IT should be good news that by 2014 there will be nearly one million fewer people on incapacity benefits in the UK.
In a civilised society such a reduction would represent a successful integration into the workforce of people who need support to hold down a job.
The figures released today by the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University, however, provide a grim picture of how life will become even more precarious for people struggling with illness and disability in the poorest areas of Britain as changes to the benefits system by the Coalition Government take effect.
In Scotland, around 115,000 current claimants will lose their entitlement, adding 35,000 to the unemployment figures. Glasgow, where 12.3% of adults of working age claim incapacity benefits, will be worst affected, along with Inverclyde and West Dunbartonshire.
There is general agreement that the number of claimants of various incapacity benefits (currently nearly 2.6 million people of working age in the UK) is too high. When Incapacity Benefit and Income Support were subsumed into ESA (Employment and Support Allowance) in October 2008, The Herald praised the positive emphasis on what a claimant could, rather than could not, do.
The realistic aim was to increase the percentage passed fit for some sort of work from 37% to around 50%. A report from Citizens’ Advice Scotland last year, however, provided evidence of worrying problems with the administration of both ESA and the work capability test.
Patients with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, those with severe mental health problems and the terminally ill were among the 68% of claimants who had been found fit for work. The capability test, administered by a private company, appeared badly flawed.
As the Sheffield researchers point out, the high concentration of incapacity claimants in the older industrial areas of Scotland, Wales and the North of England means these areas will be severely affected by the reforms, which will barely impact on the most prosperous parts of southern England.
This is because for decades the medical threshold for access to incapacity benefits was set at a level that allowed substantial numbers of people with health problems to claim incapacity benefits. This reduced the scale of unemployment and maximised income for people unable to work for a long time.
However, it has led to the unhealthy situation of people not being encouraged to return to employment, something that has led to the labelling of many claimants, including the genuinely incapacitated, as cheats, when, as a result of Government policy, they were “parked” on benefits.
The policy of requiring people to engage in preparation for work and to move those well enough from incapacity benefits to Jobseeker’s Allowance is philosophically correct but impractical in the current economic climate when even highly motivated workers are struggling to find work.
A benefits system funded by the taxpayer must have effective mechanisms to prevent fraud but it must also fulfil its function of providing adequately for the ill and disabled. Yet many of those who lose incapacity benefits as a result of the new work test or time limit will also lose other benefits, resulting in real hardship.
The evidence so far is that the pendulum is swinging too far and too fast and the additional impact of taking millions of pounds out of areas of high unemployment can only make the situation worse.
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