Chancellor Ignores Social Care, Weeks After UN S Independent Living Warning

Chancellor ignores social care, weeks after UN’s independent living warning

Disabled campaigners have criticised the chancellor’s failure to provide any money in the budgetto solve the social care funding crisis, despite a warning from the UN.

Although Philip Hammond announced some extra funding for the NHS, there was no mention of social care in his budget speech, or in the main budget report.

It came only days after the government left disabled campaigners “completely frustrated” by admitting that it will side-line the needs of working-age disabled people from next summer’s social care green paper (see separate story).

In August, the UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities warned that the UK was “going backwards” on independent living, and called on the government to draw up a “comprehensive plan” to address the problem.

Despite that call, there was not a single mention of disabled people, disability, independent living or social care in the chancellor’s 7,700-word speech to MPs yesterday (Wednesday), repeating his failure to mention disabled people or disability in his 6,700-word budget speech in March.

The chancellor did announce an extra £335 million for the NHS in England this winter, £1.6 billion in 2018-19, and another £900 million in 2019-20 – still far short of the extra £4 billion-a-year health leaders say it needs – as well as overall increases of £2 billion for the Scottish government, and £1.2 billion more for the Welsh government, but he allocated nothing to social care in England.

In March, the chancellor allocated just £2.4 billion in extra money for social care over the next three years, a sum described by disabled campaigners at the time as “meaningless” when set against the scale of the funding crisis.

Asurvey of social workers in England by Community Care magazine and the Care and Support Alliance, published in September, found that more than two-thirds felt they were expected to cut people’s care packages because of local authority funding pressures, while more than a quarter were not confident that the reduced care packages they had to oversee were “fair and safe”.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said yesterday, in his speech responding to the budget, that by March next yearmore than £6 billion will have been cut from social care budgetssince 2010.

Linda Burnip, co founder of Disabled People Against Cuts, said: “As expected, the Tories have completely ignored yet again the human disaster they have allowed to develop in relation to social care and have failed to address in any way the ever increasing lack of funding to support disabled people’s human rights to live independently in the community with adequate levels of support.”

Disability Rights UK said: “There will be deep disappointment amongst disabled people that there was no mention of social care in the budget.

“The crisis in services looks set to continue unabated.”

The Local Government Association said it was “a completely false economy to put money into the NHS while not addressing the funding crisis in adult social care” and “sends a message that if you need social care, you should go to hospital”.

The disability charity Sense warned the government that it “cannot save the NHS if it delays dealing with social care”.

And another disability charity, the MS Society, said the failure to provide more money for social care was “even more alarming” than the refusal to meet the NHS funding gap, and “provides nothing to prevent the current crisis from worsening”.

The budget report did include one disability-specific spending announcement, with an extra £42 million for the disabled facilities grant – which provides funding to make disabled people’s homes more accessible – increasing the total budget for this year (2017-18) to £473 million, although this was not mentioned in Hammond’s speech.

There was also relief that the government finally agreed to introduce measures to soften the impact of the botched rollout of universal credit (UC), which is gradually replacing six working-age benefits.

Campaigners have been warning that the rollout is leaving hundreds of thousands in debt, and forcing people – many of them disabled – to borrow from loan sharks, pawnbrokers and payday loan companies, while many have been left in rent arrears and facing eviction.

Hammond announced a package of improvements to UCthat will cost £1.5 billion over the next five years (£300 million in 2018-19), including removing the seven-day waiting period for new claimantsso that entitlement starts on the day of the claim.

Claimants will also be able to secure an advance, equal to a full month’s UC payment, within five days of making a claim, and will be allowed to make online applications for advances.

They will also be allowed to pay back the advance payment over 12 months, instead of the current six, while claimants moving from housing benefit to UC will receive an extra two weeks of their housing benefit award to ease the transition.

The Treasury told Disability News Service that the changes will cause a further three-month delay to the rollout of universal credit, so it will now reach all jobcentres – although not all claimants – by December 2018 rather than September 2018.

Further details were due to be announced today (Thursday) by work and pensions secretary David Gauke.

Citizens Advice Scotland welcomed the “significant” changes, and said they would “make a real difference to those claimants who are currently experiencing hardship”, but warned that there were “other problems with universal credit which we believe still need to be addressed”.

23 November 2017

Benefit assessors ‘must be held accountable’ for report failings, MPs hear

The healthcare professionals who carry out disability benefit assessments on behalf of the government should be held accountable for failing to report what they are told accurately, MPs have been told.

Members of the Commons work and pensions select committee were told repeatedly this week that assessors working for the outsourcing giants Atos, Capita and Maximus were producing reports that did not reflect what they had been told by the disabled people they were assessing.

They were hearing evidence from four welfare rights advisers as part of their inquiry into the assessment processes for personal independence payment (PIP) and employment and support allowance (ESA).

Disability News Service (DNS) has been carrying out a year-long investigation into claims of dishonesty at the heart of the PIP assessment system, and revealed last monththat complaints about the process rose by nearly 900 per cent last year.

But Atos and Capita – which carry out PIP assessments – and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have repeatedly insisted that there is no dishonesty in the system.

David Bryceland, from Oxfordshire Mind, told the committee yesterday that he and his colleagues saw “many inaccuracies”, including major factual errors such as someone who lived in a ground-floor, one-bedroom flat being described in an assessment report as living in a three-bedroomed house.

He said: “Those are not easy mistakes to make, those are not slips of the pen.”

Kayleigh Nor-Val, a benefits adviser for Citizens Advice in MerthyrTydfil, told the committee that she and her colleagues came across “so many” inaccuracies in assessment reports.

Martin Richards, a disability benefits adviser for the charity Involve Northwest, in the Wirral, questioned why healthcare professionals should be telling so many “untruths” in their assessment reports.

He said: “I don’t understand the motivation for the reason behind that, because if I went to see my consultant and he wrote untruths down, then there would be civil actions and things in place.”

Richards said the healthcare professionals “need to be accountable” for what they write in their assessment reports, and he said he believed they were “acting under orders”.

He said that two clients with mental health problems in the last six months had been unable to cope when their benefits were reduced because of “inaccurate” assessment reports.

Both of them had been sectioned because their reduced income meant they had had to reduce their care packages and “they couldn’t cope”.

All four of the experts said they believed that Atos, Maximus and Capita should be held accountable when their assessors include inaccurate information in their reports, while Bryceland said he believed civil servants who make the final decisions on the benefit claims also need to “take responsibility”.

Richards said: “I would agree that the contractor should be the one that gets penalized because I believe the healthcare professionals are acting under orders.”

He said again that he believed there must be some kind of “motivation” for the assessors to record the information inaccurately.

But Nor-Val went further and said she believed that individual assessors should be held accountable.

She said: “There should be fines against healthcare professionals who are making inaccurate statements.

“There should be fines, there should be repercussions for those healthcare professionals and those contractors.”

Gary Edwards, from Southampton Advice and Representation Centre, said that “trust needs to come back into this system”.

He said: “The trust is lost between claimants and the providers, the private contractors that the DWP use.”

He pointed to a PIP appeal tribunal he had attended the previous daywith a man with complex mental health issues, who claimed that his assessment had lasted just seven minutes.

Atos and DWP had refused to say how long the assessment had lasted.

The claimant had originally been given just two points(a claimant needs eight points to qualify for the standard rate and 12 for the enhanced rate, for both the daily living and mobility elements of PIP).

The tribunal ordered that he should be given 11 points and 10 points. Until this week, he had been without any PIP since June 2016.

Earlier, five disabled people who had themselves been assessedfor PIP or ESA had also given evidence to the committee.

All five said they would like to see all face-to-face assessments recorded, and claimants given a copy of those recordings.

Three of the five raised concerns about assessors failing to produce accurate reports following their face-to-face assessments.

Thomas O’Dell said his ESA assessor was “like a smiling assassin”.

She had seen him being pushed into the room in a wheelchair by his father, and then take three steps while holding onto the table, but concluded in her assessment report that he could walk 50 metres.

He said she had touched his leg, and told him she would not continue with further physical tests because he was in too much pain, but then claimed in the report that she had completed a full examination.

O’Dell said she had “fabricated the whole assessment”.

He also said that one of his assessment reports had beenaltered by another member of staff who had not even been in the room for his assessment.

Another claimant, Amanda Browning, said her last assessment report had contained 21 factual inaccuracies.

She said: “At my appeal the tribunal noted that the assessor had been selective in reporting my capabilities and awarded in my favour.”

And Natalie McMinn told how the letter she received after her home assessment “was full of mistakes” and “contradicted itself”.

She said she had been “appalled” by her PIP assessor, and added: “A lot of the information I had given her as well as putting on the forms wasn’t reflected or was wrongly recorded in the award letter after her visit.”

Last week, Disability News Service (DNS) reported how the inquiry has produced more online written evidence from the public than any other investigation ever held by a House of Commons select committee.

23 November 2017

Government’s social care plans side-line needs of working-age people

The government has announced plans for a social care green paper that side-line both the needs of working-age disabled people and their user-led organisations, say frustrated campaigners.

Damian Green, the first secretary of state, said the government would publish a much-delayed green paper on “care and support for older people” by next summer – the government had previously said it would be published by the end of this year – but made no mention in a press statement of the needs of working-age disabled people.

In the same statement, health secretary Jeremy Hunt said the government was “committed to reforming social care to ensure we can guarantee everyone dignity and security in old age”.

Green also announced the names of a 12-strong team of “independent experts” chosen to advise the government on the green paper, none of whom are disabled people or represent user-led organisations.

It was only in a written parliamentary statement that Green said there would be “a parallel programme of work” on issues affecting working-age adults with care needs, to be led by the Department of Health (DH) and the Department for Communities and Local Government.

This work will be overseen by the same group of ministers responsible for the development of the green paper.

But DH has been unable to tell Disability News Service (DNS) what kind of report this parallel programme of work willproduce – if any – or if its conclusions will be included in the green paper.

In August, the UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities warned that the UK was “going backwards” on independent living, and called on the government to draw up a “comprehensive plan” to address the problem.

And all three main UK parties were criticised during this year’s general election campaign for ignoring the needs of working-age social care recipients – responsible for nearly half the annual spending on adult social care – and focusing instead on older people.

But there was no mention of social care in this week’s budget (see separate story), despite some new funding for the NHS.

A survey of social workers in England, published in September, found more than two-thirds felt they were expected to cut people’s care packages because of local authority funding pressures, while more than a quarter were not confident that the reduced care packages they had to oversee were “fair and safe”.

Sue Bott, deputy chief executive of Disability Rights UK, said she felt“completely frustrated” by the government’sgreen paper announcement.

She said: “Although we are promised a workstream looking at social care for younger people, it is clear it is almost entirely about older people and how much they should pay.

“How else do you explain the list of experts that contains not one disabled person or anyone knowledgeable and committed to the choice and control agenda.

“This isn’t about kicking social care into the long grass, it’s kicking it over the hills and far away.

“The government also seem not to have learnt anything from the recommendations of the [UN] committee that there needs to be better engagement with disabled people on all areas of policy.

“I would urge the government to listen to the concerns of the 90 MPs who have raised social care as an urgent issue to be resolved and to listen to the many voices of disabled people who are highlighting how the inadequacies of the current system are blighting our opportunities to live and participate as equal citizens.”

Ellen Clifford, campaigns and policy manager for Inclusion London, said: “Given the extent of the social care crisis facing working-age disabled adults, there is deep disappointment that the green paper will only focus on older people.

“However, we know that the government’s real interest is in finding ways to make disabled people pay for their own care.

“This may be possible for older people who own their own homes but not for many working-age disabled people, many of whom are living in poverty.

“They have effectively devolved away responsibility for the right to independent living to local authorities.

“If central government starts expecting more from local authorities, then local authorities will respond with demanding the funding to meet those expectations.

“It’s an issue that they would simply rather avoid. We have to make sure they can’t escape it.”

Professor Peter Beresford, co-chair of Shaping Our Lives, said: “What is perhaps most surprising about the government’s social care green paper proposals is that so many commentators seem to be treating them at face value.

“What they really represent is a terminally broken government’s own recognition that it is in no position to sort out long-term policies for anything.