Bill Scott, 5.8.13
Cuts – who they are falling on?
•
£22
billion of cuts to welfare benefits
•
More than half of all cuts falling on households containing disabled people.
•
The other major losers, apart from disabled
people, are women in their 40’s & 50s with caring responsibilities.
•
Impact in Scotland = £4.5 billion being taken out of local economies
•
90,000 Scottish DLA claimants lose an average of
£3,000 a year with the change to PIP.
•
100,000 ESA claimants also losing an average of
£3,000 a year
•
Half of all ESA claimants also claim DLA and so
total losses from just those two benefits could average £6,000 a year for tens
of thousands of disabled people.
•
And of course Bedroom Tax is also falling
disproportionately on disabled people. Across UK two thirds of households
affected contain a disabled person. In
Scotland however it’s 80% of the 95,000 households likely to be affected.
But poor and disabled people aren’t just facing massive cuts
in benefits and their families’ incomes. They are also facing massive cuts in
essential services that they, more than any other group in society rely on,
because they cannot pay for any alternatives.
The Campaign for Fair Society estimates that in England the combination of cuts in
benefits & services means that:
•
People in poverty will lose an average of £2,195 p.a. - 5 times more than the burden placed on “the average” citizen.
•
Disabled people will lose an average of £4,410 per person - 9 times more than the burden placed on
the “average” citizen.
•
People with the most severe disabilities will
lose an average of £8,832 per
person - 19 times more than the
burden placed on the “average” citizen.
So disabled people and others are losing social care &
social work services, library services, education services, refuse collection,
public transport, sport and leisure facilities etc. etc. etc.
That in turn leads to a loss of personal independence. Without care services older and disabled
people cannot even get out of their own homes and go to shops or visit friends
and relatives or take an active part in community life – e.g. as volunteers –
they are even perversely forced to give up work.
How are local authorities making these cuts –
·
Care
charges – being levied on people already relying on benefits. Marginal tax rate
for a disabled person is sometimes 95 – 100% of their disposable income!
·
Higher
entitlement criteria for care services – leading people to lose care packages
that they have had for years and in some cases decades. Pam’s example.
·
Day
Centres being closed.
·
Supported
employment services such as Remploy being closed – thousands of workers emptied
onto dole.
·
Disabled
people and their carers being sent ultimatums that they can either accept cuts
in care packages or go into residential care.
·
Loss
of Mobility – 48,000 people to lose Higher Rate Mobility. 16,000 of them will
also lose Motability vehicles.
·
Loss
of Homes - Scottish Government estimate
that 11,000 people will be evicted due to Bedroom Tax – we think that’s an
under-estimate.
·
Service
providers moving disabled people out of individual flats and into “communal
living” with 8 or more sharing – and that may just be the start of a move back
to disabled people being forced into a new form of residential care.
But some would argue “We’ve seen cuts before. What’s new
about these ones?”
The answer is that apart from being more vicious and deeper
cuts happening over a very short timescale these are not just benefit cuts but
an attack on the very concept of the Welfare State.
Reign of Terror: The
Government are using their allies in the Tory press to attack and scapegoat
benefit claimants and immigrants for not just the Financial crisis but all the
ills of our society - the lack of jobs,
something for nothing benefits, lack of affordable housing.
But the real truth is that the Tories and the Lib Dems and
Labour believe that the crisis in Capitalism can be solved through supply side
economics – if workers can be forced through fear to accept cuts in their wages
and terms and conditions of employment – as they have largely over the last
five years - then the rate of profit can be restored. By the way company
profits have never been higher than they are at present – it’s just that they
are not being shared with their workforces.
To achieve this fear amongst workers claiming benefits has
to be made as shameful and degrading and difficult as possible.
Disabled people are literally being assessed to death – 30 a
week who are found fit for work die within six weeks of their Assessment.
But they now face not one assessment but potentially dozens in the course of their
lives - WCA, PIP assessments, Blue Badge assessments – awards for life thing of
past regardless of whether you have a lifelong or progressive condition their
aim is to bring you back time after time after time.
Result continuous stress of fearing that the next time you
could lose your ESA, your PIP and or your Blue Badge. Add to the stress of losing your benefits the
stress of trying to get them back again through appealing.
·
Appeals
– Over 800,000 appeals now in the system. ESA appeals
in 2012/13 heading for a quarter of a million in a single year.
But even for those who manage to get put on benefits what
then?
Work Related Activity Group of ESA & JSA claimants and
Single parents whose children are aged over 5 – all face sanctions unless they
participate in mandatory job search activities.
There are now also proposals that sick people will be
compelled to undertake “treatment” for their condition on pain of losing their
benefits if they do not attend medical interviews.
Sanctions-
Since May 2010 two and a quarter million claimants on
Jobseeker’s Allowance have had their benefits referred for a decision on
whether to cut their benefits for a fixed length period.
A study conducted
by the DWP
in 2006 showed that around
130,000 claimants were subject to sanction referral that year. These
latest figures are seeing figures of over 110,000 in a single month.
Since 2010 1.5 million people have been sanctioned
for failure to attend an Advisory interview and half a million for failure to
participate in the mandatory Work Programme.
When people are
sanctioned they are treated as no longer in receipt of benefits and thus do not
turn up in the official statistics – a clever way of reducing the claimant
count by tens of thousands each month without putting a single person into
work.
But it’s not just
the numbers. Those who fail to meet their Work Related Benefit Commitments can
now lose -
·
30% of
their benefits for 13
weeks for the first failure;
·
30%
of their benefits for 26 weeks for a second failure within a year of the
previous one;
·
and
156 weeks—3 years—for a third, or further, failure within a year of a previous
failure that led to either 26-week or 156-week sanction.
It’s likely that 80,000 people who are currently claiming
have already been sanctioned twice - if
sanctioned again in the coming year they could lose 30% of their benefits for
36 months.
And the alternative to being sanctioned? - Workfare being sent to work in Tescos or
Asda or some other extremely profitable business, for just your benefits.
Workfare is unwaged slavery and designed to get people to
take any job rather than have to work for nothing. And any job now would
include the 1 million (or many more?) on Zero Hours contracts, less than the
minimum wage etc.
The latest DWP report is seriously advocating residential
workfare for disabled people and the long term unemployed, carrying out menial, repetitive work for
nothing more than your benefits, living in communal dorms, potentially a
hundred miles from your friends and families until you have been trained for
work
We are seeing a return to the Victorian concept of the
workhouse where people will be prevented from falling into the sin of
worklessness.
And for those lucky enough to escape that fate – why instead
of benefits food vouchers that you can exchange at your local Foodbank stocked
by the generosity of those lucky enough to be in work.
In other words the wholesale importation of the American
welfare system of shaming and humiliating the unemployed and poor and making
them reliant on charity rather than benefit “entitlements”.
This is what we can look forward to if we continue in the
Union.
Can an Independent Scotland do Better? –
Cuts totally unnecessary. We are spending less, in terms of
a proportion of national income, on benefits now than we were during the last
major recession in the early 1990s (GDP). Spending on working age benefits
accounts for about 5% of GDP today compared to around 8% in 1992/93.
Moreover even if you accepted the need to “pay our way” – and I don’t
-none of the benefit cuts would be needed at all if we just collected a
small percentage of the estimated £25 billion pounds lost each year in tax
avoidance and the £70 billion lost in tax evasion by the likes of Amazon,
Google, Starbucks and Philip Green of Topshop shifting their liabilities to
lower tax regimes.
Moreover benefits are not only affordable but
necessary. They stabilise capitalist
economies by maintaining demand when times get hard – it was Keynes and
Beveridge, both Liberals who understood this, but it’s a concept that Labour
has abandoned.
Finally Scotland is better placed than the UK as a whole to
pay out more in benefits - Scotland is the eighth
wealthiest country in the world. The three wealthiest countries
by the same measurement are Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland (just ahead of
the USA). The UK ranks in 17th place.
However we shouldn’t be content in simply avoiding the worst
of what the UK intends to do and accepting that people on benefits will be
poorer than those lucky enough to be in work.
We need to campaign for a system that genuinely supports
Independent Living and decency –
High
levels of inequality in a society are associated with higher levels of
ill-health and reduced well-being.
Getting
welfare on the cheap has costs in terms of the health and well-being of
citizens which in turn are passed on to the tax payer. Investment in effective
welfare provision which helps to reduce inequality will lead to better
outcomes, not just for individuals but society as a whole.
The
over-riding principle of any new Benefits system in an Independent Scotland
should be that it supports all of Scotland’s people, including disabled people,
to reach their full potential and play a full, active and equal role in
Scottish community and economic life.
We
need to invest in childcare and Access to Work – Norway is wealthy
because it supports far more women to be active in the workforce. Access to
Work which provides for adaptations to workplaces, office furniture and even
pays for PA support at work results in a return to the Exchequer of £1.20 for
every £1 spent.
There are literally hundreds of
thousands of jobs that need done – in terms of personal assistants, childcare
and health service workers, renewable energy etc. So we should create jobs for
those that want to work rather than penalising folk who can’t find one.
We also need to invest in public
transport to make it free and more accessible to reduce people’s dependency on
cars and to allow disabled people to access work and the community.
We should also, it goes without
saying, abolish the Bedroom Tax as it flies in the face of providing Homes for
Life – homes that can be adapted to meet our needs – to have the extra rooms
needed when we become parents and to also have them when we acquire care needs
as we get older.
Even with vote for Independence
will this happen without a struggle? No. Just today Alex Salmond is quoted as
saying that the benefit cap would be retained in an Independent Scotland. The
benefit cap would be completely unnecessary if we were building social housing
for the tens of thousands of families that need them and still had a Fair Rent
Act that restricted profiteering by private landlords.
So vote Yes to Independence. But
be ready to campaign for a fairer more redistributive benefits system because
it will not be given to us without a fight.
