DLA threat and AA threat
What exactly is the Green Paper about?
The green paper is about the problem of paying for care as the UK’s population ages. It proposes setting up a National Care Service, like the National Health Service, to provide a universal system of care throughout the UK. Much of the document is devoted to discussing how to pay for this service, including:
making everyone pay a flat rate of £25,000 before or after they die, whether they ever need care or not; or
making everyone over retirement age pay into an insurance scheme; or
making people pay for part of their care depending on their means.
This is in addition to the proposal to take disability benefits off claimants and hand them over to the care service.
The National Care Service would only deal with your care needs. If you had to go into residential care you would still have to pay for accommodation, heating, lighting, food, clothes, toiletries, etc.
But at least under this system everyone would have the right to the care they need, even though it might mean getting rid of disability benefits, right?
No, not at all. Everyone would have the right to have their care needs assessed but only the most severely disabled would actually receive any care.
The way it would work is that under the National Care Service everyone in the UK would have their care needs assessed using the same criteria wherever they live. This might be done by a national body – it’s easy to imagine a company like Atos who currently do benefits medicals being employed to do the assessments – or it might be done by local social services departments all working to the same system.
As a result of the assessment, some people would be awarded a ‘personal budget’ – a cash amount that could be used to meet their needs. Many people, however, would receive no care whatsoever, because their care needs would be below the threshold set nationally or by individual local authorities.
For example you might be assessed as needing help with washing, dressing and undressing because of arthritis. But you’d be very unlikely to actually get this help from the National Care Service. Resources would be reserved for those with higher needs than yours.
One of the concerns of disability agencies, including RNIB, is that many people who are currently entitled to DLA or AA would not be entitled to a personal budget from the National Care Service. At the moment, most local authorities do not currently provide help for people who ‘only’ need help with washing and dressing.
Still, those with the highest care needs would be able to purchase whatever they wanted with their personal budget, wouldn’t they?
No, not at all. How the budget would be spent would depend on what agreement individuals were able to reach with a social worker.
If you have ME/CFS, for example, you may rely on your DLA or AA to pay for alternative therapies such as acupuncture, homeopathy, herbalism or chiropractice or you may use it to pay for dietary supplements that you know help you. However, professionals may dismiss these as quack remedies and you may not be able to use your personal budget for those sort of things. It wouldn’t be your cash to spend as you choose, in the way that DLA and AA are.
Won’t there be some sort of transitional relief for current claimants?
Yes, there may be. But you might not like it.
One proposal is to ensure that all current claimants get a care package of at least the value of their current disability benefits payments. But the amounts paid for DLA and AA wouldn’t get you very much care.
Middle rate care DLA and lower rate AA are worth £47.10 a week, for example. This might get you help with washing and dressing in the morning and getting into bed at night for two, or at the most three days a week. The other four or five days you’d have to manage alone.
If your care needs are at night, your benefits would pay for one night a week for someone to sleep in your house and not even a single night for someone to stay awake.
Lower rate DLA wouldn’t pay for even two hours of care a week. In fact it might not get you any hours at all, but instead be used to pay for aids or adaptations.
Sign up to our campaign to fight the threat to DLA & AA COPYAND PASTE THIS LINK/ http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/disability-living-allowance-%28dla%29/dla-aa-cuts
OK, this doesn’t sound great, but this is only a discussion document, isn’t it?
Yes it is, but green papers are the first step on the road to new laws. If politicians sense from the responses – or the lack of them - that disabled people and disability organisations won’t put up too much of a fight then they’ll see that as a green light for abolishing DLA as well as AA.
You keep going on about ‘disability benefits’ but what exactly are they?
Good question. We only keep going on about them because the green paper does. In all, the term ‘disability benefits’ appears 35 times
TO FIND OUT HOW THE GOVERNMENT INTEND TO PLACE MORE OF OUR ELDERLY AND SICK INTO EVEN MORE POVERTY PLEASE COPY AND PASTE THE FOLLOWING
http://www.benefitsandwork.co.uk/disability-living-allowance-%28dla%29/dla-aa-cuts
Sphere: Related Content
