PIP is a disaster for disabled people. At last the full horror is emerging

From test centres with no disabled access to the mass repossession of cars and wheelchairs, a report exposes the true scale of this catastrophe

When does reform become dangerous? Over three years ago the Conservatives began to roll out personal independence payments (PIP) – in essence, the mandatory, mass re-testing of disabled and chronically ill people – and the answer is getting stark.

A report released today by Muscular Dystrophy UK is the latest piece of evidence to expose an administrative catastrophe: appointments cancelled at the last minute, lost applications, year-long delays. Two in five respondents report being sent to an assessment centre that wasn’t accessible for disabled people. That’s in order to be tested for a disability benefit.

Make it inside the building and the picture is as dire: widespread reports of assessors – employed by private firms hired by the Department for Work and Pensions – who showed no respect for disabled people, while some didn’t even understand the condition they were testing (one man, with muscular dystrophy, pointed out that the word “progressive” means “muscles don’t come back”).

The result of this chaos is anything from rent arrears and credit card debt to mental scars. One woman, with a muscle wasting disease, said that she developed panic attacks after her assessment. She is now under care of a mental health team and doesn’t leave her house.

That the government deliberately built PIP with tightened criteria – and is sitting by as the system descends into disarray – becomes grimmer still when you consider that this is being done to a benefit tied to other essential disability services.

Without PIP a disabled person can’t access anything from carer’s allowance to severe disability premium. If that isn’t enough, anyone who is rejected – or bumped down to the standard rate – is also barred from the Motability scheme for an accessible car or powered wheelchair.

Sarah, a nurse with progressive muscle wasting and weakness, is seven months’ pregnant – and has been forced to hand back her Motability car. The 29-year-old had been receiving the higher rate of disability living allowance (the predecessor to PIP), but after being reassessed she was knocked down to the standard rate – despite her condition deteriorating.

Sarah can’t take her fatigue medicine without affecting her pregnancy, and her disability means she is at risk of falling when she walks, and permanent damage. “That vehicle was a lifeline to me,” she says. “I’ve lost my independence.”

Last week Sarah was due at a tribunal to appeal against the decision, but found it cancelled with just two days’ notice – and no explanation. She’s been in hospital twice this weekend.

Will this be making many headlines? It took the resignation of Iain Duncan Smith and a budget hole of billions to get the mainstream media to shine a light on the disaster of PIP – or many politicians to find a conscience. One cut to the benefit is stopped. A new secretary of state is hired. And the news cycle moves on. The disabled can’t. For many, things are only getting worse.

Between 400 and 500 adapted cars, powered wheelchairs, and scooters are being taken away from disabled people every week. Independence gone – with a maximum of seven weeks to hand your lifeline back. As an insight into the logic, let alone empathy, in this system, that’s notably less time than it takes to go to appeal or even to get the results of mandatory reconsideration – meaning the DWP’s ruling can be overturned, but the disabled person’s car or wheelchair will already have been taken. (At the last count, 60% of appeals against PIP were successful).

read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/07/pip-disaster-disabled-access-report-benefits?

50,000 disabled people ‘have adapted vehicles removed after benefits assessment’ | The Independent

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/benefit-cuts-disability-welfare-pip-adapted-vehicles-a7678926.html

via 50,000 disabled people ‘have adapted vehicles removed after benefits assessment’ | The Independent — Britain Isn’t Eating

MS sufferer slams ‘awful’ benefits chiefs who axed her Motability car in favour £65,000 taxis

BENEFITS bosses axed a disabled woman’s Motability car to save cash – but then agreed to pay out £65,000 to taxi her to and from work.

The bureaucrats first decided Jan Davis, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, no longer qualified for the disability allowance she used to pay for the car.

But just weeks later officers from the same Government department ruled she did qualify for help in getting to work.

They agreed to pay for a taxi to take Jan, from Ayr, to and from her job in East Kilbride, 33 miles away.

The move, which would cost the taxpayer an extra £19,000 a year, was last night branded “shambolic” by her local MP.

Jan, 58, who suffers excruciating pain, had been receiving the Personal Independence Payment, a non-means tested benefit, and used this money to lease a Motability car.

But the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) last month informed Jan she would no longer qualify after a snap reassessment of her benefits ruled she did not need the car to live independently.

Desperate to keep her job at HM Revenue & Customs, Jan turned to the DWP’s Access to Work scheme after taking advice from her MP.

To her surprise, she was informed the DWP would pay for her to take a taxi to and from work – despite a cost of almost £65,000 over three years, compared with the £8000 cost of leasing a car over that period.

Last night, Jan, of Ayr, blasted the DWP’s approach, saying: “It’s crazy – it would have cost them less than £6000 for me to keep the car and yet they are willing to pay up to £65,000 for taxis.

read more here: https://www.sundaypost.com/fp/ms-sufferer-slams-awful-benefits-chiefs-who-axed-her-motability-car-in-favour-of-taxis/

If I lose my car I lose my life

An ex DWP officer tells her experience claiming PIP. She’s intimidated, and terrified she will lose her motability car, without which she cannot go out.

 

It’s deeply shaming to have to prove to the state you’re still disabled

Cruel benefit changes mean reassessment over and over again for blind people, paraplegics and many others – all fed by the myth about ‘scroungers cheating the system’

ou know the one about the scrounging disability-benefit claimant: that woman with the limp who has always got the latest designer handbag; the unemployed guy across the road who has been given a “free car” by the state. Everyone’s heard a version of it. Mainly because certain politicians and the rightwing media have been peddling it for years.

The cultural shift against social security sharpened considerably in 2013. That was when, as part of the abolition of DLA – disability living allowance – the Conservatives pledged to scrap “lifetime awards” of the benefit: essentially, what enables some disabled people to have indefinite help for care or mobility needs.

The policy played straight into people’s greatest fears about the benefit system: that not only are there hordes of people with disabilities living off taxpayers’ money, but they’re receiving all that cash practically unchecked. As the myth has it, it’s just a case of filling in a few forms, complaining about a bad back, and free money arrives every month for life. As the then work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, put it to explain the policy change, disabled people on lifetime awards are “just allowed to fester”.

Three years later, in the final stages of the mass re-testing of DLA’s replacement, PIP – personal independence payments – we’re now deep into the consequence of this myth: disabled people who had been told their support was for life suddenly being forced through reassessment. And in many cases seeing their support pulled away.

People like Phil Spanswick: born with shortened limbs, three fingers on one hand and four on the other, as a result of the thalidomide scandal. The 54-year-old – who is unable to shower, get dressed, or use the oven or washing machine without help – had been on a lifetime award of high-rate DLA since the 1980s. Spanswick’s disability will quite obviously never improve, but he was forced to go to a PIP reassessment. The woman who assessed him “was 21”, says Spanswick, “and had trained as a paramedic, and asked me three times how I had got my disability and what age was I when I got it”. He had his benefit downgraded: a cut of almost £40 a week.

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Phil Spanswick, a thalidomide victim, has had his benefit cut by almost £40 a week. Photograph: Tom Pilston for the Guardian

Or Carly Tait, a Paralympian born with cerebral palsy, who this week returned from competing for Great Britain as a wheelchair racer in Rio. Tait has been on a lifetime high-rate award of DLA for mobility since she was a teenager but had to go through a medical for PIP this year. She had her benefit bumped down to the standard rate and was subsequently told she would lose her specialist car. Tait told me that when she asked the assessor why she had to be tested when she had previously been given a lifetime award, “He said ‘there might be medical advances’. There’s no cure for cerebral palsy. I’m never going to get any better.”

Logic has no place in Britain’s new benefit system. We are firmly in hysteria mode, where it is seen as prudent to use taxpayers’ money to check whether a disabled person’s neurology or genetic makeup has changed. There are no exemptions or “good sense” limits to this. The re-testing of PIP claims means, in practice, blind people, paraplegics and those with Down’s syndrome will be put through reassessment: forced to provide information about their disability that the government already has and cannot possibly have changed.

read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/22/we-cant-help-being-disabled-reassessment-hysteria-scroungers-cheating-system