Nothing Ever Happens
Frank Field has pointed out the proposals announced today for welfare reform are unlikely to 'see the light of day' and won't make any difference if they do.I couldn't agree more with his latter point, though not being in possession of the same income as an MP I'm still worried about the former.
The proposed reforms rely heavily on the Pathways programme and use of job brokers as well as the assumption that there really are the mythical 1 million to remove from benefits, the flaws of both have been looked at many times on this blog, and by other more esteemed bloggers than yours truly.
Frankly the whole thing has left me more depressed about the problems facing the benefits system than ever.
5 comments:
I can't comment directly on these new proposals as we have yet to see what they will mean on the ground, but there has been a lot of activity around investigating how the USA handles social security and similar benefits (why no one ever investigates how the Norwegians handle benefits I'll leave to you to speculate) with the idea of instituting a more american model in the UK. Having lived in both countries all I can say is that if I ever did suffer a debilitating injury that prevented me from working (say a pile of form 51B's fall on me) I'm just glad I have more than one passport.
-faceless-
urgh, the govenment totally suxs!
It's upsetting me despite having been lucky enough to 'escape' the system myself.
If you'll forgive the gross indecency of quoting myself... this is from a blogpost I made when I was looking for work:
"The obvious physical symptoms of my illness rule out quite a lot of things, especially in terms of the usual easy-to-get minimum-wage flexible-hours jobs. I don't think I'm in any way 'above' cleaning toilets or serving fast-food or collecting trolleys from a supermarket carpark, but I would do such an ineffective job of those tasks that really, another person would have to be employed just to pick up my slack."
I have so far seen no word on what would happen to those of us who aren't "severely" disabled but are, nevertheless, quite restricted in terms of the work we could do.
New here; love your blog!!
I shouldn't believe Frank Field - he is as facist as the rest of them.
It is shocking the way things are going - and for one simple reason - that the incapacity benefit was introduced before care in the community - therefore Freuds report is deeply flawed, because it assumes that levels of illness remain constant, and ignores that thousands of peolpe have been added to incapacity because the asylums were shut.
But hey! let's not expect Mp's to deal with the real world - not when they can live in fantasy land on the fantastical expenses dished out on the gravy train.
And the worst thing is that Cameron has already declared that he accepts the Freud report in full and all of this fluff from Labour is simply the watered down version.
Sick.
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