easy, universally applicable suggestion get those of us who are uninsurable in the event that our health worsens further making it impossible to work?
I am fortunate to be able to work. A need a great deal of equipment, adaptive technology, help from carers and PAS and a very supportive and flexible employer to allow me to remain in employment, most people with my level of disability are not so fortunate. Without PIP I would be unable to work as the equipment and support I pay for with PIP and which allows me to function from day to day and actually get to work and perform while there would be unaffordable. My PIP already fails to cover all of the costs due to my disability which I subsidise with my salary meaning I am, in fact, considerably worse off than a non disabled person doing the same job.
It's ignorant, ill-informed bigots like you with their stupid glib suggestions and "I'm all right Jack" attitudes that make me despair.

Do you really think the OP and their ilk give a toss ?

No, nor the MN mods who allow countless hate-filled threads about disabled people, like this one, to pop up on here every single day and allow them to flourish completely unchecked. I know I'm shouting into the void but someone needs to keep countering this blatant hate speech and holding the MN authorities to account for their tolerance and therefore tacit approval of outright hate aimed at disabled people.

You're being unfair on MNHQ - they have to pay the bills too. It's not like they are enabling hate speech for free.

On the flip side if someone had to accept a car that didn't meet their needs them it's a futile waste of money. There's no point giving someone who requires a wheelchair lift that weighs 950kg a 1l ford fiesta that it won't fit on and the engine will wear out trying to get anywhere!

As a real life example, whenever we have been assessed by wheelchair services, we've been offered a chair with wheels that were too far offset to comfortably push any sort of distance, risking shoulder wear and tear and injury and at the same time being a fraction too wide to fit through one of our doorways. It's tough though as they was that was sourced in bulk so that's as good as it gets! A complete waste of money from the taxpayers point of view because it is expensive and not fit for purpose.

That's true, I hadn't thought about that. Presumably some kinds of hate speech are more lucrative than others, I would hate for MN to upset and potentially alienate some of their ableist sponsors in the name of protecting a few whinging disabled scroungers who MN probably quite rightly think the site would be better off without!

Plus if needed, pay for new adaptations. In our case a wheelchair lift that is about 7k when it wears out plus £1000 to fit it, plus the cost of hand controls and fitting.

The car would go back on the market without the additions as someone pointed out, because they would have been removed.

As a real life example, whenever we have been assessed by wheelchair services, we've been offered a chair with wheels that were too far offset to comfortably push any sort of distance, risking shoulder wear and tear and injury and at the same time being a fraction too wide to fit through one of our doorways. It's tough though as they was that was sourced in bulk so that's as good as it gets! A complete waste of money from the taxpayers point of view because it is expensive and not fit for purpose.

Wheelchair services SOP (and I have my doubts about the "O" bit) is: here's what we have.

That's it.

I probably won't win any friends across the UK, but you can get a Personal Wheelchair Budget to go towards one that actually suits your needs. But it will be capped at the cost of whatever they tried to palm you off with.

Well you've got subscribers. And we know there are people who'd rather pay £x a month to spew hate than 1/10£x to actually help anyone.

But also the advertisers.

Yep.

What free car?

But able bodied people have the opportunity to change things.Many disabled people don’t have that luxury. That comment alone tells me you don’t understand the most basic differences between disability and non disability.

To be fair. If you were talking about asylum seekers, then some of them would magically give a toss about British disabled/homeless people. It's a continually moving target.

⬆

being disabled is expensive. It’s the things you don’t realise that add up.

I needed to change my car earlier this year. It is just me and DS so we should be able to just get a small runaround. But we need to be able to fit his wheelchair and other equipment is so I had to pay more to get a decent car that is big enough for what he needs.

W T A F?????