I would like to offer my two-pennorth on the subject of the comments Freud made as I know a lot more about his job than he does.Having stated that he knew nothing about social security, he put together his "reform" of the entire system in.... three weeks.
Worker A takes an hour to make a widget. Worker B, who is disabled, takes two hours to make a widget. The employer will use Worker A - unless he has a guarantee that if he uses Worker B he will be subsidised for the loss of productivity. Sensible.So naturally the thing to do is to abolish the subsidy, and the quotas that accompanied them; this is what happened when the Green card Register was dismantled in the 1990s.
People who have disabilities but want to work go to factories which make lots of useful stuff; some of the factories are subsidised, but they are happy places to work, keep people busy and interested rather than stuck at home on benefits, and supply all manner of well-made things to government and other willing buyers.So the sensible thing to do is to close all those factories and put all the people on the dole; lots of money will be made from flogging off the assets and the land. Lots.
In the interests of "equality" disabled people will be treated just like everyone else for employment purposes; and employers must promise to consider disabled people on an equal basis as able-bodied people and to that end they can get Access To Work money to adapt their workplaces to accommodate the disabled worker.Sounds very sensible - but unfortunately the employers don't see it that way and they are not being paid extra to take on a disabled person any more so they don't do it.
All of this is the fault of the disabled person, obviously. As Lord Fraud has opined, they are "stock" and their "benefit lifestyle is the destruction of our society" and "people who claim incapacity must show what work they are planning to do" so clearly something must be done.
So this is what HAS been done, in just 4 years - New descriptors for ESA with tougher qualifying conditions;New WCA rules and repeated reassessments;A resulting queue of 750,000 people waiting for first assessments;Removal of immediate right to appeal WCA outcomes;New jobsearch conditions for ESA subject to sanctions;100,000 ill people sent to the Work Programme;67,000 ill people sent to some form of workfare or "training";22,000 ill people sent to mandatory indefinite work activity;13,000 ill people sanctioned for an average of 3 months;200 disabled JSA claimants sanctioned for the maximum of 3 years;All self-organised voluntary work or training banned;Cuts to the Access To Work budget;Abolition of Incapacity Benefit and Severe disablement Allowance;Abolition of the Permitted Work system under IB;Abolition of the Independent Living Fund;Abolition of DLA for working-age people;Introduction of PIP including a 20% cut in funding;Removal of DLA lower Rate Care Component in PIP;New descriptors for PIP, much tougher than for DLA;A queue of 250,000-plus for first PIP assessments;New jobsearch rules for claimants of Carers Allowance;New means-testing and benefit cap;70% of all bedroom tax claimants are disabled;All claimants now paying Council Tax for the first time;New fines imposed for various claim errors;Care packages cut, with higher charges for less care;Removal of the presumption of NI Conts for sick/disabled children on DLA;and to come.....Universal Credit means-testing by household;Possible taxation of DLA and PIP;Further reductions to the benefits cap;An increase in "Residential Training";Longer waits to register any claim.
Having removed all the things that made it possible for disabled people to engage in the workplace - quotas, subsidies, access, flexible benefit arrangements, Permitted Work, voluntary work, and more - Freud is now wondering how he can fiddle Universal credit to accommodate employers who claim they want disabled workers but won't pay them the minimum wage. He is, he says, going to look at how he can add yet another layer of complexity to an already complicated and so far unworkable system so that we can subsidise employers even more than we do now.
Freud, of course, is a genius. What do I know? I'm just "stock".
