Well I haven’t managed to blog for a couple of days and it has been an exciting and also frustrating couple of days! I posted Sue Marsh’s post from her blog on Monday to encourage everyone to campaign for the #spartacusreport to try and change the government’s ideas for welfare reform.
Wednesday night we won a brilliant victory in the House of Lords where the Lords voted for 3 amendments to the welfare reform bill, they are:
• To retain automatic eligibility for ESA for young disabled people who are unable to work;
Won; Contents: 260, Not Contents: 216
• To impose a two year time limit for ESA claimants, overriding the government's proposal that claimants be reassessed after 12 months;
Won; 234 Not Contents in favour of the amendment, 186 Contents against
• To exempt cancer patients from the proposed ESA limit;
Won; Contents: 222, Not Contents: 166
Unfortunately in an unprecedented move, after recess when many of the Lords had gone home believing the business to be over with for the day, Lord Freud then attempted to overturn these amendments by tabling more amendments that basically undid the amendments that had been voted in. He managed to overturn the decision on ESA for young disabled people but was then stopped from changing the other 2 clauses by Labour and Crossbench Peers who realised what he was trying to do and basically shamed him in to stopping. But unfortunately the damage has been done to that one amendment unless the Lords decide to table a further amendment to the amendment of the amendment in order to reinstate what they voted for!
On Tuesday the Lords meet again and the main point for debate at this time will be the change from DLA to PIP (Personal Independent Payments). At the moment DLA has fraud rates of around 0.5%, this is a minute amount, but the government wants to reduce its overall spend on DLA by 20%, with a fraud rate of 0.5%, this means that the only way to reduce the government spend is by cutting the benefit to those who genuinely need it. The way they are proposing to do this is by cutting out what is currently the low rate of DLA altogether. This will badly affect a lot of Fibromites as many are on the low rate either for care or for mobility or both.
They are also proposing to make all claimants, existing and new, undergo a medical similar to the one used for ESA. As we all know, the ESA medicals are fraught with faults and huge amounts of people are being found ‘fit for work’ when they aren’t and are having to appeal and go to a tribunal. In a system that was working well, we might expect appeals to concern marginal cases where points awarded were not quite sufficient to meet the criteria. However, of the appeals heard by February 2011, 39% were overturned in favour of the claimant. Of these, 60% had originally been awarded no points at all! To date 31 people who have been found ‘fit to work’ have died in the time they have been waiting for a date for appeal or tribunal. If we have to undergo a similar medical to get or to continue to get DLA then it is fair to assume there will be similar faults with it and many people will be found to not be eligible for DLA that were eligible before and will find themselves with no money while they appeal the decision and possibly have to go to tribunal.
People on DLA use that money to offset the higher cost of living that faces someone with a disability. For myself I use it to buy equipment that makes my life easier and less painful, such as a heated throw that I can have on the bed or on the sofa and greatly reduces my pain. I have to have a gluten and dairy free diet due to intolerances I experience due to the IBS I have. A small loaf of gluten free bread costs around £2.50 in comparison to a normal sized ordinary loaf being around £1, that is a huge mark-up. Lactofree or soya milk costs around 3 times as much as ordinary milk. Those with coeliac disease get their bread on prescription to counteract their costs, but as my coeliac test came back negative I do not get offered this. My costs are exactly the same as theirs but as I am classed to only have an ‘intolerance’ I have to pay full price, DLA helps pay for this. We have also used my DLA to pay for things around the house to make life easier for me and my other half so that he is not left doing all the work. It will also be used in the future to buy me a wheelchair or mobility scooter so that I can get out and about a bit easier if my Fibro gets much worse. Unfortunately you can only get them through the NHS if you need them indoors as well as outdoors. I try to not use too much support indoors in an effort to keep my muscles as strong as possible so I will have to pay for one with my own money. At the moment I use crutches outdoors but that causes extra pain in my arms, wrists and shoulders so I don’t go very far. We also have higher fuel bills as I have to keep warm or the pain increases to unmanageable levels. I have prescription costs as I get through about 5 or 6 prescriptions a month, I have a prescription card which does cut the costs somewhat, but it is still another cost that the able-bodied don’t have to consider very often. So I do not squander my DLA on luxuries as the press would have people believe most benefits claimants do in their ‘benefit scrounger’ stories, this money just helps me live as ‘normal’ a life as possible without facing poverty to do it.
This week has been a hectic week with a doctor’s appointment on Monday and as much campaigning as I could manage from my bed on my laptop to highlight the #spartacusreport and its importance, an x-ray on Tuesday (I never realised possibly inhaling a tramadol capsule by accident while trying to take it and choking instead would cause such a problem!) and a belated Christmas meal with our brass band in the evening, Counselling on Wednesday and preparing packs for our new Fibro support group, working a few hours on Thursday and the first meeting of the support group in the evening. As could probably be expected on Friday my body declared enough was enough and laid me low with a migraine that meant I didn’t get out of bed all day and just slept as much as I could! Others involved in the Spartacus report have also suffered terribly for the effort they have put in writing and compiling the report with at least 2 hospitalised on Tuesday and Sue (aka @suey2y, diary of a benefit scrounger) and Kaliya (aka @bendygirl, benefit scrounging scum) both very sick, though struggling on to post blogs and appear on TV trying to put their point across to politicians. It has had a huge toll on them but they are doing this for us, for the disabled of Britain, so remember:
“Alone we whisper, together we SHOUT”
THERE ARE THREE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO CHANGE THE FUTURE RIGHT NOW: 1. Sign Pat’s petition and the 'Drop the Health Bill' petition Pat’s petition asks for the same thing that the Spartacus Report wants – a pause and a proper consultation before further ‘welfare reform’ takes place. A huge surge in signatures before next week’s debate is the simplest way to expose the monstrous lie that disabled people support these reforms. http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/20968 We know some people fear it might be risky to give a name and address on a government website, as you have to in order to sign this epetition. But more than 14,000 people have already taken that ‘risk’. And if ever there was a day for taking a chance to save your benefits, surely this is it. You can add your name to the petition and nail the government lie. 2. Email a crossbench peer The crossbench peers are the ones who have inflicted such damage on the welfare reform bill. You may want to tell them that if they voted to protect ESA claimants you are very grateful. But add that, whatever they voted before, you would be grateful if they would vote to delay the PIP legislation, because your views have not been properly listened to. Ask them to read the Spartacus Report if they haven’t already. They can download a copy from this link – though they’ve already been posted a hard copy. If you responded to the original DLA consultation in December 2010 tell them that too. And if you have read about PIP and can explain concrete ways in which you personally would be disadvantaged, please explain that too. There’s a list of crossbench peers here with links to their email addresses. Given that a large number of Lib Dem peers chose to abstain rather than support the coalition, and five actually rebelled, you might want to email a few of them too. 3. Get others to join the fight Use email, twitter, facebook, your telephone and maybe even speak to people face-to-face and encourage them to make their views known before Tuesday’s debate in the lords on getting rid of DLA. It isn’t a waste of time. As Wednesday night’s votes showed, no matter how hard the government and the media try to silence and vilify disabled people, dedicated campaigning can make an astonishing difference.
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