Disability Benefit Cuts - Take action before July 9th.

So realistically people in our position may not be assessed until 2030 .... Long time to be worrying isn't it .... A new government will be in by then.... a long way to go .... No way I'm going to worry myself for the next five years .... Just concentrate on my next assessment I think 😌

Well I'm hoping for a reassessment no earlier than January 2027 hopefully I pass and get two years then that will be Jan 2029 and even without all these changes you always get a delayed reassessment of a few months so it will be chaos around that time so that will take me to mid 2029 and we go from there .....

Again, thank you for the update @MW123 - I won't say what I think about Timms, but you got me looking at Sir Charlie Mayfield, so if you haven't come across this, you might be interested to read the following:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/67dac71a91e6e0492302842c/keep-britain-working-review-discovery.pdf

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/keep-britain-working-terms-of-reference/keep-britain-working-advisory-board

I’ve never seen what their relevant conditions were . In fact I’ve never known anyone that knew about it including legal advisors and my GP . My assessor gave me two years for conditions with no cure or treatment. Anything that is up to an assessor I’d be weary of

Hi Passerby, thank you for eloquently detailing this, when just a couple of days ago I could only manage saying ''you will need to be at deaths door'' . I believe this still to be true, I hate saying that, many many folk will fall through the cracks. I firmly believe but obviously could be wrong, that those in power will make any and all changes as difficult as possible for the very simple reason that they need ( to please the tax payer et al ) and will want to, claw back the money to fill that black hole we are all so sick of hearing about.

Thank you Chiareds for posting the link to the Mayfield report.

What stuck out to me like a sore thumb was how little the report tended to touch on employee experiences. It was sympathetic to people's situations more than just assuming people didn't want to be in work, but the idea that most employers want to keep employees and support them in the workplace is highly subjective and doesn't really jive with the 50% of employers who apparently don't want them.

I remember reading a report a few years back about Disability Confident, where around 80% of organisations had not actually increased their disability employment. I wish I could find the report now (I think it was 2018, so before the pandemic, showing that this was an endemic problem even then) but it was eye-opening about how many Disability Confident employers were not actually making changes to their practices.

Mine is one that does take all that seriously - for example, they've just published a new disability strategy after consultation with disabled and neurodivergent staff groups - but although that acknowledges so many of the barriers disabled people face, and problems faced during recruitment, it still looks at employment from the perspective of interviewing and scoring candidates on points. No matter how much awareness training you have, you are never going to employ someone who can't present themselves coherently in an interview over someone who can. The playing field is never going to be level - if you make too many allowances for a disabled candidate, you discriminate against non disabled candidates, but if you are using a method that is known to discriminate against disabled candidates, then no matter how much you try and mitigate, it's still never going to be completely fair.

So how the government intend to mitigate that I don't know - if it's still a problem even in well-meaning and supportive workplaces.

As I've mentioned before, at department level I've had nothing but support from my management team. It was GETTING the job in the first place that was the barrier . And I think this is something the Mayfield report is missing - at least in any depth - because the barriers people face are so diverse.

(Meanwhile, I hope I misread a report in a paper headline yesterday in which it looked like the Chancellor referred to benefit cuts as 'low hanging fruit' - ie an easy financial target. Perhaps I just took it out of context).