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You and Yours聽- Transcript 成人论坛 Radio 4 |
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TX: 31.01.05 - Incapacity Benefit PRESENTER: PETER WHITE |
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Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 成人论坛 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WHITE Later this week the government is expected to publish its long-term plans to reform incapacity benefit. Currently around 2.7 million people, who are considered too ill or disabled to work, receive a range of work related benefits and incapacity benefit starts at around 拢55 a week but rises to 拢74 after you've been on it for a year. The bill for this comes in at somewhere over 拢7 billion annually, which is why successive governments over the past decade have desperately tried to devise ways to reduce it. Amongst the strongest rumours circulating at the moment is that the government will be trying to remove the incentive for people to stay on incapacity benefit any longer than is absolutely necessary, either by lowering it to the same level as Job Seekers Allowance or by saying that the present automatic rise in the benefit payment, after six months and a year, should now depend on the claimants efforts to find a job. Nobody really knows though. Terry Martin and Lorraine Cowie have both been on incapacity benefit for over three years, after road accidents, how would they react if it were made tougher to get? COWIE We go out and talk to people and they ask you what you're doing these days and you tell them - Well I've had an accident and I'm on incapacity benefit. Sometimes you do get the feeling of thinking well you shouldn't be on that, you should be out there earning your pennies and everything and paying your tax. The incapacity helps us out quite a lot, I think if they turned around and said to me right you'll be losing your incapacity benefit I think that'll make us a lot worse off than what we are now, I mean you just get by on what I get and also what my other half gets, I think it will be hard on a lot of people when they're families as well. MARTIN People should be encouraged to go back to work but it's no good pushing someone into a job that they're not suitable for or is not suitable for them. Because of my limited mobility I've got to make a conscious choice - do I stay on benefits and get the training that I need and get what I want or do I go for a full-time job and possibly make my condition worse and then I'm back on benefits again? WHITE So that's the reaction of Lorraine and Terry. Joining me in the studio is Lorna Reith, who's chief executive of the Disability Alliance and who's been involved in meetings with the Department of Work and Pensions about their plans. Lorna, what's your understanding of what the department is likely to do? REITH That's a hard question to answer. Our discussions with the Department for Work and Pensions have centred around the Pathways to Work pilots, which they've had running in a number of places around the country. WHITE And that's trying to help people who are on incapacity benefit back to work as quickly as possible. REITH That's right, there's a number of additional help that's available and they've been relatively successful, though obviously it's still early days. The rumours about cutbacks to incapacity benefit, time limiting, keeping the amount depressed hasn't been coming from the Department for Work and Pensions and hasn't featured in our discussions with them. WHITE So do you know where they have been coming from? REITH Well they've been coming from other parts of government, they've certainly not been coming from back bench MPs. WHITE Can we talk a bit about the figures that make the demand for this a perennial problem? There's a lot of reporting which suggests that the number of people in incapacity benefit is rising or at least stubbornly won't go down, what is the truth about the trend in the figures? REITH Well in fact the trend's completely the other way, the numbers of people on incapacity benefit has been falling steadily, it's fallen by 21% since 1995. There really isn't a problem with the numbers of people on incapacity benefit. Yes it would be nice if we could speed up the number of people moving back into work but it's not a benefit that's out of control in any way. WHITE So why do people think that it is? REITH Well there's been a certain amount of misinformation in the press. Benefits are quite complex things and unless you know your way around it's quite difficult to distinguish claims for one lot of benefits from claims from another lot of benefits. WHITE And one of the real perennials is that there is if not a level of fraud then a level of malingering, in other words because incapacity benefit is higher than Job Seekers Allowance that it's in people's interest to stay on that and if they're not being fraudulent they perhaps are giving the impression that they're iller than they really are or they could get back to work. REITH That's certainly not been our experience. The government figures on fraud are absolutely tiny, less than 0.5%, they certainly don't accept that there's any problem with fraud. It is very difficult for people to get back to work, but the test that people have to go through - the medical test - is one of the toughest in the world, and that's the government's words not mine. I think people who are on incapacity benefit are legitimately there, a lot of them do want to go back to work but they face pretty enormous barriers to do so. WHITE So I mean what are the reasons then for there being still a lot of people claiming incapacity benefit because people say - it's all very well to say this but I don't see that amount of disability around me, where are they all coming from? REITH Well one of the reasons for - one of the reasons why you might expect to see an increase, though in fact we haven't, is the number of women now in the labour market. If you go back 10 or 20 years not so many women worked and certainly if they did they paid a reduced national insurance stamp, which didn't entitle them to benefits. That situation has changed and so you now have women in work who would be eligible for incapacity benefit if they had to stop work. WHITE How worried should people currently on incapacity benefit be? REITH Well what normally happens is any change that government introduces only applies to new claimants, now they could change that but certainly that's been the accepted way of doing things for years. So people who are already on incapacity benefit should not, I hope, be too worried. WHITE We will be reporting on what happens, probably later this week. Lorna Reith thank you very much indeed. REITH Thank you. Back to the You and Yours homepage The 成人论坛 is not responsible for external websites |
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