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Shake-up of ’fundamentally flawed’ ESA system
From the Daily Mail ....
‘A crackdown on the sick pay culture which costs Britain billions of pounds a year is being ordered by Iain Duncan Smith.
The Work and Pensions Secretary is particularly keen to slash the numbers off work with anxiety and depression.
In what is expected to be the biggest welfare reform of this Parliament, he will call for the shake-up of the ‘fundamentally flawed’ Employment and Support Allowance ...
... under a policy document to be unveiled within weeks, they will instead be tested for what they are able to do – not what they cannot.
They will then be found work for around ten hours a week, or whatever is possible, to get them back into the workplace ... Those who repeatedly refuse could have their support cut.’
Mr Duncan Smith said the test is too ‘binary’, adding: ‘It is a system that decides that you are either capable of work or you are not.
‘Two absolutes equating to one perverse incentive – a person has to be incapable of all work or available for all work.’
Except, of course, that’s absolute tripe as everyone qualifying for ESA is found to by DWP have a limited capability for work, but everyone in the work-related activity group has to, as the name suggests, undertake work-focused interviews and work-related activity as a precondition of receiving benefit, and if they fail to do so, they risk being sanctioned.
It also ignores permitted work all together. You’d almost think that the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. Either that, or he’s deliberately misleading the Mail-reading public, shurely not….
“GPs will be called on to refer the long-term sick to back-to-work programmes.”
They’re going to love that…
The service is in place for people in work.
The service is in place for people in work.
Except of course, that service is run by Health Management Ltd aka Maximus who are also in the business of attempting to assess sick people under the WCA as well. No vested interests there, no no no…
Should we dust off our copy of the Invalidity Benefit regs and the ‘fit within limits’ provisions?
The service is in place for people in work.
Except of course, that service is run by Health Management Ltd aka Maximus who are also in the business of attempting to assess sick people under the WCA as well. No vested interests there, no no no…
But the only ‘self interest’ could be to give out sick notes?
edited to add ‘self interest’ rather than interest
The ‘flawed’ system that his dept was warned not to roll out in 2010 but they did it anyway, thus causing chaos?
The ‘flawed system’, so abhorrent to him that he has put it wholesale in to the holy of holies, Universal Credit?
People off work with anxiety and depression - yep, what they need is more threats, more coercion, more sanctions. That’ll larn ‘em!