This is the Deaf and Disabled People’s Organisations Forum England response to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) Transforming Support: The Health and Disability White Paper.
DDPO Forum England White Paper Response
The DDPO Forum England brings together d/Deaf & Disabled People’s Organisations (DDPOs) across England to work collectively to act as the voice of disabled people [1]. The DDPO forum offers a unique and valuable perspective, as the members are all DDPOs that are representative organisations of disabled people: majority run and controlled by and for disabled people. We are truly able to speak as a voice of disabled people because we represent disabled people.
Our current membership includes:
- Alliance for Inclusive Education
- Breakthrough UK
- Bristol Reclaiming Independent Living
- Bromley Experts by Experience
- Choices and Rights (Hull & East Riding)
- Chronic Illness Inclusion
- Disability Positive
- Disability Rights UK
- Disability Sheffield
- Disability Stockport
- Disabled People Against Cuts
- Equal Lives
- Equality Together
- Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People
- Inclusion London
- Liberation
- National Survivors Users Network
- People First
- Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA)
- Shaping Our Lives
- Sisters of Frida
- Spectrum CIL
- WECIL (West of England Centre for Inclusive Living)
- WinVisible
Having responded to the green paper and seeing no material changes as a result of the consultation responses by disabled people and their representative organisations, we refute that the white paper is any improvement whatsoever on the discredited green paper. Instead, we suggest that it is a further threat to the benefit support and services which people have a right to, across disability and immigration status; in particular, the removal of the work capability assessment is nothing more than the displacement of a discredited assessment regime onto an unqualified discretionary opinion of a work coach where prejudices of all kinds and opportunities for abuse will be heightened. Tying the new Universal Credit disability payment to getting PIP is a cut, while abolishing the WCA in this way takes away the “substantial risk to health” exemptions which protect claimants.
Furthermore, the new Health Element of Universal Credit requires someone to receive Personal Independence Payment (PIP) with only a few notable exceptions. The assessment of PIP is poor with the DWP losing or conceding 80% of PIP appeals lodged at the Tribunal[2]. The rules around PIP eligibility also exclude people with shorter-term conditions and can be very difficult for people with fluctuating conditions, including mental distress to be able to meet or evidence. In any case, PIP does not assess someone’s difficulty with working but is intended to cover extra disability related costs. Research estimates that up to 1 million low-income disabled people could be worse off under these proposals[3]. There is an urgent need for a wholesale redesign of PIP and work capability assessments in full collaboration with disabled people and their representative organisations.
While the white paper proposes that PIP claimants receive the Health Element, it disguises the fact that, unlike legacy benefits, UC doesn’t include: the severe disability premium (SDP); the enhanced disability premium (EDP); or the tax credit disabled child premium (DCP). The DWP still hasn’t confirmed that it will implement the January 2023 High Court judgment [4]that ruled that disabled claimants should be fully compensated the full £180 a month difference for losing the SDP and EDP on moving from ESA to UC. Or that parents of disabled children should be fully compensated for the £150 a month loss of DCP on moving from tax credits to UC. However, even if full “transitional protection” is paid this erodes over time. And for disabled people making a ‘new’ UC claim the effect of no SDP, EDP or DCP is immediate. This amounts to a substantial income loss and all these premiums should be incorporated into UC.
The social security system has orientated towards a policing of disabled people instead of supporting and enabling disabled people to live a life well. We have a system that when people are at the lowest point due to their illness or impairment, they find themselves interrogated, judged, and denied the support they need. This in its most extreme consequences has led to thousands of avoidable deaths. Rather than remedying this situation, we submit that this white paper is going to exacerbate it. At the same time, the minister for disabled people, health and work, alongside the DWP, ran a benefit fraud campaign which heightens the attack on disabled people’s lives and rights to support.
This white paper repeats the punitive policy that the way to increase the number of disabled people in employment is to increase coercive sanctions on disabled people or who work part time, instead of addressing the societal barriers (e.g., low pay, lack of accessible transport to travel to work; lack of support services to get ready, failure to make reasonable adjustments) to ensure that jobs with good pay and conditions are fully accessible to disabled people who want to do waged work. The paper focusses on the disability employment gap but not the disability pay gap, which is worst for disabled women. This approach puts sanctions on disabled people for not working without any sanctions for employers who discriminate, are more likely to consider a non-disabled candidate over a disabled candidate for a role or appoint disabled people solely into menial roles at a lower earning level, that does not provide disabled people with equal opportunity to progress. Sanctions will hasten the deaths of many who are put under back-to-work conditions for benefit which we are unable to manage; while not addressing discrimination in employment.
It is important to note that most claimants who can take on waged work already have, in order to escape the benefit cap, especially mothers. So those claimants who are demeaned and attacked as “economically inactive” are usually sick and disabled people unable to work (due to their health or societal barriers), mothers of young children, parents of disabled children and other unpaid family carers who deserve a care income in recognition of their unwaged work but get a pittance, and women fleeing domestic or other violence who need time to recover.
We strongly object to placing DWP staff in NHS services – the DWP portraying work as a cure of mental distress was encouraged by non-representative charities including Mind – who have a conflict of interest as a service provider with contracts in that work. Therapy and treatment must be completely separate to employment advice and benefits, not a condition of getting them. Studies show that where someone wants to work, good work can be beneficial, but pressure to enter or return to work that is badly paid, without appropriate adjustments or isn’t a benefit to do, is not helpful to mental health, and with no productive mental health treatment can be extremely damaging. We are deeply concerned that the white paper doesn’t make the important distinction of work in good, fair, and appropriate jobs.
We have no confidence in the profiteer companies Atos, Capita, and Maximus after a track record of many years of poor quality work. We are concerned that health professionals from these DWP appointed healthcare providers will be asked to conduct “health discussions” with claimants at an earlier stage, expanding their powers to deny benefits. People do not apply for benefits because of all the things you can do, you apply because you need financial support for something you cannot do.
Leaving decision making to an individual, leaves it open to their own pre-conceived ideas and prejudices which allows for a dangerous environment of exploitation and abuse.
Instead of designing a solution that works to improve the lack of trust disabled people already have for the DWP, we have a system that sets targets for the number of sanctions issued by work coaches. This approach is not a supportive system to encourage disabled people to start, stay and succeed in employment, but a system designed simply to reduce disabled people’s benefit entitlements and rights.
To this end, we also do not support the continuous reassessment of disabled people whose circumstances are unlikely to change year on year. In fact, the constant interference with disabled people’s lives is tantamount to harassment.
In conclusion, the White Paper marks further steps in the wrong direction overall. The overall effect will be to continue to make lives worse for disabled people, we cannot support it.
Deaf & Disabled People’s Organisations Forum England (DDPOFE)
[1] people facing disabling societal barriers due to their impairment or condition, and this includes physical impairments, mental distress, hearing impairments, visual impairments, neurodiversity, and those with chronic illness or fatigue.
[2] Department for Work and Pensions (2023). Personal Independence Payment statistics to January 2023. Retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/personal-independence-payment-statistics-to-january-2023.
[3] Institute for Fiscal Studies (2023). Spring Budget 2023 response. Retrieved from: https://ifs.org.uk/articles/spring-budget-2023-response.
[4] https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/news/call-dwp-compensate-50000-claimants-unlawfully-short-changed-moving-uc
GM Disabled People's Panel 