Up to three-quarters of disabled people in Bucks could fail new Government assessments for disability benefits, forcing them into poverty and dependence on the NHS and social care, warned a leading expert in welfare benefits. Speaking at a BuDS seminar arranged to help local authorities and the NHS get ready for the huge numbers of extra people who will be looking to them for help over the next 18 months, Ian Greaves of the Disability Alliance warned of shocking imminent changes to disability benefits that could result in thousands of disabled people in Bucks losing all financial help from the disability benefits system and tens of thousands more losing significant parts of their income.
The meeting heard that:
- The Government’s new draconian rules for who can claim disability benefits mean that many people who everyone would regard as genuinely disabled - such as deaf or blind people, people with amputated limbs, wheelchair users or people with a long-term condition like Multiple Sclerosis - will get no help at all through the benefits system from 2013. Only people with the most severe or multiple disabilities are likely to qualify for help.
- Over 90% of disabled people currently receiving Incapacity Benefit will not get its replacement, Employment & Support Allowance, on a permanent basis. About 50% of current Incapacity Benefit claimants in Bucks won’t get anything and about 41% will only get ESA for one year. Only a tiny fraction of the most seriously disabled people – 9% of current IB claimants - will get ESA permanently. This means that tens of thousands of genuinely disabled people and people with serious long-term illness in Bucks will be regarded by government not as disabled and incapable of work, but as simply unemployed.
- Half of the most seriously disabled people who currently get Disability Living Allowance, designed to help them live independently and to pay for their extra care needs, will not get the new Personal Independence Payment which is replacing DLA in 2013. Even those who do receive a PIP will probably get less money than they do at the moment. And because receiving DLA entitles disabled people to other help as well, the damaging impact of the changes will be magnified. Thousands of the most vulnerable disabled people, unable to work, will have to pay for their care privately or rely on families and friends, or turn to already-overstretched social care services and their GPs for help.
- Many hundreds of people in Bucks who are wheelchair users or who cannot walk unaided may lose their low-cost Motability cars which give them independence, owing to the abolition of the higher-rate mobility element of DLA and its replacement by the PIP.
Andrew Clark, Chair of BuDS, said:
“The government has stated quite clearly that it wants to force disabled people and people with long-term illness back into work by removing their benefits. What we are now seeing is the real outcome of those plans: people with MS forced back into the Job Centre; wheelchair users deprived of their independence; blind people who have no realistic chance of working cut off without a penny from government. It is a catastrophe in the making for disabled people. With this seminar, BuDS is doing all it can to help local authorities and the NHS get ready for the huge numbers of extra people who will be looking to them for help over the next 18 months.”