Alternatives to DLA

Disability Living Allowance has been widely defended – I’ve signed a petition myself – but there are problems with it, and those problems seem set to continue into the reformed PIP.

The first problem is comprehensibility. The DWP’s evidence on claims suggests that people don’t understand the criteria, that they have a go at claiming benefits regardless, and that for many people it’s simply seen as an add-on to Incapacity Benefit/ESA.

The second problem is fairness. Older people don’t get DLA, and that means they don’t get the element in DLA for mobility. That’s been the case since the 1970s; older people were excluded, simply enough, because most people with mobility problems in the UK are elderly, and it would have cost a lot. However, older people who become entitled before the age of 65 can get an extension of DLA – which means that two people who have had strokes, one at age 63 and the other at age 67, will be treated differently – and the older person will not get the benefit if if that person’s condition is more serious.

The third problem is testing. Disabilities don’t always come in neat, predictable packages. People have good times and bad times. Their capacity varies. PIP is supposed to take fluctuating conditions into account, but frankly there’s little hope it can do it effectively. There is also the problem that people who make the best of things will be penalised for doing it. The most practical way of dealing with this is to have different types of qualifying condition. In the same way that we don’t test someone with no feet – that exception is made in the current system – we should be able to rely on a diagnosis of blindness, or paraplegia, or terminal illness, or brittle bones, and so on. The more conditions we can identify in these terms, the less the scope for testing. If that means that some people will qualify who might not otherwise get the benefit, so be it.

Attendance Allowance and DLA are not carefully designed benefits catering for identifiable needs; if they were, older people wouldn’t be cut out. They’re benefits for severe disability, and the tests and the components are a complex way of separating out people with more severe disabilities. Currently, nearly 5 million people get the benefits – 3 million on DLA, 1.9 million on AA. About a million DLA claimants are over working age, so it’s true that most claimants of both benefits are older, but when that’s set against the population of people with disabilities, older people are probably still under-represented. Let’s imagine that we want a benefit to cover five million people with varying degrees of disability. What should it look like? We should be aiming to create a system that is comprehensible, to respond globally to specific conditions, and to support people reliably into older age. The ideal is probably something like the ‘Disablement Allowance’ long advocated by the Disability Alliance. It wouldn’t look much like DLA, or PIP.

The arguments for free services

Hard on the heels of the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Labour Party has announced its opposition to services which are free at the point of delivery, including free prescriptions and personal care. Part of this is in a speech by Johann Lamont, part in comments by Arthur Midwinter.

There are many arguments in favour of universal services – services that are available to all, and free at the point of delivery. Here are some of the main ones.

    Principle

  • People have, or should have, a right to welfare. They do not lose that right if they earn more.
  • Societies which offer equal rights are better to live in for everyone; societies that are less equal are worse to live in for everyone. (See The Spirit Level.)

    • Politics

  • Richer people will not be content to pay for services they cannot benefit from.
  • Separating out services for the better-off means there must be at least a two-tier service. “Services for the poor will always be poor services.” See e.g. T Horton, J Gregory, The Solidarity Society.

    • Practice

  • If entitlement has to be policed, there has to be a mechanism for doing it. Means tests are intrusive, burdensome and expensive.
  • The administration of testing inevitably includes some people who should not be included, and excludes others who should be.
  • Multiple means tests are wasteful and unnecessary; there are better ways of controlling the finance.

It’s difficult to know at what point a shower becomes a rainstorm, but the Labour Party’s shift may indicate the emergence of a new consensus, where the three main parties are all opposed to the principles of the welfare state.

Universality: a simple point

In reports from today’s Liberal Democratic conference, both Nick Clegg and Don Johnson have queried why the Winter Fuel Payment should be available to rich pensioners. The same argument is frequently heard about other benefits, including Child Benefit, and it could be extended to any non-means-tested benefit – health care, pensions, social care and so forth.

There are several arguments for universality – social inclusion, avoiding deterrents and so forth – but the simplest one is this. At present, everyone is already subject to one test of income: the tax system. The easiest way to manage any benefit is to pay a fixed sum and then to claw it back from tax. If there was to be a separate test for benefits like Winter Fuel Payment, everyone who might qualify would then be subject to a further test of income. Testing people’s income repeatedly is a recipe for unnecessary administration and intrusion. Why would anyone want there to be more tests than we need?

Scottish travellers

Gypsy/travellers are the minority group most discriminated against in Scotland. In a report published today by the Scottish Parliament, the Equalities Committee describes the findings as ‘deeply shocking’ and describes its reaction as ‘horrified’ and ‘appalled’. The work I do doesn’t often bring me into direct contact with travellers, but I did do some work in Aberdeenshire in 2004 which gave me the opportunity to talk directly with travellers about their situation. One of the women said what it’s like: “you’re a floor they can dance on.” The travellers talked about rampant racism, discrimination in services, harassment and lack of protection by the police – “we’re just a puckle of tinkers to them”. It’s good to see some public attention, but depressing to see so little progress.

Citizen's Pension is sidelined

It appears that proposals for a Citizen’s Pension have been kicked into touch; I saw this first in an article by Simon Reade (“How politics put paid to the Coalition’s pensions reform”, i, 22nd September) but the main source of the reports has been the Financial Times, which I can’t link to here because it’s confined to subscribers. This decision goes beyond the question of postponing decisions till after the next election. When the government suggested a flat-rate pension in 2010, the proposal was for a universal payment for all pensioners. In later discussions it seems this has been changed to become a flat rate pension for anyone who has contributed for 30 years – which is line with the Beveridge scheme rather than the original idea of a Citizen’s Pension. The key difference is that those who have not been able to contribute or whose working life has been interrupted, especially women and people with disabilities, will be left out. That means that there will be no minimum income guarantee and that Pension Credit will have to be maintained.

The other long-standing weakness of the Beveridge scheme, of course, is that flat-rate benefits were never enough to meet basic needs. The reason why governments moved to earnings-relation was the evidence that continental schemes had proved far more effective in providing incomes in old age.

Can Scotland afford benefits?

Iain Duncan Smith argued yesterday that an independent Scotland would not be able to afford benefits because of the high dependency of its population. This was dismissed by Alex Salmond on the basis that Scotland generates a higher proportion of revenue, and takes a lower proportion of benefits, than the rest of the UK. Salmond is right, because Scotland pays less to pensioners and Housing Benefit, but it’s still only part of the response. The more fundamental question is whether an independent Scotland would want the same benefit rates and tax rates as the UK; and while there may be pressures to conform to the pre-existing norms, there would be good reasons to do something different. If benefits are capped at existing levels, it will not be possible to make anyone better off without making someone else worse off. Reforming benefits without undermining existing protection is, inevitably, an expensive business; but it could be worth the expense.

A review of rules for cancer sufferers

The government has announced that people undergoing chemotherapy or radiology for cancer will now be exempt from the Work Capacity Assessment. I have made the case for this change four times in this blog (see e.g. the entry for 19th January and May 2nd) and am heartened to see sense prevail. Can we hope now for an exemption for people with severe developmental impairments?

Benefit cuts

The announcement that the government wants a further £10 billion in benefit cuts is not a great surprise. I wrote in 2010: “What is happening, on the contrary, is an incremental series of cuts which cannot have the effect the government intends. It follows that, before very long, they will be back for more.” And so they are. (The paper is part of Radical Statistics 103, The Cuts.) The fundamental problem is that two thirds of benefit expenditure – scheduled to rise to 70% in the next five years – goes to pensioners. Less than 10% of the benefits bill goes on unemployment and incapacity benefits. The main targets will be disability and housing benefits, because that’s where the money goes, but the scope to cut benefits is very, very limited.

Universal Credit implementation

The BBC reports this morning that it has been able to view evidence about growing concern on Universal Credit. That should not be surprising, because the evidence to the Work and Pension Committee is public: it is available here.

There are valuable comments on the process of implementation from UNISON, South Lanarkshire Council and East Riding of Yorkshire Council. The Institute of Chartered Accountants also makes an important point I have to admit I’d not much thought about before – the situation of self-employed people, small businesses and independent workers means they will have to return their books monthly when currently many struggle to do it annually.

Much of the evidence consists of apprehension either about principles or about elements of the scheme which have not been settled. There is a growing sense, beyond that, that the problems that have to be resolved cannot be tackled in the time-scale that is planned, and that we are heading for a crash.

Asia’s next revolution

The Economist devotes this week’s cover, and its main leader, to a story about the expansion of social protection in Asia. One of the main unsung tales of the last ten years has been the massive development of social protection in developing economies like South Africa, Mexico, India, Indonesia, China and Brazil – Barrientos and Hulme call it a “quiet revolution”. The Economist article focuses mainly on health care, and Asia has come late to the party. The Economist is probably right to argue that “every country that can afford to build a welfare state will come under mounting pressure to do so.” But then, I would say that: I have argued the case in The Welfare State (Sage, 2000) and some other papers.

The Economist’s leader does, however, make a common mistake. They write: “Europe’s welfare states began as basic safety nets. But over time they turned into cushions.” They didn’t begin that way, and they haven’t finished that way either. The origins of many welfare states lie in the development of solidarity and the mutuals; the state became involved much later. See Peter Baldwin’s book, The politics of social solidarity, Cambridge University Press 1990. The extension of health care, which they focus on, is essential to the maintenance of any modern labour force.

It was the English Poor Law that began as a safety net. The accusations that the British system had become excessively generous can be dated back to the criticisms of the monasteries before the Reformation, but it became a regular part of complaints about welfare from the mid-18th century onwards; it continued in the accusations that workhouses had become ‘pauper places’; and it continues now in the assertion, contrary to all the evidence, of generations who have ‘never worked’. The system is neither generous at an individual level, nor collectively unaffordable. There is extensive evidence of the relationship of welfare to economic performance: there isn’t one. See A B Atkinson, 1995, The welfare state and economic performance, in Incomes and the welfare state, Cambridge University Press, and the entry on my website.