Jeffs posts
The UK's leading professional associations for psychological therapies have reaffirmed their opposition to welfare sanctions.
The British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies, British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, British Psychoanalytic Council, British Psychological Society and UK Council for Psychotherapy between them represent more than 110,000 psychologists, counsellors, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists who practise psychotherapy and counselling.
In a joint response to the recent report of the Welfare Conditionality project, the organisations say:
...“Our key concerns remain that not only is there no clear evidence that welfare sanctions are effective, but that they can have negative effects on a range of outcomes including mental health. “We continue to call on the Government to address these concerns, investigate how the jobcentre systems and …
The organisations reaffirmed the clear position against welfare sanctions that they took in a 2016 joint response.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard the British Psychological Society’s acting director of policy said:
“We are delighted to sign this joint statement. The Society has seen increasing evidence that benefit sanctions undermine people’s health and wellbeing, and that people with multiple and complex needs are disproportionately subject to them.”
I've written a lot of critical articles over the last few years about the government's controversial welfare policies. The Conservatives claim that welfare sanctions "incentivise" people to look for work. However, the authoritarian application of a behaviourist idea - that punishment somehow motivates people to "change their behaviour" - especially when such punishment involves the cruel and barbaric removal of people's means of meeting their most fundamental survival needs - food, fuel and shelter - contradicts conventional wisdom and flies in the face of a substantial body of empirical evidence.
Making provision for meeting fundamental human needs so rigidly conditional is an atrociously brutal act. There is simply no justification for a government in a very wealthy democracy to behave in such an inhumane manner.
Social security is a safety net that most people have contributed towards. It came into being to ensure that no citizen would face absolute poverty - hunger and destitution - when they experience hardships, in a civilised and civilising democracy.
Punitive welfare sanctions are an extremely regressive policy. It was widely recognised during the 1940s that absolute poverty reduces citizens' motivation and prevents us from fulfilling our potential at an individual level and as a society.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 02 June 2018
Another lie by the Torys
Jeremy Hunt: He warned us that ‘health tourism’ was costing us a fortune, five years ago; it isn’t.
Tory racism rolls on without much ado.
This aspect relates to so-called ‘health tourism’. Remember a while ago we were being force-fed reports that people from foreign countries were ripping off the NHS for £2 billion a year?
The total cost to the 48 people listed in the Evening Standard article quoted below was less than £160,000. It does not represent the cost of ‘health tourism’ in the 18 NHS trusts that participated in the pilot scheme for around two months last year – just the amount paid by people who identified themselves as foreigners when they were asked. That’s an important distinction to make.
If those figures were replicated across all the NHS trusts in England, the total amount payable by foreign patients would be less than £12 million per year – less than 1/167th of the amount suggested by the Tories in 2013.
Now get ready for the punchline: “The Department of Health declined to say whether the ID checks would be abandoned in light of the trial.”
This is throwing good money after bad (don’t forget that the cost of running the pilot scheme was paid by the NHS – and ultimately the taxpayer – and takes funds away from healthcare.
There could be only one reason for continuing with ID checks:
The persecution of Johnny Foreigner – and, for that matter, any UK citizen who can’t produce two forms of ID. Can you?
Posted by jeffrey davies on 31 May 2018
Jeffs posts
The DWP confirmed to the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week that they will pay the minimum amount they can legally get away with to claimants who were underpaid ESA as a result of DWP errors. This means that they will not backdate all the way to the date of the error in many cases and also will not pay any consequential losses, such as prescription charges claimants should have been exempt from.
In March of this year we reported that the DWP failed to award income-related ESA to around 70,000 claimants who were transferred from incapacity benefit to contribution-based ESA from 2011 onwards.
Affected claimants are owed between £2,500 and £20,000 each.
However, the DWP are insisting that they are only legally obliged to repay underpayments from 21 October 2014, when the upper tribunal first ruled that contribution-based and income-based ESA are a single benefit and that the DWP has a duty to assess claimants for eligibility to both types of ESA when a claim is made.
This means that underpayments from before this date all the way back to 2011 can simply be ignored by the DWP. Child Poverty Action Group are currently mounting a legal challenge to this decision by the DWP.
In evidence to the PAC, Peter Schofield, DWP Permanent Secretary, insisted that compensation would not be paid to claimants who had lost out:
“We don’t pay blanket compensation in situations where the courts have told us to interpret a piece of legislation in a particular way. We don’t do that . . . I have a responsibility, as accounting officer, and I have looked carefully at this in the context of “Managing public money”. The key point here is not to create precedents that put the taxpayer at risk.”
Schofield was then pressed by the Chair of the committee:
“Just to be clear, if you were paying prescription charges or something—the passported benefits—would people individually be able to get those refunded, if they can prove that they had to pay them?”
Schofield responded that prescription charges would not be refunded:
“We are not introducing a blanket compensation scheme . . . No. I have assessed this from the point of view of an accounting officer, and I don’t believe that is consistent with “Managing public money”.
Schofield also revealed that the DWP intend to have processed all repayments by next April and that “hopefully” they would begin processing repayments in June to the next-of-kin of claimants who have died.
The PAC also praised the welfare rights website Rightsnet for first highlighting the issue. The chair suggested that the welfare rights worker (Andrew Dutton from Derbyshire Welfare Rights Service) who spotted the problem and first wrote to the DWP about the underpayments, should be bought a pint.
Posted by jeffrey davies on 31 May 2018
