The elephant in the room that nobody in government wants to talk about is that the astonishing rise in personal independent payments is highly correlated to the rollout of Covid vaccines. Their side effect profile is disastrous to the public health. A few brave statisticians have written about this including John Dee on substack and Ed Dowd of Phinance Technologies in the USA
There’s a flaw in Labour’s strategy (yeh ok, maybe a few!) but a biggie is this: there is no-one - not any extra resource at all - to help take ‘non-workers’ through the assessment/rehabilitation/therapy/ monitoring process. Please don’t say ‘doctors will do it’ - no they won’t.
I probably even missed out a few stages there, as well as words like motivation, retraining etc.
How can you keep reducing civil service resources and then still pile in the number of specialists they need to help here??
So, Liz Kendall’s savings will be bunkum anyway, compared to the money required to pay people to solve the problem.
As I say, I don't for one minute believe they have anything to do with getting people back to work anyway; that's clearly impossible for many reasons. Instead, I remind myself doing away with social security opens up a multi-£bn private insurance market, plenty of gravy for everyone involved, politicians, the media, everyone. That's all this is about. Greed.
Fabulous article as ever, bottom line is there is no more road to kick the can down; this is the Government’s TINA moment and they literally cannot afford to get the reform wrong.
I work with many people, aged 50+, who are on benefits as a result of long-term sickness or some form of disability. They come to Startup School for Seniors, the programme I co-founded. not because they have a desperate desire to become self-employed, but typically because they are not capable of finding suitable work due to their circumstances. Ageism is one, caring responsibilities is another and their health condition sometimes prevents them from easily leaving their home and travelling to an office. These broad stroke measures proposed by Liz Kendall are going to have a catastrophic impact on our beneficiaries.
Their situation is compounded by the fact that the DWP's self-employment track does not actually support people who genuine want to work for themselves, as it comes with a requirement to earn £1000 profit per month at the end of a year that is completely unachievable for the vast majority.
Finally, although our programme is funded by Local Authorities, the cost-per-head is nowhere near what it needs to be to actually be able to take those furthest from the labour market and help them to become successful business owners. Thank you for reporting on this - it's an important conversation, and I hope your recommendations does not fall on deaf ears.
"There are many people who do not deserve the huge support they claim in PIP." Where's the evidence for this, either that people receiving it don't 'deserve' it or that there's huge support in the first place, something many would feel to be a demonstrable nonsense?
I think the lefts hatred of private healthcare also plays a part. If employers were encouraged to get more people on private health schemes, rather than taxing the employee and employer for doing so, fewer people would be waiting for operations. Freeing up government staff to look
At existing cases. Again, encourage people to take out income protection polices, that would pay out before/instead of state benefits. What do people think?
I think doing away with social security opens up a multi-£bn private insurance market, plenty of gravy for everyone involved, politicians, the media, everyone. That's all this is about. Greed.
I think one step that would help but will never be tried is to increase the standard unemployment benefit, currently it is so low that it all but forces people to go doctor shopping to try and get a disability payment, but once you’re on one of them you fear taking a low paid, part time or casual zero hours contract type job because if it doesn’t work out you can lose your disability payment (because after all you just showed you were fit enough to work) this then condemns hundreds of thousands of people to the scrap heap of lifelong welfare, where their entire focus is gaming the system to maximise housing benefit, DSP top Ups and any other welfare they can get, and it’s not really their fault, the system has incentivised it, but if you increase the basic unemployment benefit you remove the NEED to get on a DSP to live and let these people actively seek work without the fear of their finances being ruined if the job doesn’t work out (this is especially true of the mental health DSP cohort)
Now treasury and even the public are going to be a hard sell on ‘reduce the welfare bill by increasing welfare payments’ the Daily Mail headlines basically write themselves, plus the benefits might not be seen within one parliament, so there are a lot of reasons why this will never happen, but I’m convinced it would work because I’ve grown up around these people, I don’t just see graphs about welfare recipients , I live among them, so unlike Guardian middle class do-gooders I don’t have an almost anthropological view of their inherent goodness, or a Daily Mail readers view of their inherent scrounger nature, I just know how the incentive structures force them to make decisions and if the standard unemployment benefit isn’t enough to live and they can’t get a job then they’re obviously going to follow the advice of Jim down the street or Auntie Carol and game the system because most of us in that position would when we see our friends and family doing it
Some sense here IMO. An actual living wage, a realistic one, should be being enforced too. Everything has to be looked at in context. Any gaming of the system, I might point out, is being done by the Authorities in Britain, not by claimants. Try researching John leCascio formerly of American insurance co. Unum & his input into UK social security issues in the mid 1990s at the request of Peter Lilley.
The elephant in the room that nobody in government wants to talk about is that the astonishing rise in personal independent payments is highly correlated to the rollout of Covid vaccines. Their side effect profile is disastrous to the public health. A few brave statisticians have written about this including John Dee on substack and Ed Dowd of Phinance Technologies in the USA
https://open.substack.com/pub/jdee/p/uk-personal-independence-payments?r=peo1w&utm_medium=ios
Until we own this issue and start treating people with vaccine injuries the social and financial nightmare will carry on.
There’s a flaw in Labour’s strategy (yeh ok, maybe a few!) but a biggie is this: there is no-one - not any extra resource at all - to help take ‘non-workers’ through the assessment/rehabilitation/therapy/ monitoring process. Please don’t say ‘doctors will do it’ - no they won’t.
I probably even missed out a few stages there, as well as words like motivation, retraining etc.
How can you keep reducing civil service resources and then still pile in the number of specialists they need to help here??
So, Liz Kendall’s savings will be bunkum anyway, compared to the money required to pay people to solve the problem.
As I say, I don't for one minute believe they have anything to do with getting people back to work anyway; that's clearly impossible for many reasons. Instead, I remind myself doing away with social security opens up a multi-£bn private insurance market, plenty of gravy for everyone involved, politicians, the media, everyone. That's all this is about. Greed.
Fabulous article as ever, bottom line is there is no more road to kick the can down; this is the Government’s TINA moment and they literally cannot afford to get the reform wrong.
I work with many people, aged 50+, who are on benefits as a result of long-term sickness or some form of disability. They come to Startup School for Seniors, the programme I co-founded. not because they have a desperate desire to become self-employed, but typically because they are not capable of finding suitable work due to their circumstances. Ageism is one, caring responsibilities is another and their health condition sometimes prevents them from easily leaving their home and travelling to an office. These broad stroke measures proposed by Liz Kendall are going to have a catastrophic impact on our beneficiaries.
Their situation is compounded by the fact that the DWP's self-employment track does not actually support people who genuine want to work for themselves, as it comes with a requirement to earn £1000 profit per month at the end of a year that is completely unachievable for the vast majority.
Finally, although our programme is funded by Local Authorities, the cost-per-head is nowhere near what it needs to be to actually be able to take those furthest from the labour market and help them to become successful business owners. Thank you for reporting on this - it's an important conversation, and I hope your recommendations does not fall on deaf ears.
"There are many people who do not deserve the huge support they claim in PIP." Where's the evidence for this, either that people receiving it don't 'deserve' it or that there's huge support in the first place, something many would feel to be a demonstrable nonsense?
No such thing as the Treasury banking savings in a fiat economy. This is economically illiterate nonsense.
Poverty Porn by Ken Loach. Where is he and Jezza now.😃
I think the lefts hatred of private healthcare also plays a part. If employers were encouraged to get more people on private health schemes, rather than taxing the employee and employer for doing so, fewer people would be waiting for operations. Freeing up government staff to look
At existing cases. Again, encourage people to take out income protection polices, that would pay out before/instead of state benefits. What do people think?
I think doing away with social security opens up a multi-£bn private insurance market, plenty of gravy for everyone involved, politicians, the media, everyone. That's all this is about. Greed.
Well done, sir! A fantastic article.
Here’s hoping indeed! Thank you.
I think one step that would help but will never be tried is to increase the standard unemployment benefit, currently it is so low that it all but forces people to go doctor shopping to try and get a disability payment, but once you’re on one of them you fear taking a low paid, part time or casual zero hours contract type job because if it doesn’t work out you can lose your disability payment (because after all you just showed you were fit enough to work) this then condemns hundreds of thousands of people to the scrap heap of lifelong welfare, where their entire focus is gaming the system to maximise housing benefit, DSP top Ups and any other welfare they can get, and it’s not really their fault, the system has incentivised it, but if you increase the basic unemployment benefit you remove the NEED to get on a DSP to live and let these people actively seek work without the fear of their finances being ruined if the job doesn’t work out (this is especially true of the mental health DSP cohort)
Now treasury and even the public are going to be a hard sell on ‘reduce the welfare bill by increasing welfare payments’ the Daily Mail headlines basically write themselves, plus the benefits might not be seen within one parliament, so there are a lot of reasons why this will never happen, but I’m convinced it would work because I’ve grown up around these people, I don’t just see graphs about welfare recipients , I live among them, so unlike Guardian middle class do-gooders I don’t have an almost anthropological view of their inherent goodness, or a Daily Mail readers view of their inherent scrounger nature, I just know how the incentive structures force them to make decisions and if the standard unemployment benefit isn’t enough to live and they can’t get a job then they’re obviously going to follow the advice of Jim down the street or Auntie Carol and game the system because most of us in that position would when we see our friends and family doing it
Some sense here IMO. An actual living wage, a realistic one, should be being enforced too. Everything has to be looked at in context. Any gaming of the system, I might point out, is being done by the Authorities in Britain, not by claimants. Try researching John leCascio formerly of American insurance co. Unum & his input into UK social security issues in the mid 1990s at the request of Peter Lilley.
Wise words