Capture image taken from www.theguardian.com/politics

Conservative disability activist Graeme Ellis was so enraged by last Wednesday’s budget that he immediately sabotaged the Conservative Disability Group website he ran, and resigned from the party. Now, he’s joining the Labour party.

“Graeme Ellis is a 59 year old disability rights adviser from Lancaster, who has used a wheelchair for the past seven years because of diabetes-related nerve damage.

“Ellis came to the sudden realisation that it was simply no longer possible to be disabled and a Conservative supporter when he heard that disability benefits were to be cut just as tax breaks were being given to high earners – the same issue that Iain Duncan Smith said motivated his resignation as work and pensions secretary.

“A lifelong Conservative voter, Ellis has been an active member of the Conservative Disability Group for the past four years, responsible for its website. Immediately after the budget, he vented his fury by destroying the group’s online presence, removing all its content and replacing the home page with a curt note stating: “This website is temporarily closed owing to disability cuts … Graeme Ellis has resigned and will no longer develop or host this site.”

“His protest had an unexpectedly powerful impact, attracting headlines, and manifesting the sense that this was a cut too far, even for Conservative activists.

“Ellis is now planning to join the Labour party, and will meet with shadow minister for disabled people, Debbie Abrahams, this week, to discuss how he might advise the party on disability policy.”

Read full story at: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/21/huge-injustice-conservative-disability-graeme-ellis-labour?platform=hootsuite.

Graeme Ellis is also now in the process of developing his own website, www.cilp.org.uk – The voice for UK Disabled Citizens. The site aims to be the voice of those with disabilities, where you will be able to share your own thoughts and opinions, the site will be developed by Ellis over the next few weeks.

Wednesday’s budget brought to light that more cuts were on the horizon for disabled people. An estimated £1.3bn is going to be cut, affecting about 640,000 people across the country.

The Guardian has reported that 200,000 people will be removed from the Personal Independence Payments (PIP) system altogether and further 400,000 will have their benefits cut from the enhanced rate of £82 per week to the standard rate of £55. To put that into perspective that calculates to losing £1400 per year.

This has sparked anger and a huge amount of worry and many disabled people have voiced their opinions. Alex Brooker, co-presenter of the Last Leg, has called for Iain Duncan Smith to try to live of £73 per week to see how he copes. Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson has made an emotive plea to urge them to consider the implications of the affects of the cuts of the mental health of disabled people. The list goes on.

We want to know your thoughts on this, how will you be affected?

Email ros@2apublishing.co.uk or share your thoughts on Facebook.

By Rosalind Tulloch

To find out more about Ros, or the rest of the PosAbility team visit the Meet The Team section

Most reasonable people might think the changes fair — generous even. Indeed, polls show that three-quarters of the public are in favour of sharp cuts in benefits and stricter rules on entitlement.

However, critics have condemned the cuts by the ‘cruel’ Coalition, and insist that if voters knew the full facts, they would change their opinion.

Here, we reveal the truth behind the claims peddled by commentators on the Left…

THE WELFARE STATE ISN’T BEING SAVAGED

CLAIM: The welfare budget is being slashed in size and scope by the Coalition in a series of ‘cruel’ attacks on the needy.

REALITY: Between 1997/98 and 2010/11, benefit and tax credit spending in Britain increased from £122 billion to around £200 billion. This represents an increase of 60 per cent over the whole period.

As Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently admitted, the budget is not being cut at all — despite howls from the Left and BBC. It is just increasing more slowly than it would have under Labour.

At the end of the current Parliament in 2015, the Coalition is forecast to spend £206 billion on welfare. In other words, it will be higher even than at the height of Gordon Brown’s ruinous debt binge.

Working age welfare will fall slightly from £95.3 billion to £91.5 billion over the Parliament, but pensioner welfare will rise from £103.7 billion to £114.2 billion.

HUGE FAMILIES ON BENEFITS ARE NO MYTH

CLAIM: Only a tiny number of jobless families have large numbers of children reliant on the State for support.

REALITY: There are 160 families on out-of-work benefits with ten or more children. This figure was cited by the Left during the debate over the case of Mick Philpott from Derby, who killed six of his 17 children in a house fire and whose lifestyle was subsidised by taxpayers.

However, closer scrutiny of official figures shows that there are huge numbers of large workless households reliant on welfare.

There are 194,000 homes with three children; 76,310 with four; 25,980 with five; 8,760 with six; 3,200 with seven; 1,080 with eight; and 360 with nine.

Some 419,370 workless families have two children — which is the average number of offspring for all homes in the UK.

THE POOR WON’T BE FORCED OUT OF CITIES

CLAIM: The Government is making savage cuts to housing benefit, which will lead to the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the poor, who will be forced to move out of cities to cheaper areas.

REALITY: The £26,000-a-year cap on the amount a family can receive in state benefits will affect only 58,000 households. To put this in context, there were 4.5 million recipients of Housing Benefit in 2010 — with the total housing benefit budget virtually doubling in the previous ten years to  £21 billion a year.

The Coalition is not ‘cutting’ the overall budget — merely managing the increase. By 2015, the Housing Benefit bill will stand at £23 billion.

THOUSANDS OF FAMILIES HAVE NO WORKERS

CLAIM: The number of families in which no one has ever workerd is ‘minuscule’.

REALITY: Around 15,000 households contain two generations who have never worked. Some 17 per cent of working-age households contain a ‘workless generation’ (i.e. parents or all the working-age children).

Figures compiled by the Department for Work and Pensions show that, under the last government, 1.4 million people had spent nine or ten years on out-of-work benefits.

At least 600,000 young people who left school during the same period have never worked.

BENEFIT FRAUD IS A HUGE PROBLEM

CLAIM: The level of fraud is tiny and deliberately overstated by ministers.

REALITY: The Left loves to cite the figure that, for all benefit expenditure, ‘only’ 0.7 per cent is fraudulent (the figure, of course, is an estimate — the actual figure could be higher or lower).

But, in cash terms, this ‘tiny’ percentage is the equivalent of £1.2 billion being stolen from the taxpayer every year.

The figures are particularly stark for tax credits, where fraud and error costs 8.1 per cent of total expenditure. HMRC has already written off debts of £4 billion — money paid out in tax credits as a result of fraud or error — with another £4 billion outstanding.

BENEFITS ARE NOT BEING CUT

CLAIM: Millions of people in and out of work are having their benefits ‘cut’.

REALITY: Benefits, including out-of-work-benefits and tax credits, are increasing by one per cent. This is depicted as a cut because it is less than the rate of inflation. But it follows a period when benefits outstripped average wage increases.

In 2012/13, while average earnings increased by 2.9 per cent, most working age benefits were up-rated by 5.2 per cent.

If compared over the past five years, the gap is wider still: with the incomes of those in work having risen half as quickly as those on out-of-work benefits — at a rate of 10 per cent compared with 20 per cent.

Elsewhere in Europe, benefits have suffered real cuts: Ireland has cut unemployment benefits by four per cent a year for two years; Portugal has reduced it by six per cent; and Spain has cut payments to anyone unemployed for longer than six months by 10 per cent.

THE DISABLED ARE NOT BEING TARGETED

CLAIM: Scrapping this allowance will result in ‘real hardship’ and strip the disabled of their independence.

REALITY: Disability Living Allowance is designed to make life easier for the disabled — for example, by funding taxis to work. It can be paid to people whether they are working or not. There are 3.3 million people claiming, compared with 1.1 million when it was introduced by the Tories in 1992.

It is being replaced with a new system of Personal Independence Payments, and new checks are expected to lead to a reduction in the number of claimants of around 600,000, according to campaign group Scope.

In other words, there will still be 1.6 million more claimants than when it was introduced.

Ministers have repeatedly been accused of trying to slash the budget for the benefit by £2 billion. In fact, spending will remain at £13 billion every year between now and 2015.

THE TRULY SICK ARE NOT BEING FORCED TO WORK

CLAIM:  New tests to check Incapacity Benefit claimants’ inability to work are having a devastating effect on the sick and mentally ill.

REALITY: Incapacity Benefit, which is being phased out to be replaced by Employment and Support Allowance, is paid to people considered unfit for work. Only 232,000 — one in eight of those tested by healthcare professionals — have been deemed too unwell to do any work.

Another 837,000 who took the test were found to be fit to work immediately, and a further 367,300 were judged able to do some level of work.

Some 30 people were claiming they were unfit to work because of blisters, while 60 cited acne and 2,110 said ‘sprains and strains’ rendered them unfit for employment.

OTHER COUNTRIES SPEND LESS THAN US

CLAIM: Britain’s spending on benefits is unremarkable for a major European economy.

REALITY: Disability benefits cost the UK more than almost any other Western country, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (oecd).

We spend 2.4 per cent of national output on the benefit — more than France, Germany, Italy or Spain. The share of GDP is more than double the 1per cent in the U.S. — and six times Japan’s 0.4 per cent.

Only Norway and Iceland spent more: 2.8 per cent. The study found that sickness and disability combined made up 12 per cent of UK social spending. The average across the OECD is 9.2 per cent.

An earlier version of this article, based on information provided by Conservative Central Office, stated that 878,000 individuals claiming benefits intended for the genuinely sick ‘stopped claiming rather than face a fresh medical’. We are happy to make clear that other important reasons people had for not pursuing ESA claims were that they recovered, returned to work or claimed a more appropriate benefit.

Daily Mail  By JAMES SLACK

Up until Monday claimants who could not walk 50 metres were entitled to disability living allowance (DLA). The new social security (personal independence payment) regulations 2013 (PIP) reduce the distance to only 20 metres. As a direct result, an estimated 51,000 fewer people could be eligible for payments.

Other changes to mobility benefits could eventually lead to as many as 428,000 claimants losing their entitlements, according to the government’s own estimate.

The legal challenge is being run by the law firms Leigh Day and Public Law Solicitors who argue that the official consultation process did not mention the new limit would be reduced to only 20 metres.

One of the three claimants cannot be identified because of an anonymity order. The other two are Kim Storr and Steven Sumpter. Storr, who relies on crutches, has rheumatoid arthritis and other severe progressive conditions; her mobility is affected by joint swelling and pain. She currently receives DLA, including the higher rate of the mobility component. She needs an adapted vehicle to enable her to go out independently.

Sumpter suffers from ME which causes him increasing mobility problems. He can walk short distances with a stick, but is otherwise dependent on a wheelchair. He was assessed as eligible for the higher rate of the mobility component of DLA last year, which he has used to lease a Motability car.

Rosa Curling, a solicitor with Leigh Day who is representing two of the disabled clients, said: “We have advised our clients that the consultation undertaken by the secretary of state was unlawful. People were not properly informed that the limit might be reduced to 20 metres and had no opportunity to provide … their views on this proposal.

“Removing this vital benefit to disabled people will have a devastating effect on many people’s lives and their ability to access and be part of our communities. The secretary of state has a legal obligation to consider such impacts before deciding whether to limit access to this benefit.”

Karen Ashton, of the Public Law Solicitors who represents Sumpter, said: “What is at the heart of this legal challenge is fairness. The extra costs of getting out and about for those who have severe mobility problems can be huge.

“The higher rate mobility benefit can make the difference between being able to do everyday things that everyone else takes for granted – such as doing your own shopping and visiting friends and relatives – and only leaving the house for absolutely essential appointments.

“But the government failed to mention the reduction to the 20-metre threshold in their consultations with disabled people and so those who are potentially affected have not had the chance to explain how devastating the consequences will be.”

Defending the new PIP regulations, Duncan Smith said it was “ridiculous” that under the old disability living allowance (DLA) more than two-thirds of recipients were guaranteed payments for life, regardless of whether their condition improved.

He told the Daily Mail: “70% of people on it have lifetime awards which means no one sees you ever again. It doesn’t matter if you get better or your condition worsens – it’s quite ridiculous.

“We’ve seen a rise in the runup to PIP. And you know why? They know PIP has a health check. They want to get in early, get ahead of it. It’s a case of ‘get your claim in early’.” More rigorous new health checks for claimants were “common sense”, he added.

The Guardian

Moves to replace the disability living allowance (DLA) begin, as the pressure mounts on Iain Duncan Smith to live off £53 a week.

A petition calling on Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith to live off £53 a week has been handed in to his office – as major changes to disability benefits are rolled out.

New claimants in parts of northern England will now receive Personal Independence Payments (PIP) in place of the old Disability Living Allowance (DLA), which critics say will leave many worse off.

The new system which includes face-to-face assessments and regular reviews will take at least two years to roll out across the country.

Steven Sumpter from Worcestershire, who suffers from ME and diabetes so finds walking painful, told Sky News he was worried about the future.

Previously, to get disability benefit he had to prove he was unable to walk 50m, but that will be changed to 20m.

He said he fears in the future he will lose half of the money he receives and the subsidised car he relies on.

“It means every single trip to the shops and the doctor will turn into maybe three hours of effort and that will leave me in bed, exhausted and in pain for days afterwards,” he said.

The Government insists DLA was outdated and the changes mean those who really need support will now receive it.

Mr Duncan Smith has described the previous system as “ridiculous”.

“We’ve seen a rise in the run-up to PIP. And you know why? They know PIP has a health check. They want to get in early, get ahead of it. It’s a case of ‘get your claim in early’,” he told the Daily Mail.

He added that rigorous new health checks for claimants were “common sense”.

Some charities have already expressed concerns that it will mean 600,000 people miss out on support.

Chief Executive of Scope, Richard Hawkes, admitted changes were needed but claimed the Government was motivated by cost cutting.

“The Government has already announced how much the Disability Living Allowance budget is going to be reduced, they’ve already announced how many people are going to lose DLA and they’re introducing a test which is going to provide them with the results they want to reduce those costs.

It’’ not right, it’s not fair,” he told Sky News.

PIP will initially be introduced for new claimants in northwest England, Cumbria, Cheshire, northeast England and Merseyside.

Meanwhile, welfare reform campaigners have delivered a petition bearing 450,000 names to the Department of Work and Pensions.

Mr Duncan Smith was challenged to live on £53 a week after a market trader on a radio show said that was all he had to live on despite working 50 to 70 hours a week.

Asked whether he could live on £53 a week, the former army officer, who now earns around £1,600-a-week after tax replied: “If I had to I would.”

The Cabinet minister has since dismissed the campaign as a “complete stunt”.

Musician and part-time shop worker Dominic Aversano, who started the petition on campaigning website Change.org, said: “I don’t think Mr Duncan Smith has a choice about whether to listen to the petition because so many people have signed it.

“I think it has changed the debate around welfare cuts. I was surprised because I didn’t think we would have such a large response. I am delighted.”

As well as the Personal Independence Payments, other reforms, including a below-inflation 1% cap on working-age benefits and tax credit rises for three years, have already come into force.

Around 660,000 social housing tenants deemed to have a spare room will lose an average of £14-a-week in what critics have dubbed a “bedroom tax”.

Trials of a £500-a-week cap on household benefits are also due to begin in four London boroughs.

Chancellor George Osborne insisted on Sunday that the public was behind his changes to the benefits system.

Mr Osborne also said he felt “angry” that too much money was being “spent in the wrong way in our welfare system”.

By Siobhan Robbins, Sky Reporter

Sky News

Mr Black had booked himself into the George Hotel in Edinburgh the night before.

He told the BBC he had breakfast and then made his way to the conference room in the hotel in time for Mr Duncan Smith’s speech.

When the secretary of state rose to his feet Mr Black called out: “You are creating a new poll tax and we are going to see the end of you back to England, where you belong, you rat bag.”

Mr Duncan Smith replied: “It is always good to be welcomed.”

Mr Black was then escorted from the conference room and Mr Duncan Smith continued with his speech.

Then two disabled protesters stood up and shouted out.

They said: “We want social justice and equality … We’re coming for you.”

The two, and their guide dog, were then escorted from the room.

Outside Jonathan Smith and Charli Saben Fox explained why they had interrupted Mr Duncan Smith’s speech.

Mr Smith who receives income support, disability living allowance and housing benefit said: “If we don’t do it then we may as well just go out and shoot ourselves.

“A bullet in the head is probably easier, kinder to most of us than just letting us rot away.”

Charli Saben Fox, whose son has learning difficulties and is disabled herself, said: “If they take away everything from us we have nothing to lose.

“That means we have everything to fight for and that is what we are going to do.

“Iain Duncan Smith has got a fight on his hands if he thinks we are just going to lay down and die.”

Earlier, the BBC understands Mr Duncan Smith had held private meetings with the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Willie Rennie and the Deputy First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon.

Mr Rennie’s party conference recently voted for a rethink on changes to housing benefit which will see people lose benefits if they are deemed to have spare bedrooms in their property.

Housing benefit

Ms Sturgeon’s government has called on the UK government to scrap what they call the “bedroom tax”.

Labour will use an emergency question at Holyrood to ask the Scottish government if they will bring in emergency legislation to stop local councils and housing associations evicting tenants if they run up arrears as a result of housing benefit changes.

But her housing minister Margaret Burgess ruled this out saying: “What we would have then is lots of tenants and people running up debts and landlords struggling to balance the books and their rent accounts.”

Ms Burgess said the cost of the housing benefit changes in Scotland could be £65m and that was money her government did not have available to compensate councils and social landlords.

She continued: “For us to do that would be asking to use Scottish government funding for devolved matters, money we would have to take from health, from education or from our police services to pay for a reserved matter.

“The bedroom tax lies squarely on the shoulders of the Westminster government and we will continue to fight them on this.”

First Minister Alex Salmond pledged no SNP council would evict tenants who ran into financial trouble as a result of the welfare changes.

In a BBC interview, Mr Duncan Smith defended his housing benefit reforms saying the current system was unfair.

He said: “It is unfair on taxpayers, it is unfair on those in over-crowded accommodation and it is unfair that one group of housing benefit tenants cannot have spare bedrooms and another group are subsidised.

“When is someone going to speak up for the overcrowded and those who suffer on waiting lists waiting for their housing because of mis-management here in Scotland and across the United Kingdom.”

Mr Duncan Smith also added his policy was not cutting the welfare bill but slowing its growth to try to help reduce the deficit and get more people into work.

BBC By Raymond Buchanan

There may be particular concern over the workless rate among UK single mothers. Only Ireland and tiny Malta among the other 26 EU states have a higher proportion without work.

The analysis will further fuel the row, with Labour over the Coalition’s proposed cap on benefits increases.

The figures from the EU statistical arm Eurostat cover 2011 and show the share of homes where no adult wokrs more than a day a week.

In Britain the level has fallen from 13.1 per cent in the previous year to 11.5 per cent.

The reduction may be due to an earlier tightening up of sickness benefits by Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

Yet even with the fall, Greece and Spain – where steeply rising unemployment rates have been linked to social unrest and riots – are only slightly worse off.

Britain’s lower unemployment rate hides the many people who have signed off work permanently due to sickness or disability.

In Spain the workless home rate has risen to 12.2 per cent, while in Greece it stands at 11.8 per cent.

Only Belgium and three eastern European countries are ahead of the UK. Ireland has yet to report overall workless figures for 2011.

And more than 43 per cent of single parents in Britain do not work for more than one day a week – higher than anywhere except Ireland.

This suggests that the tax credit system introduced 15 years ago has failed in its aim of getting any single parents into work.

Critics of benefits in Britain have long complained that the system means work does not pay for millions.

The Tories have been attacked by Labour for suggesting that the cap is designed to reward strivers rather than shirkers.

The Daily Mail by By STEVE DOUGHTY