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“The assessment process itself is awful”. Carol Vickers receives the personal independence payment (Pip), the disability support benefit whose spiralling cost the government is determined to cut back.
She has a debilitating condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome that affects her connective tissues, and means she needs an assistance dog. I spoke to her this week, to get a sense of how those at the sharp end of the looming reforms may be feeling.
The work and pensions secretary, Liz Kendall, has insisted the government didn’t “start from a spreadsheet,” when drawing up the plans; but officials privately make no bones about the fact that they did have a savings target.
Cutting £5bn from the welfare bill will help Rachel Reeves to meet her self-imposed fiscal rules – and the row over welfare is likely to be the first of many battles, as she looks for further savings in June’s spending review.
“They are coming at it from completely the wrong angle,” argues Vickers. “It’s almost as if they’re trying to tackle the outcome, not the root causes.”
Pip is paid regardless of whether the recipient is in work. Vickers says the £100-ish a week she gets on the lower rate doesn’t meet the extra costs of coping with her condition, which she reckons are about £1,000 a month – but helps her to stay in her job, in the education sector. She also has a small craft business, making jewellery.
“To an extent, it’s helping keep me in work,” she says. “The fact I can run my 13-year-old car means I can keep my job; the fact that I can pay for my assistance dog, keeps me independent.”
Reports this weekend suggest Kendall may withdraw plans to freeze the value of Pip next year, after a cabinet backlash; but the intention still appears to be to make it much harder to claim. Yet like many others who engage with the system, Vickers says it is already “degrading”.
“They approach it as if you are a liar or you’re trying to play the system somehow, when all you’re trying to do is stay in work or stay as a contributing member of society”.
As well as cutting the bill for Pip, which is projected to soar to an eye-watering £30bn without intervention, ministers are expected to reduce the amount paid to the “limited capability for work related activity” (LCWRA) group of universal credit claimants.
These people, judged too sick to be in a job, receive an extra £416 a month on top of the basic universal credit payment – more than doubling it for a single person under 25 – and do not face the threat of having their benefits deducted if they fail to carry out work-related activities.
Experts say the gulf in generosity between the basic level of UC and this group, may have helped contribute to the sharp increase of claimants in recent years, by making it more worthwhile to jump through the requisite hoops.
But given charities say the basic rate of UC is all but impossible to live on – the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says five out of six households on UC are going without essentials such as heating or food – it seems unlikely the main problem here is that LCWRA payments are too lavish.
And recent research by the Learning and Work Foundation said that the DWP tends to leave most disabled claimants with little or no practical help.
Kendall and her DWP colleague, the employment minister Alison McGovern, are keen to change that.
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Even in opposition, McGovern was an enthusiast for the kind of devolved, bespoke back-to-work schemes that can make a real difference to people’s lives – but require investment of time and resources.
I visited one such project with her in the Welsh seaside town of Rhyl, where Luke, who had been too shy to leave the house, was serving up lattes in the local cafe.
In the Whitehall wrangle, Kendall appears to have won the right to reinvest up to £1bn a year of the savings DWP hopes to make, in funding more of this kind of approach – as well as a “right to try,” so that claimants can start a potential job without immediately losing benefits.
This is the only acceptable version of the argument, made repeatedly by ministers in recent days, that there is a “moral case”, for welfare reform: that it is indefensible for so many people to be left on the sidelines of society.
Yet when the public hear ministers suggest there is a moral case for cuts, it conjures up all the guilt and shame-laden Tory language of scroungers and shirkers.
Kendall explicitly rejects those words; but painting a veneer of morality over cuts, risks people like Vickers, who may now face a tougher battle to get support, feeling the government thinks they are a moral problem. “I almost feel like they’re picking on the people who are too tired or sick to fight back,” she says.
Moreover, Labour face any number of other pressing problems – social care, child poverty, court backlogs – but have chosen to put a moral slant on the one in particular they hope will save them £5bn.
Reforming a system that leaves too many people on the scrapheap, in a way that should save money over time by helping many back into work, is absolutely laudable. Coming over all moral, and especially about a plan to make swingeing upfront cuts that will leave many people fearful about losing the support they rely on? Not so much.
