Forum Home → Discussion → Decision making and appeals → Thread
Claimants could be charged for appealing benefit decisions
From the Guardian -
‘People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
Critics said the proposal, contained in an internal Department for Work and Pensions document leaked to the Guardian, would hit some of the poorest people in Britain, who have been left with little or no income.
In the document about the department’s internal finances, officials say the “introduction of a charge for people making appeals against [DWP] decisions to social security tribunals” would raise money’
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/20/people-stripped-benefits-charged-decision
Responding to the proposal, Justice Minister Shailesh Vara said: “Reducing the deficit is our top priority ...”
I despise this game. This, along with other ideas, has quite clearly been deliberately leaked to guage public perceptions as we run into election country. The papers need stories so they run with it in the naive assumption it will generate interest and outrage amongst their readers but in reality it just plays well with the heartland voters and makes sure they come out to play if they think the “opposition” may prevent such “good” ideas from going ahead.
Think we can be pretty confident at least one of these ideas will become a reality and it wouldn’t really surprise me if it was this one. People are charged huge sums to go bankrupt and one of the (intentional) side effects of the massive reduction in publicly funded advice has been the growth in solicitors firms and especially lone practitioners who charge benefit claimants. Our government would see the latter as a good thing and the expansion of that market as an endorsement of the benefits of competition so why not build cost throughout the process? If you’re going to have to pay to challenge a decision then the next step is to pay an “expert” to do that for you.
Doubtless there’s an element of kiteflying to this but I have to say that my flabber was well and truly ghasted when I read about this last night, to think that it’s even been put on the table as a proposition is quite outrageous. Good to see a certain Mr Bateman of this parish not pulling his punches in the Guardian article.
If they intend to make people pay for appeals, they should also ensure that the DWP is held liable for the full cost to the taxpayer of every case it loses.
Soon we shall have a modern Modest Proposal….
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm
...but it will be called ‘fair and responsible policy’ by a government which has altered and abused the meaning of the very words they speak.
I think you will find that issue like this are the reasons they Tories want to leave the European Union, as the right to appeal a govt decisionis a fundemental principle of membership, just as much as the no capital punishment rule. So it can’t fly without leaving the EU.
I keep thinking that nothing this government proposes or introduces will make me any more furious than I am already. And then it does.
Please tell me its 1st April and I hadn’t noticed.
outrage, right to a hearing , but as you say above, when the human rights act is abolished no one will be safe, we thought King John was a b****** but at least he accepted Magna Carta !!!
i saw this report and have been mulling it over.
given that tribunals are part of HMCTS, it might well be that the court rules on fee exemptions will apply in any event…. in which case, no fees to be paid as exempt.
but we’ll have to see, of course. and if people with no money are not exempt, one would have thought a JR might help if someone could afford to do it…
cant’t see a JR would be considered the right course, its not after al lsomething on which you could ground an error or administrative malfunction, and how much would it cost HMCS to administer hundrens of thousands of exemption applications each year. NO, it needs a brave senior politicain, [if such a creature existe] to nip this in the bud NOW.
“outrage, right to a hearing , but as you say above, when the human rights act is abolished no one will be safe, we thought King John was a b****** but at least he accepted Magna Carta !!!”
I agree with the outrage but so far as the HRA is concerned were things really so awful for the many many years before it came in in 1998?
given that tribunals are part of HMCTS, it might well be that the court rules on fee exemptions will apply in any event…. in which case, no fees to be paid as exempt.
Experience from the Employment Tribunal, where fees and remission were introduced last year, suggests that many who should qualify for remission don’t get it. This may be because of difficulties in producing the evidence of means, which is onerous if not on a main means-tested benefit. But HMCTS maladministration is also a real possibility. We recently had an ET fee remission application wrongly rejected, and the deadline they gave to appeal the remission decision was just 5 days (which included a weekend). The problem areas identified in this 2009 study still largely apply:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20100111120959/http:/www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/2007-court-fee-remission-system.pdf.
So, according to this blog, on recent ET stats most remission applications fail
..only 22 per cent of all single claimants applied for fee remission, and just four per cent of all single claimants received full or partial fee remission. Yet as recently as September 2013, in its final Impact Assessment on the revised fee remission scheme, the Ministry of Justice suggested that 31 per cent of all claimants would be eligible for full (25 per cent) or partial (six per cent) fee remission.
And the figures suggest a definite chilling effect on the volume of ET claims. I see no reason why the same would not apply to Soc Security appeals, even if remission was allowed.
[ Edited: 24 Feb 2014 at 06:38 pm by Jon (CANY) ]Derek, the HRA is a brake on governments that think they can get away with whatever they want, it may not have been so wonderful before but now we have it lets try to keep it.
[ Edited: 25 Feb 2014 at 10:24 am by SocSec ]Why is it necessary to link this policy proposal with independent welfare rights advisers?
Some in the voluntary sector would rather claimants lose their rights and go hungry in the face of diminishing free advice than seek help from paid-for experts, most of whom learned their trade in the voluntary sector. And lets remember that free advice isn’t free - we all pay for it in our council tax bills.
I think the government are on to a winner with this one. Sickening though it is, they got through MR - a cut in the right to appeal - with barely a whisper from the big charities. On this, opponents can only say “it will hit the poor hardest”. Really?! Could never have guessed! Nothing about eroding the principles of democracy, fairness and justice then, and ensuring that the state is - if in theory if not practice - accountable for its actions.
and thank you for that, Tony. Although these days i find that people can’t afford me even if i offer to charge half price…
We all have to get a living and we can’t do that on fresh air, no matter how much the government witters on about pro bono. if we all worked pro bono, we’d all end up bankrupt and trying to claim JSA…..
phew lets focus on the issue chaps
In one way it is the same issue - should people pay for the process of getting the right benefits?
That in turn is only the opener to a bigger discussion (and a number of other discussions) on a more philosophical question - is it wrong to pay if that is the only way to get the right benefits?
I’m taking it as a given, I’m afraid, that there will not be enough publicly funded resources to provide advice or advocacy for all those *needing* support in the welfare rights arena. There will not be enough publicly funded resources to provide advice or advocacy for all those *wanting* support in the welfare rights arena.
We have a shortage, growing bigger daily as resources fall and demand rises, of services which are ‘free at the point of delivery’.
There is a strong business case, I’d argue, for any client in some circumstances to use an available paid service. If I have a case worth £50 a week in extra benefit (£6k a year) and a 20% chance of winning on my own then, if paying £200 increases my chance to 60%, it’s well worth doing. It may also reduce stress, inform me about other relevant issues and provide me with a better basis for future situations.
I spoke to someone at NAWRA in Sheffield on Friday who said, in passing, “Not much we can do as there are no specialists round here”. I mentioned Howells, who sponsored the meeting, and she said “Oh no, we’d never refer to a paid service”.
Now that may, I hope, be an uncommon attitude but I doubt it. What we need to do is to:
Recognise the reality of the situation.
Accept that there are good paid services -firms and individuals.
Be prepared to refer people to them when their work is needed.
Build them into the networks and accept them as part of the broader service.
It may not be the ideal system but it’s a damn sight better than going home, from a paid job in a free service, with a smug feeling of purity while a client loses an appeal that they could have won if they’d been passed on to a fee charging service.
<Other questions>
Is it right for the taxpayer to pay to challenge what are found to be correct decisions?
Are free services ‘better’ than paid services?
Are free services ‘better quality’ than paid services?
Are free services, that limit access to customers of sponsoring organisations, free?
Are free services free?