There are 2.7 million people claiming Incapacity Benefit in this nation. I often wonder if after the World War Two, did we have more than 2.7m incapacitated civilians on this Island once the soldiers had all returned? I do not know for certain, but I suspect not. Suffice it to say, although 208 British Soldiers have paid the maximum price in the conflict in Afghanistan, we are essentially a country at peace and have been thankfully for a long period of time. Not since the Second World War has the totality of the nation been involved in conflict. So why do we have so much incapacity? With the relentless avalanche of Heath and Safety laws being applied to business, they can for sure not be putting more people out of work by injury. Have the standards of our health service fallen so low over the last 60 years that more people then ever are incapacitated? To all of these, I think not. The majority of these persons who are incapacitated are just plain and simply put, work shy.
In the Sunday Times of the 30th of August, Michael Portillo in this article, said that the intentions behind the formation of the Welfare State were to prevent this abuse of our system by the work shy.
The state “should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility”, wrote Sir William Beveridge in the 1942 report that inspired the post-war welfare state. “In establishing a national minimum it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family.
How many of the 2.7m are genuine in their illness? Would it be 100,000, or 200,000, but certainly not 2.7m. Even if it was a cool 1 million people, we would still have 1.7m people who are work shy and scamming the system.
When I sit as a Magistrate, I often see abuse. I was in a domestic violence court recently where we were reviewing a Pre Sentence Report on a young man who had beaten up his 29 week pregnant teenage girlfriend in the High Street under several CCTV cameras. The Probation Service informed us that he was on incapacity benefit but that he was looking forward to the start of the football season so he could resume playing for his local team as this would take up some time. I do not know if it occurred to the probation service that incapacity benefit and a young man playing football to most would not go together.
Let’s be clear, we the taxpayer pay 2.7m people to sit at home and do nothing. This is a good 10% of our workforce that sit on the payroll of the taxpayer and do nothing. People like the above are forcing the tax burden up on the hard working families of this nation of ours. As Portillo says “As a result, taxpayers have spent £346 billion on payments to those out of work since Tony Blair entered No 10.” This is 2 and a quarter of a years worth of income tax for the whole nation out of the last 12 years just on this!
He then goes on to say “It might have been possible for the state to fine-tune benefits in that way in the days when parishes organised relief and every claimant was known to the local poor law guardians. It is much more difficult today in systems that are nationalised and standardised.
But perhaps, at least, we ought to assume that fit young people are not entitled to anything. If a few young men from sink estates are now heroes in Afghanistan, why should we presume that all the others are capable of nothing useful at all?”
A centrally planned benefits system, like anything centrally planned is bound to fail. It fails because it is impossible for a centrally planning body such as a Whitehall department, to know all the facts and all the circumstances of all the people to be able to access who is actually in an incapacitated state. We should do the following;
- Immediately send the Incapacity to the local councils as the custodians of the state,
- Let the local citizens in each ward choose a voluntary council of wise and impartial people from all walks of life, the “community guardians” in that small local ward area – maybe have a pool of 50 – 100 people who could participate. Perhaps the selection criteria of the Magistrates could be used.
- Each week, let the citizens of the ward apply to the voluntary local ward council or community guardians for “their” benefit.
- The voluntary local ward council , with all their local ward, street by street knowledge, would more than likely have some intimate knowledge and information about the life style of the applicant, or could easily take soundings and find out if their application is genuine or not.
- All the ward based GP’s should as part of their contracts be required to work on behalf of the local community to assess the fitness of someone for work.
- The law must lay down strict boundaries within which communities may be compelled to support individuals and families for reason of incapacity.
- Having knowledge also about what jobs are available in the community and the insights of an on hand GP , they may be less likely to grant benefits to the simply work shy. Indeed they will focus on only those who can not work. They may even elect to spend more on these unfortunate , but in many cases deserving people.
- The final reform would be to abolish the central taxation that relates to this provision of benefits and devolve it entirely down to the local ward to levy a tax on its citizens to pay for the incapacity of its people. With the voluntary policing of its distribution, I am very sure this tremendous burden on the hard working people of the UK will fall substantially freeing up masses of new resources to wealth creation.
Enough is enough: social progress requires everyone who can to do something of value for others. This aspect of the Welfare State needs to be reformed immediately
See also ECONOMIC DEPENDENCY AND WORKLESSNESS, The Centre for Social Justice:
The CSJ goes on to explain that “weak and ineffective work expectations” are a key cause of the failure of government policies, together with poor support for those moving from welfare to work and a complex benefits system full of perverse incentives.
And see also Hannan and Carswell’s The Plan, which advocates neighbourhood welfare.
Please see also the remarks about this post here: http://benefitfraud.blogspot.com/2009/09/localist-welfare-aspirations-need-more.html to which Toby responds:
“The majority of these persons who are incapacitated are just plain and simply put, work shy.”
Please correct me If I am wrong, as you will have more experience of the magistrates system than I do, but should you not step down as a magistrate, or at least always declare your beliefs on any case that involves a claimaint of those benefits.
You are clearly biased in my opinion, and it is your duty to report any bias is it not?
You cannot expect people to believe that those people in receipt of incapacity benefit will get a fair trial if you hold the view that the majority of people on incapacity benefit are fraudulent.
Even your statement
“I do not know if it occurred to the probation service that incapacity benefit and a young man playing football to most would not go together.”
displays a clear lack of knowledge, and bias, as many people on incapcity benefit do not have physical problems, they can claim for mental health problems – and exercise is recommended by medical experts for those with certain mental health problems.
The official DWP statistics for the fraud levels on incapacity benefit is only 0.5 percent (yes that really is ZERO POINT FIVE PERCENT).
Hardly the vast majority is it?
Underpayments by the DWP, and mistakes by DWP officials cost more than the total fraud cost in the last statistics I saw.
Unless you can prove your statements as facts, which I respectfully ask you to do, then you should realise that in effect you are stigmatising a huge group of people, and is it not libelious to state they are indeed work shy without being able to offer one ounce of proof, that actually has an evidence base?
I look forward to your response, and evidence.
By email, Toby replies:
fair enough, if you look at facts and keep thoughts of someone likely to be guilty as they are ‘likely’ to be guilty of something else as they may likely be guilty of benefit fraud out of your mind, then all is well.
I suppose its impossible to not have opinions at the end of the day though, as you say.
Anyway, back on track..
Some more stats for you
“3.1 One unfortunate aspect of the debate on IB is the public perception promulgated by the media that fraud is common amongst IB claimants. All available evidence is to the contrary.
• A successful IB claim is reliant on being signed off by a medical practitioner, being assessed by a Job Centre Plus doctor and being liable to further assessment at the instigation of Job Centre Plus.
• As stated in the official Benefit Review of IB undertaken by the Office for National Statistics (2002) , fraud is negligible.
‘Due to the small number of confirmed fraud cases found during the review, it is not possible to produce a robust central estimate of the total annual value of benefit overpaid due to fraud for short-term Incapacity Benefit and long-term Incapacity Benefit. However, an indicative upper limit has been produced. It is estimated that the amount of overpayment is less than £19m, i.e. less than 0.3% of all expenditure on cases in receipt of these rates of IB. Similarly, it is estimated that the percentage of all IBST(H) and IBLT cases that are fraudulent is less than 0.5%.'”
source http://www.stuc.org.uk/files/import/6/TUGSLMP.pdf
some more detailed stats (all stats vary slightly depending on dates etc)
http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/fem/fem_oct07_sep08.pdf
” *
For 2008/09, it is estimated that 2.0 per cent, or £2.7bn, of total benefit expenditure was overpaid due to fraud and error
*
The estimate for the percentage overpaid in 2008/09 is the same level as the estimate for 2007/08 published in October 2008. The estimated value of overpayments has increased from £2.6bn in 2007/08 to £2.7bn in 2008/09 due to the increase in total benefit expenditure between the two years.
*
For 2008/09, it is estimated that 0.9 per cent or £1.2bn of total benefit expenditure was underpaid due to fraud and error.
*
The estimate for the percentage underpaid in 2008/09 is the same level as the estimate for 2007/08 published in October 2008. The estimated value of underpayments has increased from £1.1bn in 2007/08 to £1.2bn in 2008/09 due to the increase in total benefit expenditure between the two years.
”
source http://research.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd2/fraud_error.asp
and some common myths about incap dispelled at
http://www.radar.org.uk/radarwebsite/tabid/54/default.aspx
as you can see, all the evidence points towards the majority of people on incapacity being genuine, not workshy.
Sadly the majority of the problem appears to stem from comments (and the welfare reform report) made by Lord Frued, who claimed 2/3rds of claimaints on incap were not genuine.
Sadly for him, he admitted to not knowing anything about the benefits system when he started that report, and wrote the report rather fast. Plus he made numerous factually incorrect statements, including the classic one that claimaints are only assessed by their own gp.
The lack of research, and glaring errors he made was outstanding, yet the press and many politicians still use him as a source – despite the fact that clear evidence shows his evidence to be uncredible in my opinion.
(Plenty more on google about that subject).
Sadly, for some reason, the easiest targets, the sick and disabled are being targetted, despite the evidence that is used to target them being usually without any evidence base.
Perhaps its just easier for the politicians to attack people least able to defend themselves, instead of investigating the billions of pounds of lost revenue due to companies not paying full corporation tax, or looking at other benefits that have higher fraud rates.
There is for me a twofold social tragedy connected with incapacity benefit.
In the first place, people find themselves labelled and “shunted into life’s sidings”. From Iain Duncan Smith’s 2006 Chamberlain lecture (emphasis mine):
The second tragedy is that the potential contribution of incapacitated people is lost to us all, not just economically, though that is vital, but also in terms of the very fabric of our society. It is awful that anyone should be incapacitated or that they should live the life of the incapacitated if they need not. We compound our social failure if we allow a centralised bureaucracy to hide from us the vulnerable in our midst, enabling us to abdicate our responsibilities to our fellows.
Our present system simply is not good enough. People must have more to do with one another and the bureaucracy less if we are to lift one another up and make progress.
Sadly it appears Ian duncan smith is yet another who has no idea how the current system works.
“this offers guaranteed payouts for life”.
Sorry – no it does not.
You are re-assessed on a regular ongoing basis, and many people are kicked off, despite still being ill, and find they have to appeal (and go without incapacity benefit for upto 6 months (in some cases longer) until their appeal is heard. Appeal win rates (where the claimaint wins his case) are 58 percent (if the claimaint is represented).
Incap is certainly not a case of “guaranteed payouts for life”.
I really wish politicians would actually bother to do even the basics of research instead of making things up of the top of their heads.
OK course many of the people on IB have illnesses related to many years of unemployment.
Anyway, what does a public school educated toff know about the real world?
Someone who had about four time more spend solely on his education than some gets on IB.
We have a million young people unemployed, are they all ‘work-shy’ if I can use that term of middle class abuse?
No they were not born into privilege with a silver spoon in their mouths.
Presumably when he speaks of ‘local citizens’ he means upper-middle class toffs like himself, you won’t find many of those living in deprived areas, they would probably be to frightened to visit them without a police escort.
Oh and he expects the poor to pay for the benefits of the poorest whilst the rich like himself pay nothing.
What a vile, selfish uncaring pig. No surprise he is a magistrate.
To Dave Brown
Just for the record, 3 years out of my 16 years in education was educated in the state sector, replete with free school dinners etc, the other 3 being by the Quakers.
I was bought up in a housing association 1 bedroom apartment with my mother and sister for my early life then on the subsidised charity of my aunt. So I do know a lot about poverty.
You are clearly a prejudiced and small minded person.
I pray for you. I pray your pain goes away and you get more peace within yourself.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
We seldom have blind invective written on this site which is testament to its good standards of readership. Your falls well under this standard, what a shame.
I would also like to add, one year for A Levels I worked and paid for myself to go to a Tutorial college and in the 2nd and 3rd year of my degree at LSE, because I was working, I did not claim my grant money that I was entitled to claim. So much for being a public school educated toff!