Forum Home → Discussion → Universal credit administration → Thread
Quote of the day
Lord Freud has told House magazine that his wealthy background does not make him unable to understand the reality of living on benefits.
“You don’t need to be the corpse to go to the funeral”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/nov/22/benefits-system-dreadful-tory-minister
Yes, and you don’t need to be an undertaker to bury people either. As an aside, did anyone see the always excellent Owen Jones on last night’s Question Time provoke the ridiculous IDS into almost losing his temper. To paraphrase his own words, never underestimate the fury of a quiet man, eh!
last night’s question time is @
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p2wbj/Question_Time_22_11_2012/
.. and the question on the benefit cap is the last question, at 49 mins and 20 seconds
Understatement of the year is from page 60 of the ATos handbook to doctors. In the section advising how they should score:
“There will be occasions when it is necessary to choose a “None of the above apply” descriptor even though some disability has been identified..”
Love it.
I particularly like: ‘The people waiting for their work ability assessment and then not going to it’. Yep- happens here all the time. Obviously it’s the client’s fault that it takes a year or more for ATOS to arrange a WCA date and obviously, if said client then doesn’t attend, the local BDC continues to pay the client indefinitely. Run that one by me again?
Not to mention all the people on ‘incapacity benefits’ and lone parents and the self-employed. Riff-raff and scum the lot of them.
Love it.
I particularly like: ‘The people waiting for their work ability assessment and then not going to it’.
Back in the ‘good old days’ of Sickness and Invalidity Benefits when I worked in a benefit office about 25% of claimants ‘got better’ (and many then returned to work) because they had a short term condition like a broken leg or had recovered from a major operation. Thats why Sickness Benefit was known as a ‘short term benefit’.
Now despite the DWP process of trying to grind ESA claimants into the dust some of them still get better before they are sent an Atos appointment!
I once remember some one inventing a wheel.
Ah yes- I remember it well…dear old SB & IVB…one of my favorite memories is of the client who told me his Infidelity Benefit had been removed by the Agitation Officer….happy days…
Viz His Lordship and his weird views and phraseology, and IDS and his not-so-quiet outburst on Question Time that ‘we are changing people’s lives’ (this he said when challenged about people dying after being found fit for work - now there’s a change in their lives) and now today’s News page that the Work Programme is failing the homeless (and let’s face it, others, and only A4E etc are doing well from it) ....
There is a clear cart-before-horse problem here. This rush to get people ‘in to work’ might make a sort of sense in a booming economy with full employment. That’s what we haven’t got. Shouldn’t that be delivered first? And then people should be given genuine help to ‘overcome barriers to work’? All that’s happening is that people are being shunted from what the media still call Sickness Benefit to JSA (or do I mean Unemployment Benefit?) thus saving a few pounds a week per claimant, and as for their actually getting jobs…......
World. Upside. Down.
Lord Freuds statement : “people who are poorer should be prepared to take the biggest risks” as they have “the least to lose”: remains the most puzzling.
If I am right, he appears to have rejected the “dominant economic paradigm” based on marginal utility theory, and reinvented the notion of “common sense.”