Rishi Sunak's speech

may007 said:

hi im new on here. does the prime minister mean to target all people on pip or is it new pip claims,i dont understand it my partner has a ten year awardment , will that be affected. 

I am incredibly stresssed too.

I have had to claim from the DWP for 27 years now & I have never once met anyone who I can communicate with or work with to help me reduce my benefits claim. I want to minimise the amount I am claiming but the DWP staff I spoke with were actually frightened for me that I would lose my funding for my powerchair (higher mobility) if I did not claim all the other money.

I feel like I can never escape from the DWP and I am completely at their mercy.

4 years ago I zoomed in my powerchair up to my sofa and transferred at a home assessment. The woman depicted compassion & empathy and then went back to her car where she wrote that I took 4 steps to the sofa and that I can walk 200 metres repeatedly. All my benefits stopped on the basis of her assessment. She was a 25 year old woman from a posh village who was a horse rider (her name was very unusual so it was easy to find her Facebook). She had come to a very rough council estate and basically concluded it was a scroungers den and took out her hatred of these estates on me. The estate does have benefits cheats on it but they are men in their 20s who wear tracksuits who are usually very pale because they hide from the general public. They are not older women zooming around in powerchairs.

I wish they would target the cannabis smokers because from what I can see, the people who are not genuine usually smoke cannabis and are young and wear tracksuits.

I think it is crazy that they are targetting the genuine people instead of these people. It is very easy to find the cannabis smokers. You just visit the home of each claimant. 

@kandarohi I’m really sorry to hear how you were unfairly treated, I can understand that. Have you tried contacting your local MP about it? If you want to find their details you can through this link:
https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP

@woodbine please don’t use my thread to start arguing with people. I started this thread as I was stressed, as were others, it’s meant for us to be supportive to one another. It’s not for us to fight with one another. 

Im new here x If Im doing it wrong let me know. To be honest Ive been really stressed the last few days about all this. Having some pretty dark thoughts. Im totally imprisoned by the way the benefits system is set up and run. For me it blocks me being able to try to improve my health in any way.

I wrote letters to the government asking them how can people get any health improvement if you are punished for trying to get exercise or cook a fresh meal. If you do either they say you have no disability. I have literally got a jar of thyme in my kitchen and feel like if a benefits assessor saw it they would cut my benefits. I have pans in my kitchen. Does that mean my benefits would be cut? Im just so tired of this situation. Tired of feeling like I should be ashamed that I have a small amount of abilities. I actually managed to make a sauce last week. I felt so incredible because I hadnt made this sauce since 1996. Then I felt so guilty and ashamed and worried. Its like achievement is a bad thing. Its like this any time I do anything that contradicts the benefits criterion. Every time I manage to wash myself I feel guilty. Every time I am sat listening to someone saying how little money they have I feel terrible. And I cant do anything to put it right because I cant work. Im so sick of feeling ashamed when Im doing nothing wrong.I should be able to strive for improvement without having to hold back. I should be able to try to get my best level of health without them taking away the wheelchair funding and without them forcing me to damage my body. I just cannot trust these people.

I tried to plant a few plants & its just like any small thing I do I feel like people would judge me or try to cut my funding for my powerchair. This Sunak policy is like the climax of 27 years of this. I just feel like even writing this is dangerous. Like Ai surveillance is coming for me. I was even worried about playing a computer game. Thinking AI will be set up and these gaming companies make profiles saying how many hours you are on your game and what you are doing. My game says I have played it 100s of hours but thats because I fall asleep leaving it running. On my game what I like to do is climb mountains. I wanted to climb mountains in the Lake district and in Scotland but I became disabled at age 21. I climb the mountains in the game. I enjoiy the countryside in the game instead of in real life. And I feel ashamed that I can type and use a computer and that I play this game whilst other people are working to raise £1000 to keep me alive for another month. I would give anything to swap lives and be that worker.

If I was free from these constraint I would be trying to do things but you cant do anything in this system without being met with anger or skepticism. Thats my experience. If your disability is straightforward and very visible its different but when its not straightforward you just get this horrible skepticism. Im totally imprisoned by this Its just feels like discouraging ability rather than encouraging it.

I had breast cancer and immediately everyone was fully supportive all the skepticism was gone. Its so different when you have an illness that people feel compassion for. I had no hair & I felt so free from judgment. Nobody could cause my cancer to increase by doing the wrong thing. But when peoples actions can cause you long term physical damage its so frightening. Especially when they are really believing they know whats best for you.

Hopefully we will all get clarification in the coming days or weeks about what the Government is looking at specifically and are proposing. 

Bydand said:

Hopefully we will all get clarification in the coming days or weeks about what the Government is looking at specifically and are proposing. 

We can all have a view on the ins and outs of any proposal or the rights and wrongs of any changes to the benefits system moving forward but until we know more detail we are all in the dark together and should be supporting each other sensitively and appropriately.

S

The plan is Austerity 2.2, they've made billions of pounds of spending commitments which are 'uncosted'. 

Lostsoul13 said:

I just read on bbc one about the voucher payments.. if you could use them for food. Heating,water,taxis, other stimulants for your condition (how restrictive the voucher would be?) like pay point or something- I wouldn’t understand how it wouldn’t work out? 

If it creating fake money bypassing the actual cash- and just tender for goods.. it’s still exactly the same thing.. you can use your uc, esa for everything else… 

Yes, voucher payment system, another nonsense, that will need administration resources. The 'joke' never stops, invent stuff that doesn't need inventing, change things that don't need changing, They are 'desperate', 'desperate', last throws of a sinking government.