Morning all,

Am doing a bit of work for Radio 4 looking at why so many older people don't take up their entitlement to benefits. I think there are several reasons why older people are missing out on benefits:

1. People often don't know what benefits are available to claim
2. Pride. A lot of older people don't claim benefits because there is still a stigma attached to claiming benefits among a lot of older people
3. People find the means test intrusive
4. The length of the application forms sometimes put people off claiming
5. The names of benefits such as Attendance Allowance can be misleading for some people. The fact that it's called Attendance Allowance could lead some people to believe that to be eligible to claim you need to have carers or have someone 'attending' to them.

Any other reasons that people can think of why older people don't claim all the benefits they are entitled to?

Cheers

John

The position is a lot more complex that just pride or ignorance.

There's some very good research into the subject, some of which is on the web.

Studies include:

Corden, A et al (1989) Tipping the balance. DWP.

National Audit Office (2002) Tackling pensioner poverty: Encouraging take-up of entitlements.

DWP. (2003) Delivering benefits and services for black and minority ethnic older people.

Costigan, P. et al (1999) Overcoming barriers, Older people and Income Support. DWP.

Bunt, K et al (2006) Understanding the relationship between the barriers and triggers to claiming Pension Credit. DWP.

Thanks Neil

I had a client who was awarded AA which we helped her to apply for - she was then entitled to an increase in Pension Credit for the SDP but would not let us follow this up for her as she said she wouldn't have anything to spend the extra income on and she didn't need it!

Nothing i said to her made any difference :/

Nicky

That's reminded me of a similar situation Nicky. I had a client who was awarded AA and didn't want the SDP on the Pension Credit as the client refused to class themselves as being severely disabled for benefit purposes so said they didn't want the extra Pension Credit.

Nothing could convince her otherwise

On a more micro level, from our anecdotal findings about perceptions:

1. Still some basic miconceptions about the capital limits and what counts as capital (e.g. people believing the value of their home counts).

2. Hassle factor/level of benefit. Many believe it is not worth the paperwork and intrusion for what is probably going to be a small financial gain. While they may be right about the hassle they are often surprised by the amount of benefit they are missing out on (which would have been worth the hassle).

3.Couples where both could qualify for AA but didn't believe both could claim because one must be the carer in the relationship.

Plus the usual old chestnuts:

Can't claim if you get a works pension, regardless of the amount. Can't get AA if you live alone/nobody caring for you. Can't get help with leasehold sheltered scheme management charges because you aren't a tenant. Can't claim CTB if you have more than £16,000 in capital (PC/GC). Can't claim AA if your income/savings too high.

I think that the approach of official anti-fraud campaigns also plays a significant part in many peoples' perceptions of claiming welfare benefits and the likely consequences for them if things go awry for any reason, whether by accident or by design. And if you link these messages to the "benefit scrounger" line carried by some of the media, the result is a powerful deterrent to investigating entitlements for many older people.

I have older clients who have been successful with Attendance Allowance claims who are then unwilling to apply for more pension credits or further premiums as they feel that the Attendance Allowance is more than enough and by asking for more (although completely entitled to it) would just be "rocking the boat". One particular client who was awarded Attendance Allowance at the highest rate was so worried that they had made a mistake and paid her too much that she never slept all night until she was able to ring me the following day. After several minutes of putting her mind at rest she was then unwilling to apply for further entitlements.

There's an interesting bit in the Shulkhan Arukh - the Jewish Law Books - which says, more or less, that you should claim what you're entitled to:

"Anyone who is truly in need and cannot live without aid, such as an old or sick person or one in great suffering, yet affects pride and does not accept, he is guilty of bloodshed and is mortally culpable."

It maps neatly onto the bits in the bible which talk about giving support:

Leviticus 35

"And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee."

Matthew Henry, in his Concise Commentary on the Bible, wrote:

"Poverty and decay are great grievances, and very common; the poor ye have always with you. Thou shalt relieve him; by sympathy, pitying the poor; by service, doing for them; and by supply, giving to them according to their necessity and thine ability.... The rich can as ill spare the poor as the poor can the rich. It becomes those that have received mercy to show mercy."

(We're redoing the content of our History of Benefits course)

I like the bit from Leviticus. No problems with the right to reside there, then: even foreigners and visitors are entitled...

I worked on an Older People's Benefits take-up campaign in London Borough of Islington and everything said so far is terribly familiar!

I've found that information received by word of mouth can often be off-putting for people e.g. 'my neighbour claimed X and then they lost all their Y' , so providing accurate information is crucial.

Providing information in other languages is also very important.

The project I worked on was a joint Local Authority/DWP/Age Concern effort, and we also had close links with Social Services. If we can get agencies working together on this issue, then there's more chance of a wider range of people getting the right information.

Hope this helps!

This is very interesting.

As a personal anecdote, my grandfather refused to claim any means-tested benefits as he remembered the humiliation of the 'means-test man' coming round when he was a boy and looking round the family home, telling them what they had to sell before they could get any help. His father had cancer and couldn't work. It still upset him decades later.

Other older people I've dealt with have been unable to believe they could really be entitled to such a huge increase in income when they got AA, extra IS/PC etc and were genuinely frightened that the police would come and cart them off to prison. It has taken quite some persuading to remind them that everything we put on the form was true, and convince them that they were entitled to it.

And I make sure I remind them that NI is insurance, and you'd expect the insurance company to cough up if you were burgled.

"In 1918 postwar relief for unemployed ex-soldiers and civilians was a comparatively generous “non-contributory donation”. It seemed that the degrading days of the Poor Law were over, and the nation was at last properly respectful of its workers and former cannon fodder. But through the 1920s conditions of unemployment benefit got narrower. Then in 1930 the Depression threw government into a fiscal panic, and the poor got the sharp end with the Family Means Test.

You had to prove just how poor you were, in intimate domestic detail. It imposed form-filling, impertinent questions, and regular, shamingly visible, visits from investigators licensed to peer into your cooking-pots, rule that one chair per person was enough, and order you to sell your spare blankets. John Craig, an apprentice fitter, recalled: “You got so much off the labour exchange, but they kept control, and following you about would come to your house. Mother had a lovely big organ in the house. The inspector says ‘Well, you don't get any more money for four weeks until you sell that organ'. And my father belted him down the stairs.” It broke up families into homelessness: adult children lost all benefits if anybody in the house earned 31 shillings a week, so they had to move out.

From 1934, 190,000 unemployed men were made to attend “training camps” simply because there were no jobs. One contemporary interviewee asked: “How could anyone expect an unemployed man to do physical jerks on 15s a week, or play ping pong, while his wife was sitting at home before a half-empty grate with only margarine to eat?” This humiliation visited on a formerly proud working class by the means test led to the Jarrow March: which demanded, let me remind you, not handouts but work.

The memory of that mass humiliation has hung over politics ever since, colouring everything. There is a parallel with the way that the memory of callous mine-owners - shredding incriminating paperwork after disasters such as Gresford - stopped subsequent Labour governments from daring to stand up to less reasonable miners' demands. Well, the miners were finally (and brutally) defeated. But thanks to the flatfooted regime of the 1930s, means testing remains anathema".

Quoted from a Timesonline article by Libby Purves

"It is shown throughout the evidence, that it is demoralizing and ruinous to offer to the able-bodied of the best characters more than a simple subsistance. The person of bad character, if he be allowed anything, could not be allowed less. By the means which we propose, the line between those who do, and those who do not, need relief is drawn, and drawn perfectly. If the claimant does not comply with the terms on which relief is given to the destitute, he gets nothing; and if he does comply, the compliance proves the truth of the claim—namely, his, destitution. If, then, regulations were established and enforced with the degree of strictness that has been attained in the dispauperized parishes, the workhouse doors might be thrown open to all who would enter them, and conform to the regulations. Not only would no agency for contending against fraudulent rapacity and perjury, no stages of appeals, (vexatious to the appellants and painful to the magistrates,) be requisite to keep the able-bodied from the parish; but the intentions of the statute of Elizabeth, in setting the idle to work, might be accomplished, and vagrants and mendicants actually forced on the parish; that is, forced into a condition of salutary restriction and labour. It would be found that they might be supported much cheaper under proper regulations, than when living at large by mendicity or depredation. "

Poor Law Commissioners' Report of 1834

I heard a very interesting one today! One of my clients daughters told her she shouldnt complete a Pension Credit or Attendance Allowance, both of which she is perfectly entitled to, because it was Government money, and the Government were not to be trusted!

Have to say, its a new one on me!

I often remind people that all this comes under a National INSURANCE scheme and ask them that if someone had told them that had to pay the Prudential or someone like that every week (and couldn't opt out of paying them) instead of the Government would they have the same reservations about claiming?


I know the detail of how benefits are funded is considerably more complex than this but the more generalised view helps potential claimants to see that benefits are a right, and one that they have paid a lot of money for over the years, rather than a privilege.

pete.

When is the Radio 4 piece going out?