The government's disability employment support strategy is a sham
The Work and Pensions Committee published its report
on the future of welfare to work this week. Its key message is that the
government must focus employment support on people with complex needs, in
particular expanding
provision for people with substantial disability.
There is an obvious solution to the flaws identified in the
design of the existing specialist disability employment scheme, Work Choice.
And it is the same solution to some of the legendary flaws in the Work Capability
Assessment, especially the problems with the WRAG, where
people with severe ill health are put through a punishing back to work regime
incapable of addressing their needs. Yet no one seems to have had the
insight or will to name it.
The Committee did at least partially acknowledge that the
government’s specialist disability employment programme is a perverse
contradiction:
Work Choice is supposed to help those with “substantial
disability”, who can’t be helped by Access to Work or mainstream back to work
programmes, and need specialist support. But they have to be capable of working
16 hours per week or more within 6 months. Otherwise (the implication is) they
are not worth investing in.
This is borne out by the fact that only 17% of the referrals
to Work Choice comes from the ESA caseload. The majority are referred from JSA,
meaning they are not disabled enough (by the terms of the WCA) to qualify for
ESA. The referral system for Work Choice seems designed to cherry pick disabled
people with the least complex barriers to work, perhaps to ensure that contracted
providers receive enough outcomes payments to sustain their business model.
The UK is one of the very few countries where the assessment
system for work-related incapacity (the WCA) does not act as a gateway to
specialist disability employment support, according
to the OECD.
If our incapacity benefit and disability employment support
system were rational and coherent, people put into the ESA WRAG should
automatically be referred to Work Choice, or whatever replaces it, because the
WRAG of ESA is supposed to be an acknowledgement of substantial barriers to
work but not complete incapacity for work. The WRAG should be the gateway to
Work Choice. Instead being assigned to the WRAG actually all but bars access to
specialist disability employment support because JCP have to mandate WRAG claimants
to the conditionality regime of the mainstream Work Programme.
This leads to a woeful situation for most people in the WRAG:
they are not disabled enough for the ESA Support Group, where they get
unconditional financial support, yet too disabled for Work Choice, and so are consigned
to the brutal no-man’s land of conditionality
and sanctions on the mainstream Work Programme. And they are now about to
face a £30 per week cut in income to incentivise them to a miraculous recovery.
As we know the WRAG includes people with chronic and progressive conditions
like Parkinson’s and Rheumatoid Arthritis.
Tweaking the payments system for Work Programme and the
referral criteria for Work Choice, as the Committee suggests, won’t solve this
perverse paradox.
The ESA WRAG and specialist disability employment support
programmes like Work Choice should be seamlessly integrated. Iain Duncan
Smith’s aspiration to reform the WCA to get more disabled people into work
could be the perfect vehicle for achieving this. Work Choice has much better
outcomes for disabled people than the Work Programme; surely it makes sense to
put everyone with limited capability for work on a specialist scheme.
The only coherent solution is to refer everyone in the
ESA WRAG automatically to Work Choice, and if Work Choice providers believe they can’t be
supported into work within 24 months they should be placed in the ESA Support
Group.
Otherwise we are saying that some people are too disabled to be worth investing in with specialist support, so instead we will beat them with a stick and cut their income to the bone.
Otherwise we are saying that some people are too disabled to be worth investing in with specialist support, so instead we will beat them with a stick and cut their income to the bone.
dismissed for misconduct over a Batmancomic after disclosing I'd suffered from depression http://holybatsex.com/2015/07/07/the-equality-act-2010-the-capability-policy-and-depression-in-the-workplace
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