Heaven rejoices in the the sinner who repents, and the decision to suspend some of the absurd assessments for claimants of Employment and Support Allowance has to be welcome. Damian Green, the Secretary of State, has acknowledged that repeated assessments of people with long-term conditions are ‘pointless’, coincidentally a word I’ve also used. Repeated assessments will still be made for the ‘vast majority’ of claimants, but any movement is an improvement.
I’ve made the case for doing something like this more than once, including an argument picked up earlier this year by the Daily Mirror, and it would pleasing to think that public comments might have had some effect – but as we all know, they never do. The most I can ever claim, as the Scottish Government announced after my submissions on the welfare fund, is that my analysis agrees with theirs.