What those cuts really mean
The dramatic public expenditure cuts announced by the Coalition Government – too fast and too deep in my view – are only now starting to bite with the commencement of the new financial year and the implementation of new tax and benefit changes nationally and of council budgets locally. The impact on many people’s lives will be profound.
A close friend of mine has been off work for months and diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), an illness which is hard to ‘see’ but utterly devastating in its impact. It means that, while he can still do most non-strenuous activities, he cannot do them for any length of time before exhausting himself. In a typical day, he will only have some two-three hours of mild activity and the remainder of the time he has to rest.
Clearly he cannot work and one would assume that he qualifies for an appropriate benefit. So he applied for the new Employment & Support Allowance (ESA) and he was called for interview as part of a Work Capability Assessment (WCA). He asked me to accompany him as a friend which, of course, I did.
The actual interview commenced one and half hours after the scheduled time and lasted almost one and a half hours. It was clearly a very stressful experience for my friend, not least because every answer to the formulaic questions held the risk of being misunderstood or misrepresented and not obtaining the allowance. However, being fair to the organisation (Atos) and the nurse, I have to say that my friend was given the time and opportunity he needed to put his case and she was genuinely sensitive and caring in how she posed the questions, responded to the answers, and conducted the physical tests.
Therefore I was all the more shocked when the claim for ESA was turned down and the Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) declared that he had achieved no qualifying points at all towards eligibility for the benefit. In other words, the DWP consider him fully fit to work. I can understand the wish of successive governments – ESA was created by the previous Labour Government – to reduce dependency on benefits and encourage those who can return to work to do so. But pressurising those who genuinely cannot work to do so and denying them benefits that can make a real difference to quality of life seems unacceptably cruel.
My friend has a right of appeal and I hope that he will exercise it, but I know that he is fearful that the further stress of an appeal process would undermine his physical and psychological health. This whole unfortunate exercise could have the perverse effect of delaying, rather than assisting, his return to health and work.