Welfare benefits news, possible changes & constructive ‘discussion - an ongoing thread

There was another thing I noticed when reading the ‘gov response to wca doc’:

I looked up both the definitions of both substantial risk and ‘active psychotic illness’ (aka, forms of psychosis - if I’ve understood correctly) 

https://askcpag.org.uk/content/207488/substantial-risk-and-the-wca

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/understanding-psychosis

now the major difference that popped out at me was that substantial risk is to do with mental and physical health but psychosis is solely a mental health issue


and then it dawned on me that the dwp are using a single argument for the changes in the wca assessments (uc50/esa50 forms) - and it’s an argument that has been torn apart by disability commentator for the past week…………

this all comes down to the dwp ‘one size fits all’ solution of ‘work from home’ wfh jobs providing all their solutions in one - the logic being that if you work from home you don’t need to travel to a potentially unsuitable workplace or talk face to face with colleagues so ‘issue of mobility must 100% disappear’ when WFH is put in play - going on simplistic dwp logic.

those on this forum and charities know it’s a more complex issue than that

the dwp argument also falls massively apart when you consider that there is next to no true WFH job vacancies available (by that I mean solely from home, no office days………..a single day in the office would null and void the dwp mobility theories on this subject) - the only way to get around this is self employment and I will discuss this in another thread

point I’m making is the policy changes based on this particular dwp logic can be easily contested


the other thing I noted from the govs doc is the following:



This means psychosis may not be the only mental health condition that is covered in this new substantial risk definition
 (or psychosis being a symptom or side effect of another disability - when reading the definition of psychosis I think there’s an argument that some of us with disabilities, esp mental health based ones, may already experience some form of psychosis when we are under major stress……..like pressure from the dwp/job centre to find work/threats of losing benefits and trying to survive)

also tribunal judges may use liberties to decide their own definition of the criteria as they are independent of the dwp and in theory overrule them