Let’s say – for the sake of argument – that you wanted to slash the welfare budget by £12bn while appearing to be fair and even-handed. How would you go about it?
First, you might turn the spotlight on individuals who play the system. Never mind that fraud amounts to only 0.7% of the total expenditure on benefits and tax credits, according to Department for Work and Pensions figures. That inconvenient fact will get drowned out if you make enough noise about cheats and scroungers.
Then, having set the tone of the discourse to blaming and shaming, you’re free to pursue cuts by less visible means. Such as a points system.
This is how it works. You tie benefits to points. Then, you award those points on the basis of what the most vulnerable people in society have to say about their own needs, whether or not they are capable of making such judgments. While you’re at it, ensure that the system remains in constant flux, so that claimants never know exactly where the goalposts are.
My daughter has suffered from a severe mental illness for many years. At times it’s so painful she wants to cut off her own head to shut up the damning voices inside it.
Outside hospital she depends on benefits to live with any degree of independence. But she feels deeply unworthy of them –as she does of all the help she has been given. These feelings worsen every time a form arrives from the DWP to establish her eligibility, which they do on a regular basis. I’m not talking about the mild unease with which most of us face an official assessment; I’m talking about a vortex of panic and distress and fear that is way off the scale.
In January this year, another form arrived in the post. As always, she struggled to complete it. Because how can you put the chaos in your head down on paper? In tick boxes? What do the words really mean? And how can you ask for any help when you are certain your needs are utterly bogus? How do you quantify terrifying, destabilising states of mind that change hour by hour, minute by minute?
But she did complete the form – with help – giving the same answers she had given before. Nothing about her situation had changed. If anything, it had got worse (at the time she was mid-relapse).
In April she was informed that her personal independence payment (Pip) had been cut to the lowest rate. She had scored 11 points. To carry on qualifying for the enhanced rate of Pip, which she has previously received, she would have had to score 12.
Put it another way. The loss of that one point has cost her half her Pip, which is about £50 a week. When she isn’t in hospital, my daughter lives in a small room in sheltered accommodation. Most of her things are in store because she has nowhere else to put them. Storage alone costs her £125 a month.
Encouraged by her key worker, she appealed against this decision.
Three months later, she was placed under 24-hour surveillance in an acute medical bay on a locked psychiatric ward. It’s like Russian roulette, her consultant explained when she was sectioned for her own safety: you never know when there’s going to be a bullet in the chamber.
My daughter has severe anorexia. Her condition has the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. It has almost killed her a number of times. Sufferers also have to contend with intense feelings of guilt, shame and fraudulence.
The week her core temperature dropped so low she was at risk of heart failure – and I was asked to track down a woolly hat during a London heatwave to keep her head warm at night – she needed constant reassurance that she was ill enough to warrant the care she was getting round the clock.
On 30 August, while she was still in the bay, with three locked doors between her and the outside world, she received a letter from the DWP saying that her appeal had been unsuccessful. It went on to state that if she disagreed with this decision, she could apply to take her case to a tribunal within one month of the date of the letter. The letter was dated 30 July.
It is obviously in the nature of many mental health problems that reality is skewed. What a judgment like this tells my daughter is that she is not sick enough – which is something her illness also tells her. Yet the only way she could have been sicker at the time of her admission would have been if she were dead.
To assess eligibility for Pip, the DWP allocates scores based on what it calls descriptors. In their words, these are “sentences which describe how much support, and the type of support, you need. The number of points you get depends on how much help you need.”
My daughter scored 1 (0 is the lowest) for “managing therapy or a health condition”.
She scored 2 for “preparing food” and 4 for “taking nutrition”.
I’d be thrilled if that assessment of her ability to cope with her problems were true. It comes nowhere close.
Two weeks later, a nurse wheeled my daughter to an office in another part of the hospital site to see what could be done. There, an adviser leafed through the bulging file my daughter had brought with her and found a letter from the DWP dated 19 February.
The letter stated that my daughter was entitled to receive the enhanced rate” of Pip until late January 2016. The adviser explained to my daughter that this letter represented a contract from the DWP. She explained that there was no reason why she should have had to fill out the assessment form before that date.
Consulting a DWP rubric, the adviser said that in the light of my daughter’s severe ill health, she should have scored the maximum number of points in several of the “daily living” categories.
Pip is not paid when you’re in hospital, even though the bills do not stop coming, expenses that may directly arise because of your inability to live a full life, as is the case with my daughter. She has no argument with that, although I do.
Last week, after numerous representations made on my daughter’s behalf by three separate benefits officers over a period of nearly eight months – challenges that were repeatedly turned down – the DWP finally agreed to reverse their decision and restore my daughter’s Pip to the enhanced rate.
So what it amounts to is this. Benefits at rates already awarded are being cut on the basis of a points system, where points are allocated on the basis of what mentally ill people are able to say about needs they struggle to admit they have, in assessments carried out in advance of the date those benefits are due to be reassessed.
According to research published last year by Mind, people with mental illnesses are having their benefits cut more often than those with other conditions.
Who’s playing the system?
