Flexible New Deal | New Deal Scandal: Leading Welfare Reform Concerns

SAVE DLA AND ALL DISABILITY BENEFITS
Tony Greenstein

Having already abolished Incapacity Benefit, New Labour has now made it clear that it wants to scrap ALL disability benefits. On July 14th New Labour published a Green Paper, Shaping the Future of Care. Reading through the spin, the message is clear. Disability Living Allowance is ‘inefficient’ ‘poorly targeted’ [because it’s not means tested!] and therefore has to go towards paying for a new national care service. Disability Living Allowance is the best benefit there is. If your needs are great enough, if you cannot care and need help with bodily functions for part or all of the day (and night) you are eligible for Disability Living Allowance. There are 3 bands – lower, middle and higher. Receipt of Disability Living Allowance does not overlap with other benefits and is not counted as taxable income.

The result is that people who are the most vulnerable and sick in this society see a small increase in their standard of living. This is what New Labour hate most of all. The proposal is to use the money for ‘individual budgets’ run by private companies, whereby the disabled, in agreement with the local authority, can spend the money on care. Of course they’ll never actually see the money!! The whole system will be discretionary and, of course, liable to cuts. Anyone with any experience of the existing system of individual budgets knows what a nightmare the whole system is.

The Green Paper talks about abolishing Attendance Allowance which is paid to those 65 and over (Attendance Allowance is the equivalent of the care component of Disability Living Allowance). Instead they intend to force the elderly to pay £20,000 to insure themselves!! The Green Paper talks about replacing not just Attendance Allowance but ‘disability benefits’ – a clear sign that it is not just Attendance Allowance which is in their sights. And the Green Paper dresses up its purpose with the usual New Labour waffle such as proclaiming that “our aspiration (is) to build a stronger, fairer Britain.”

The Attlee Government of 1945-51, which was a right-wing cold war Labour government, introduced the building blocs of the welfare state which New Labour is intent on dismantling. They introduced the 1948 National Assistance Act intended to act as a safety net for those who fell below a certain level of income.

Successive Labour and Tory Governments built on Attlee’s measures. E.g. Disability Living Allowance was introduced by the Major Government in 1992 New Labour has abolished Incapacity Benefit and all but scrapped Income Support. Those who propagate the idea that New Labour is ‘better’ than the Tories and base their strategy on that are deceiving themselves and others..

New Labour prefers a welfare state for bankers in distress, and their ‘benefits’ are paid via stuffing their mouths with gold, whilst expecting the poorest and most deprived sections of the community to pay for it. Meanwhile the leadership of the Trade Unions, like the three wise monkeys, hear nothing, see nothing and say nothing. And more to the point – do nothing. Disability Living Allowance is used to pay for the extra costs that result from being disabled. For example my own son is autistic.

One of the consequences of this is that he is always breaking things, including windows! Disability Living Allowance pays for this. It also enables him to be taken out by his parents, to enjoy videos and DVDs and live as near as possible a normal life including holidays. This is the kind of thing that New Labour is determined to prevent and in its place will be a free-market, semi-privatised, bureaucratically driven National Care Agency which will determine what the needs of the disabled are. Disabled Charities Collaborate with Government The disabled charity sector – Disability Alliance, Mencap and all the other charities who make a good living off the back of the disabled – are the Government’s first port of call.

These so-called ‘representatives’ of the disabled, although no one has ever elected these middle-class worthies, most of whom are not disabled, to this role, are now rolling over to accept New Labour’s latest spin. Their idea of a ‘campaign’ is to get people to take part in the Government’s ‘consultation exercise’. Now no one is suggesting that people boycott the consultation, but to make that the only part of your ‘campaign’ is to fool people into believing that any New Labour ‘consultation’ is actually a genuine exercise, rather than an attempt to convince those they are targetting that New Labour’s medicine will be good for them.

On 1st September Michelle Holland of the Disability Alliance wrote to me saying it was untrue that they supported the abolition of Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance. She suggested writing to one’s MP and take part in the government consultation. Ms Holland boasted that ‘We are members of the Disability Benefit Consortium… We meet regularly with the Department for Work and Pensions and HM Revenue and Customs on a range of benefits related issues.’

Err quite and look where it’s got you. On October 16th Ms Holland followed this up with another letter urging that I contact my MP and assuring me that ‘We are building as robust a defence of Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance as possible and will be trying to demonstrate that.’ Which entirely misses the point that the government’s exercise is not conducted in good faith. The proposals for a national care system are designed to hide the fact that their main goal is the abolition of a benefit that costs over £10 billion a year. When you’ve got hungry bankers to feed, then it is clear what your priorities are.

I therefore wrote back to Ms Holland about her ‘campaign’ asking: ‘Where are the thousands of posters, the meetings, the town hall rallies, the leaflets to MPs securing firm commitments in the run-up to the General Election? Instead you prefer quiet words behind doors with those seeking to find the money to fund the public borrowing deficit incurred as a result of a welfare state that primarily caters today for Bankers and other parasites.

To be blunt your role is an absolute disgrace and since you intend to do nothing it’s about time that the spotlight was turned on people like you who purport to represent the disabled when in actual fact you do nothing but sell them out.’ In fact I had already written to my MP, and the Minister for Disabled, Jonathan Shaw wrote back thus in a letter of 12 October: ‘’Many people and charities, such as Disability Alliance, Mencap, Age Concern and Help the Aged have told us they welcome the chance to discuss and engage [i.e collaborate] with us on these important issues.’

The Fight is on to Save ALL Disability Benefits including Disability Living Allowance and Attendance Allowance (for the 65s and over).