Upcoming changes to benefits

I've a feeling they'll still hugely reduce the amount of folks on benefits via a back door policy. Which is the only way i could ever see this working. I really do think people currently awarded will keep their benefits in full.

And they will target the young people just coming out of education and direct them onto work schemes/training. That is the population that has really caused claimant numbers to soar. Young people with no physical disabilities and no cognitive disabilities who have become very unwell mentally due to difficulties with their home and education circumstances.

There's a plan put forward in Scotland to take these educational failing young teens out of school at 14yrs old and get them skilled up for work.

So i think it will be much, much harder once Labour have got their policies passed through for young new claimants to get any award at all on mental health grounds unless they have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or another diagnosed mental health issue that prevents them from taking up any kind of work that could earn them a living.

I can't see how any money will be saved though as any schemes to help support our young folks will take major investment extending into the social sector. Housing, poverty, families in crisis and breaking up all impact a child's outcomes.

A couple of things occurred to me reading through the leaked material.

Making it necessary to have 4 pts in a criteria to qualify is in itself not an issue to me - what is a bigger issue is how unsuitable these criteria are and how they already omit several elements of disability experienced by those who they most want to cut out. So someone with a MH diagnosis may have 2 points on, say, five of the existing criteria and thus qualify. But there's probably other elements that are not included in the criteria on which that person might merit 4 or 6 points. And as an autistic person, it's not fit for purpose, either. It's what some able-bodied people in a not very well run govt dept have decided, not actually representative of disability diversity as we know it to be today.

If they want to change the qualification level, fine, but change the criteria to apply across all disabilities, too. There is still a massively physical-disability-centric bias both to the form and the assessment process which is why so many autistic people struggle to get PIP in the first place. When I went through my DLA-PIP claim and had to go to tribunal, I was at university and my mentor at the time told me she had several other students in my position who were unable to deal with the stress of the appeal process. The impact of the DWP's appeal process on me has not gone away even after eight years - because how my body processes emotion and stress is not the same as someone not on the spectrum. As soon as you mention this, however, they try to push it into the anxiety category, and in my case that delayed my claim by a long long period. They're not looking at the people they're assessing in the right way, with the right criteria. (I could sidetrack here to say that most organisations are the same re autism, especially if you have no cooccurring intellectual impairment).

There is a reason why autistic people are shut out of work, disadvantaged in school and university settings. All of these things impact employability at a fundamental level outside the autistic person's control. To clarify, I do NOT see PIP as 'compensation' for my disability, as the Tories claimed - I see it as an enabler for other services (as someone up the thread mentioned ) - my railcard etc relies on it, and I can't navigate so I need bus pass and railcard to get around, even though I am able to walk.

I just get fed up with the constant onslaught. My experience both myself and the two years I spent working with autistic students is that we are much much more sensitive to atmosphere, stress and uncertainty than those not on the spectrum. And for me, having just navigated the work restructure and kept my job, now I am back to dealing with this and it feels endless.

Another thought I had was that the government keep talking about online safety and social media doing more to prevent abuse. Yet we have endured not only the last several months of state-sponsored media backed abuse and misrepresentation, we have been dealing with it for years. The last time they cut benefits they framed us as lazy and fakers as well. And it's not just in the media, but it greenlights abuse on social media, the ableists come out of the shadows to share how they KNOW for a FACT that most of these disabilities aren't real and are just playing the system.

So if the govt is so committed to reducing online abuse, could it maybe begin by reducing its level of abuse towards us? I have yet to see a single article in which a government minister involved in these discussions has even spoken to a disabled person. Not even one. It's as if they think we don't vote.