June’s Trades Council meeting considered ‘Modernising Support for Independent Living: the Health and Disability Green Paper’, which is essentially a consultation on Personal Independence Payments (PIP) criteria and assessments. The plans, if implemented, would potentially affect who qualifies for eligible for PIP and the type of help they might receive.
The Green Paper was published before the announcement of a General Election. If the Conservatives form the next British government, they will clearly carry on from where they left off. The Labour Party, meanwhile, has sometimes seemed to tack close to the recent government on welfare issues. According to the “Big Issue”, on 13/06/2024, “In May, Labour’s Alison McGovern said that that fixing the welfare system would need “big changes” – including “changes to PIP (personal independence payments).” Labour has deferred a decision on PIP payments until after the election”.
The Trades Council, therefore, felt it remained appropriate to submit a response into the consultative channels allowed around the Green Paper, and the meeting amended and approved a draft that had been circulated with the Agenda.
We took the opportunity to point out that the main problems around PIP actually identified by people with disabilities were the speed and accuracy of the assessment process and the extent to which it could in itself be a cause of anxiety and distress.
DWP may have managed recently to speed up initial processing times, but other problems have then popped up to take their place.
On 4th May 2023 “Disability News Service” reported “Disabled people trying to contact the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to pass on urgent information about their disability benefit claims are facing delays of more than an hour before their calls are answered. Even when the calls are answered, they are often abruptly cut off before they can pass on the information”.
“Benefits and Work” reported on 13th June that “Almost half a million callers to the PIP helpline in the month of April were deliberately disconnected by the DWP before they could even wait in a queue, a freedom of information request …….has revealed. The proportion of calls cut-off before entering the queue is now greater than the proportion who even get to wait for an hour or more before giving up or getting disconnected”.
According to “Birmingham Live” on 23.02.24 “the average time taken for a decision on a review is now 44 weeks, or about 10 months, and the latest figures from December 31, 2023, showed there was a long list of 440,000 people still waiting for their results“.
Our response argues that the priority should be to get the current system working properly, rather than looking to change it.
We also say, however, that it would generally be welcomed if PIP assessments were to be made simpler, more wholistic and more dignified and that there are serious concerns as to whether the level and scope of payments are at all adequate.
The House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee Report “Benefit levels in the UK”, published in March of this year, found (para 48):
“When considering PIP itself, we heard that many claimants experienced a
significant shortfall between the levels of support provided and the cost of
additional health and disability related costs. Scope’s Disability Price Tag 2023:
the extra cost of disability report found that households which included at least
one disabled adult or child faced additional costs on average of £975 per month,
even after accounting for PIP (or £1,122 per month when updating the figure to
reflect inflation over 2022–23)102. Macmillan Cancer Support estimated that
83% of people with cancer experience a financial impact from their diagnosis,
averaging an additional £891 a month. For the 39% most severely affected by
cancer, they were estimated to be on average £1,038 worse off a month
following their diagnosis”.
We said that “replacing a cash benefit with a plethora of alternatives would create additional administrative complexities for a system that, as we have pointed out, is already creaking at the seams” and cited the reasons put forward by Greater Manchester Poverty Action as to why a “cash-first” approach is generally preferable in meeting living cost challenges.
You can download a full copy of our response here:
Our June meeting also considered a draft representation to a consultation launched by the previous government on “Clarifications to the Transfer of Undertakings (Protection of
Employment) Regulations 2006 (TUPE) and abolishing the legal framework for European Works Councils”. This dealt with some rather narrow technical points, but on the TUPE issue we pointed out that what was proposed might still adversely affect people classed as “workers” rather than as “employees” and that it still left circumstances where an individual employee might be placed in difficulty where a contract was “split” between two receiving employees.
On the question of European Works Councils we said that we urged the government “to
reconsider this proposal and resolve instead to strengthen the rights of UK employees to participate in European Works Councils, making them again true transnational entities”.
The meeting received news that we had been rebuffed in an attempt to encourage “Marks and Spencer” to reconsider their decision to leave their store in Blackburn town centre.
The Trades Council had written:
“We think “Public First” put it quite well in the Report they produced for ABF / Primark, “Town Centres and High Streets Survival and Revival”: “Town centres form an essential part of people’s civic pride – and the way they feel about their high streets is reflected in the way they feel about themselves. The yardstick is the number of shops that are open or boarded up. Once a town starts the spiral of decline, it is hard for people to see how it can pick up again”. Town centre decline can have adverse feedback across a number of areas. Socially, it can lead to greater fragmentation and isolation. Economically, it means a loss of a type of employment that is particularly grounded locally. And more broadly, it can set up a cycle of decline in respect of attracting inward investment. Who wants to move to a place where there is nothing going on?”
It had pointed out that Marks and Spencer had been happy to refer to “the widespread benefits to customers, colleagues and the community” when legally challenging a decision about plans for their Marble Arch store, and had asked the Company “to integrate what is best for communities more deeply into your general decision making”.
The company had justified the move in terms of their “plans to accelerate our store closure programme and the action we must take to build a business with sustainable, profitable growth”.