Month: December 2018

Disabled people’s organisations have reacted angrily after the government admitted that it will break its promise to publish its long-delayed adult social care green paper by the end of this year.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) confirmed this week that the green paper would now only be published “at the earliest opportunity” in 2019, as parliament continues to struggle to find a solution to the Brexit crisis.

It originally promised that the green paper would be published by the end of 2017, and then July this year, before delaying it to the autumn and then the end of 2018, and now to 2019.

DHSC declined to explain the reason for the delay but claimed that its green paper was “a departmental priority”.

Last year, the UN’s committee on the rights of persons with disabilities warned that the UK was “going backwards” on independent living, and called on the government to draw up a “comprehensive plan” to address the problem, and to take “urgent action” to ensure disabled people were provided with “adequate support to live independent lives”.

Tracey Lazard, chief executive of Inclusion London, said the repeated delays were “simply not good enough”.

She said: “The crisis in social care, and the misery it is causing to hundreds of thousands of disabled people, is now undeniable. 

“Creating a social care system and funding that genuinely promotes and delivers independent living, is one of the great domestic policy and funding challenges the country faces – yet the government acts as though this is a peripheral issue that can be constantly kicked into the long grass.

“Disabled people and wider society are up for the debate with a growing consensus that significantly more funding, from progressive taxation, is needed for social care now and in the future.”

She said the government needed to “urgently show leadership and vision” on the issue.

Dr Victoria Armstrong, chief executive of Disability North, said the further delay was “disgraceful” and “clearly demonstrates where disabled people are in terms of priorities for national government”.

She said: “It leaves disabled people and disabled people’s organisations facing uncertainty and lacking in confidence that the current government understand or care about the lives of disabled people.

“Of course, this isn’t altogether surprising given recent criticisms by UN. 

“Many of the disabled people we work with feel the impact of the crisis in health and social care, and that situation isn’t improving or set to improve if the government are not able to propose any solution to tackle the crisis.”

Sue Bott, deputy chief executive of Disability Rights UK, said it was no surprise that the green paper – which itself represented a “failure to get to grips with the urgent and growing crisis in social care” – had been “pushed back and pushed back”.

She was due yesterday (Wednesday) to attend a roundtable meeting with health and social care secretary Matt Hancock to discuss the possible content of the green paper in relation to working-age disabled people.

Bott said she would be “taking the opportunity to let him know how the social care crisis is continuing to deepen”, and she said she hoped he would tell those present that “he understands the implications of the current crisis on disabled people and that solving the funding of social care is now an urgent priority”.
But she added: “I’m not holding my breath, we shall see.”

Baroness [Jane] Campbell, a disabled crossbench peer who chairs the Independent Living Strategy Group, said she was “not surprised” by the latest green paper delay.

She said: “Sadly for disabled people’s desperate need for care and support to live with dignity and exercise their basic right to independent living, it’s what I have come to expect.”

20 December 2018 News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

The government should implement major changes to the scheme that provides funding for disabled people in England to make access improvements to their homes, according to an independent review.

Among the suggested improvements, the review says the government should increase the upper limit on disabled facilities grants (DFGs) from £30,000, although only in line with inflation.

It also suggests renaming the grant as part of a national awareness-raising campaign, with a new name that is “up to date and easily recognisable”; producing a fairer and more transparent funding formula; and introducing a national accreditation scheme for builders and tradespeople carrying out adaptations.

In October’s budget, the chancellor announced another £55 million in funding for DFGs for 2018-19, following a previous decision to increase funding for DFGs from £220 million in 2015-16 to £505 million in 2019-20.

But the review points out that, although the government has already more than doubled DFG funding in recent years, the contribution of local authorities has fallen, which has meant the number of homes adapted – at least until 2016-17 – “has not significantly increased”.

The review, Disabled Facilities Grant and Other Adaptations, says the DFG is “often seen as simply providing level access showers, stair lifts and ramps”.

Instead, the review suggests, there should be “a fresh approach that is all-encompassing and creates a home environment that enables disabled people to live a full life”.

It adds: “Districts and counties, housing and social care, occupational therapists and grants officers will need to work together to establish person-centred services that meet a disabled person’s needs in a more preventative, holistic and timely way.”

The review says the way the DFG system is delivered varies widely across different areas, and it makes recommendations for improvements, including the need to bring together occupational therapists and housing staff into single integrated teams, which is already happening in some areas and will “simplify and speed up customer journeys”.

Among other recommendations, the review says that housing and health partnership boards should be set up in every part of England to have responsibility for meeting the housing needs of disabled and older people in their area and maximise the impact of DFGs.

The review was commissioned by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government and the Department of Health and Social Care and was carried out by the University of the West of England; Foundations, the national body for home improvement agencies; the Building Research Establishment; and Ferret Information Systems.

The government said it was “carefully considering the findings”.

13 December 2018. News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com

The government could be forced into court to defend its failure to make the much-criticised universal credit benefit system accessible to disabled people.

A parliamentary meeting held to mark the International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPD) on Monday – and to call for universal credit to be scrapped – heard that disabled campaigners are now seeking claimants willing to help challenge the government’s apparent breach of equality laws.

Inclusion London’s Disability Justice Project (DJP) is considering various possible legal challenges, which could include the failure of jobcentres to make the process accessible for disabled people forced to apply for universal credit, and the failure to assess the impact of the system on disabled people.

Another possible legal challenge could address how the rollout of universal credit has led to disabled people losing accessible housing, or not being able to secure housing that meets their access needs.

DJP is also examining the impact of sanctions and conditions imposed on disabled people through universal credit and whether that could form the basis of a legal action.

Tracey Lazard, chief executive of Inclusion London, and also representing the Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance, told the parliamentary meeting that it was a “disgrace” that the government had never carried out an equality impact assessment of the universal credit system, even though it “disproportionately affects disabled people”.

She said universal credit was “fundamentally inaccessible”, with an online system that appeared to have been designed to exclude hundreds of thousands of people from using it, and which disregarded the many disabled people who have never used the internet, and the hundreds of thousands who only have sporadic online access.

She added: “We also happen to think it is legally challengeable under the Equality Act, so we are looking for people who might be interested in making that challenge*.”

Lazard said she could not think of a better event to mark IDPD because universal credit provided a “live, current danger to disabled people now” and despite recent government concessions it “continues to be devastatingly unfit for purpose”.

She said: “Rather than motivating people into work, as this government claims, there is now irrefutable evidence that this hostile and threatening use of sanctions and conditionality is deeply damaging.”

She said there was a “growing number of deaths linked to universal credit” and “widespread experience of a downward spiral of sanctions, debt, food and fuel poverty”, and even destitution, and a regime that was “instilling terror and anxiety in hundreds of thousands of disabled people”.

Lazard said universal credit had been “ideologically designed” to be “punitive and hostile”, and she said disabled people must “refuse to be guinea pigs” in the government’s “ideological experiment”.

The event was organised by the TUC disabled workers’ committee, Unite the union and Disabled People Against Cuts, and was hosted by Labour’s shadow minister for disabled people, Marsha de Cordova.

Dave Allan, chair of the national disabled members’ committee of Unite, reminded the meeting that the annual TUC Congress unanimously approved a motion he had moved in September that called on the Labour party to shift its stance on universal credit and promise to scrap the system.

Labour’s policy is currently to simply “pause and fix” universal credit rather than scrapping it.

The motion had previously been approved by disabled trade unionists at May’s TUC Disabled Workers’ Conference.

Allan said there was a need for a broad alliance to “put massive pressure” on the government to scrap universal credit.

But he said there was also a need to pressure Labour’s frontbench to commit to scrapping universal credit.

Dorothy Gould, a freelance researcher, trainer and consultant for the National Survivor User Network (NSUN), said people with serious psychological trauma were seeing their mental distress “severely” worsened by the “huge problems associated with universal credit”.

She said people were finding themselves “trapped in a cycle of assessment, rejection and appeals”, and she said the assessment system was “particularly unsuitable for people in mental distress”.

NSUN has been collecting individual accounts of the impact of universal credit.

One woman has told NSUN how the fear of disability cuts over the last two years had given her the most severe mental breakdown she had had in 44 years, involving eight months of illness, six weeks in a psychiatric unit and six months of recovery, which was ongoing.

She told NSUN: “Now my biggest fear has been realised. The Department for Work and Pensions has cut all my disability payments and with two weeks’ notice.”

Everything carefully built up over the last 17 years of self-management to provide some form of stability “has been taken away within two weeks”, she said, and added: “I don’t know where to turn, I’m in despair and in great danger of another major relapse. I have felt suicidal.”

Gould said NSUN was urgently calling on the government to address the “trauma and injustice” caused both by universal credit and people’s experience of the Mental Health Act (see separate story).

Dr Liz Okokon, co-disability officer and women’s officer for Dulwich and West Norwood Labour party and a Unite activist, who works in the NHS, said it was important to feel “positive and hopeful” because “so many people are not going to give up and give in”.

She said: “We can do something about this, we can make a difference, we can change.

“There are dreadful stories but [we should remember] the fact that we have our trade union movement behind us, activists from all corners behind us.”

She pointed out how the telling of individual stories of the Windrush scandal had brought it to the mass media.

She said: “Telling these stories really is really important.

“We must remember that we are valued as people, not just as commodities, not just those who will go out and bring in a couple of tax dollars.

“We have value as people and we need society to remember all of us have value, and not just how many cogs we can put on a wheel.”

Miriam Binder, from Disabled People Against Cuts, said it was important to recognise that universal credit was being introduced “at a time of unprecedented cuts in our social infrastructure”.

She said: “The whole universal credit process is essentially draconian and not fit for purpose.

“It is punitive and takes no heed of the personal circumstances of those who are obliged to turn to it.

“Universal credit has led to destitution, homelessness, illness, exacerbated disabilities and death.”

She added: “It needs to be stopped and scrapped. No ifs, ands or buts about it.”

The parliamentary event came just two days after a national day of action by Unite against universal credit saw 90 different actions across the country.

Sean McGovern, co-chair of the disabled workers’ committee, said activists now needed to persuade Labour to scrap universal credit.

He said universal credit was an “atrocious social policy” that had already killed “innumerable people” and activists needed to discuss the campaign to scrap universal credit with constituency Labour parties and trade unions.

He said there would not be a formal campaigning alliance but groups needed to work together, including disabled people’s organisations and other grassroots groups, to push for universal credit to be scrapped under a Labour government.

News provided by John Pring at www.disabilitynewsservice.com