Upcoming changes to benefits
Comments
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@worried33 you'd be forgiven for thinking I'd somehow stumbled over some internal document especially as the https address seemed a bit odd but I've not - I made sure before posting it is definitely for 'public consumption', there's references for instance to Probationary periods which are stated as 6 months plus added 3 months occasionally but for internal applicants that's waived. Maybe we should ALL apply requesting the full flexibility we'd need 🤗 There's an irony I feel somewhere in all this as in the expectation that other employers should employ us who are sick and/or disabled, but they wouldn't.
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I don't know for sure sorry but someone has posted somewhere on here about descriptors but can't remember what they were or who posted so sorry it's gonna be a trawl through all these posts 😬 I think some descriptors were mentioned? Washing top half of self ? If can't do 4 points and bottom half doesn't get points and cooking no points if can use a microwave. I think 🤔 😕 🙄
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Another sleepless night 😥 I won't survive with LCWRA being cut 😭
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Thanks for the info Santosha. Much appreciated
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I feel like the government is trying every possible tactic to strip benefits from disabled people, and the latest one seems to be the “Right to Try Guarantee” proposed by Liz Kendall. To be honest, I don’t see this as a positive move at all. It feels like a cunning strategy to push disabled people into work, only for them to be left in limbo when their health deteriorates due to a lack of reasonable adjustments—while the government gradually takes away their benefits.I don’t believe a word this government says, especially Kendall, Reeves, and Starmer. From this point on, I suspect every move will come with a hidden agenda to strip people of their benefits.We ought to be cautious!!That’s just my take on it—what do you all think?
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Cooking is to do with preparing and cooking a one course main meal safely, reliably, when you need to, and in a timely fashion.
A meal involves ingredients. Can you chop a carrot safely? Can you lift items? Can you stand or sit long enough to prep them for cooking be it in a conventional cooker or microwave?
It's not just about putting a ready meal in the microwave. Even that has it's hazards. Can you lift the container in and out of the microwave without spillage and risk of burns.
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Oral Questions to DWP Front Bench in the Commons this afternoon from 2.30 pm. Listen out for the "topical questions" from 3.15 pm.
BBC Parliament is Channel 232 on Freeview. It's also on BBC IPlayer.
https://whatson.parliament.uk/event/cal50837
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Whoever voted this awful government in?
I certainly didn't.
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People desperate to get rid of the Tories.
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Yes and now they are desperate to get rid of Liebour who are far worse.
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F***ING hell , another day in the trenches 😫.... Roll on tomorrow , we need to know what's what
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BBC Radio Scotland reporting the DWP said 'no one is available' when they asked someone to come on. Suggests that, even at this late stage, they still don't know for sure what they're going to announce tomorrow.
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On BBC breakfast had a woman on from the treasury saying it wasn't sustainable etc she was very arragont. Just off topic , on talk tv, Starmer on about smashing the gangs , people smugglers etc. Well one is in a 4 star hotel at £180 a night.
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I doubt any of us could guessed the extent of the cruelty.
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I disagree.
I never trusted and Starmer and his cronies one little bit.
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More from "The I" this morning about ongoing concerns in the Labour ranks despite the PIP freeze thawing out:
You can tell that a Cabinet row is underway when the concessions start coming to try to close it down.
Rachel Reeves, the discipline-driven Chancellor who has insisted that the key to making precariously balanced public finances work is to “get a grip” on the welfare bill, is hitting a rock of resistance from many Labour MPs in a revolt which has spread fast from backbenches and junior ministerial ranks into the Cabinet itself.
A flurry of stories about concerns at the impact of expected cuts to the welfare budget, and particularly the impact on the burgeoning numbers of sickness and disability-related claims, have created a tricky backdrop for the publication of the Government’s Green Paper on welfare reform this week.
The aim is to distinguish more clearly between deserving recipients of benefits and those who need more support to work, and to end the wonky incentives of a system which traps many young people into a category of skimpy benefit support rather than helping propel them into training or the job market.
The difficulty is one that has long haunted welfare-reforming politicians of both main parties. How to tamp down burgeoning welfare bills to redirect funds to the NHS and (urgently, nowadays) defence, without hitting the wrong people or causing anxiety with no certain reward of a more efficient welfare-to-work system at the end of it all?
It might be scant comfort to Labour politicians, but this is a close repeat of the massive row which broke out between Iain Duncan Smith when he was the Tories’ chief welfare reformer and former chancellor George Osborne, who oversaw swingeing benefit cuts which ultimately led to Duncan Smith’s resignation in 2016 after a damaging turf war.
As several Labour ministers have pointed out in Cabinet meetings which even loyalists admit have been “tense”, Osborne – who ranks in Labour’s iconography as a steel-toed purveyor of austerity – did not ultimately freeze the personal independence payment (PIP), the core benefit specifically for those whose capacity to work and even get around is limited because of persistent sickness or disability. On his latest podcast, Osborne is frank about why.
“I didn’t freeze PIP. I thought [it] would not be regarded as very fair. What I did try to do was reform PIP,” he said. General freezes have been easier to sell than specific reforms that actually cut in cash terms the payments that certain sections of the population rely upon.
Exactly this problem has rolled up at Labour’s door as the party’s spending plans hit reality. Whips worry that the ferocity of the rebellion was more likely to grow than be quelled by the stern prime ministerial edicts of recent weeks.
“Keir is aware that he needs to keep some powder dry for future clashes over sacrifices to fund defence,” says one aide. “He will back Reeves in the fight on welfare, but he doesn’t intend it to be his Waterloo.”
Hence the step back this week. Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary now appears likely to leave the PIP payments intact. At the same time, this Chancellor and the Prime Minister are clear that the health and disability-related benefits bill, currently £65bn a year and projected to increase to £100bn over the next four years, cannot carry on without a reduction. Even if PIP is saved, entitlements for new and especially younger claimants will have to be tightened to bring down this sum.
Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall is preparing to announce cuts to benefits next week (Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty)
The broader problem for Starmer and Reeves is that Labour’s response to welfare changes is starting to look like a political Rorschach test, which endangers its hard-fought unity. It reminds us that behind the facade of a settled view of political economy lurk schisms which re-emerge when decisions get tough and the conversation turns to “what it means to be Labour” – a question of ideology which Starmer has so far adroitly dodged, by having it mean whatever he says it is at the time.
One vocal group here are those like the Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband and leader of the Commons Lucy Powell, who rank in the taxonomy of this government as hailing from the old Gordon Brown set of loyalists. Kendall, on the other hand, is clearly a product of the reformist aspirations of the Blair years – tougher in her rhetoric about people “taking the Mickey” from the system.
Reeves sits uneasily at times between these positions. Both she and Starmer are also relatively inexperienced in the ritual tug of war between the Treasury and departments, whereas senior figures like Cooper have held office as chief secretary to the Treasury and Miliband knows the ropes having been one of Brown’s closest confidants during his chancellorship and a former chairman of the Treasury’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Fundamentally, a lot of instinctive Labour thinking on budgets is fuelled by a desire to escape the strictures Reeves believes have been key to convincing voters that the Government is trustworthy on spending, welfare and taxation.
They look enviously at alternatives like the new German government’s moves to exempt infrastructure and defence spending from the tight restrictions of the “debt brake” which restricts borrowing. That is wishful thinking: Germany’s public debt is just over 60 per cent of GDP while the UK’s is 100 per cent, so the costs and risks of borrowing are much higher.
For the first time, the trade-offs and tensions which flow from the Chancellor’s tight spending corset are starting to cause trauma for senior Labour colleagues who have to administer real-term cuts. Tweaks, twiddles and fixes will result, which tie departments into fiddly compromises.
When Ed Balls (no longer inside politics but as Cooper’s husband, and a former shadow chancellor) says on his podcast with Osborne that the cuts are “not a Labour thing to do,” the temperature inevitably rises. Little by little, the omertà which has protected the Government from splits since the last election will start to dissolve. PIP may have been benched. The rows, however, won’t stop here.
Anne McElvoy is the executive editor of the Politico website
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IDS painting himself as some sort of ally to the disabled disgusts me.
"I didn't freeze PIP" no - you just took money off people with MH problems, just like Starmer and Reeves want to do.
I lost PIP low rate mobility for 4 years because of him. I lost DLA mobility on transfer to PIP 2 weeks before their ultimately illegal rule change. I didn't appeal because I knew about the rule change, as I'm sure the assessor did when they illegally applied the rule change on me before it came into effect. It was reinstated 4 years later, but never backdated because I didn't qualify. I went into debt for 4 years to keep my car on the road and it was very stressful.
It's looking like child's play compared to what they want to take off me now. Good job I still have my car because it looks like I'll be living in it.
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Will same happen with lwcra same procedure
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Now I'm worried this sounds awful absolutely worse than could of managed we must write to mps and all say we will end up in hospital we must
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Under tories we wouldn't of been reassessed
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