Weaver Vale MP Mike Amesbury has pledged his backing to a Northwich benefits campaigner whose tragic story mirrors that of a real-life Daniel Blake.

Barbara Dean and her husband Bill ran a successful taxi and minibus service company up until 1997.

Bill later suffered a major heart attack at the age of 47, which left him unfit to work and he was forced to apply for sickness benefit.

After being assessed by a panel, Bill was refused as he was fit to work – a decision that went against medical recommendations.

They appealed without success and the couple were forced to sell their business and their home, with Bill later tragically dying of a heart attack.

Sadly, Barbara received a letter from the then DSS on the day of Bill’s funeral advising that he had now been accepted for sickness benefit.

She is now part of the West Cheshire Poverty Truth Commission, which aims to help shape how services are run in a way that makes them more accessible and helpful to the people who need it most.

Having previously met Barbara and her colleagues during a visit to the Commons, Mike – now Parliamentary Private Secretary in Labour’s shadow DWP team - met up with her in Northwich town centre recently where he pledged his backing and said he would help work to bring other organisations and agencies onboard.

He said: “Barbara is an inspirational character who’s done a lot of work in local job centres to improve how certain things are done, and to put a real human face on how benefits claimants are treated.

“There are a lot of stories like Barbara’s around, people who have paid into the system all their lives and yet it’s left them down when they needed it most.

“It’s important that these stories are heard and we do all we can to make the system fair and fit for purpose.”

More than £100 million has been spent by the Department for Work and Pensions on administering reviews and appeals against disability benefits in little more than two years, new figures show.

 This is in addition to the tens of millions of pounds spent every year by the Ministry of Justice on the appeals, around two-thirds of which have been won by claimants in the past year.

The bill has been branded “staggering” and prompted a Tory former minister to claim, “something is seriously wrong with the system”.

ABC Note: Never a truer comment spoken. 

The UK state pension is the "lowest in the developed world", according to the latest OECD figures that display a comparison between the more generous state-funded pensions and the least.

According to the data, the UK is at the bottom of the global pensions league table, with the least generous state provision.

As a percentage of average earnings, the UK government pays out 29%. Comparatively, the Netherlands pays out 100.6%, Spain pays out 81.8%, Germany pays out 50.5%, the USA 49.1%, and Poland 38.6%.

Former pensions minister Ros Altmann (pictured) said the combination of an ageing population and a decline in the traditional final salary-type pension schemes, the UK faces rising risks of old-age poverty.

"In April 2016, major reforms to the UK state pension were supposed to have made the system affordable for the future, reducing its generosity," she said.

"Beyond the 2030s, the new state pension will be lower than the old system for most people and the lowest paid, predominantly women, will generally lose significantly from the new system.

"Despite this, the government has been advised, by its own actuaries, that the costs of paying state pensions will soar so much over the next 20 years and beyond, that further cuts could be required."

Altmann said that, although the UK state pension is the lowest in the developed world, it will need to be cut further to avoid "massive tax rises".

"The options could include dropping the triple lock, and increasing state pension in line with average earnings instead, or possibly doubling National Insurance rates for average workers," she added.

Under-30s To Work Into Their 70s

Meanwhile, data published in October by the government actuary suggested state pension age will be 70 in the 2050s and 71 in the 2060s, meaning anyone aged 30 or below will not get their state pension until they are 70, and those age 20 or younger will have to wait until they are 71.

Altmann continued: "We are one of the world's leading economies, but our support for the oldest in society is not fit for purpose. Even though most people will receive the lowest state pension in the developed world, the costs of providing for our aging population have not yet been brought under control.

"To avoid burdening younger generations with significant tax rises, it is vital that more is done to boost private pension saving. Auto-enrolment is a good start but the pensions industry needs to attract more customers to pay more into their pensions

The Work & Pensions Committee have published a report on the PIP and ESA assesments.

From the Work & Pensions Committee. 

In September last year we put out a call for evidence on the medical assessments for disability benefits PIP and ESA carried out for DWP by private contractors Capita, Atos and Maximus. We asked claimants to share their experience of the whole assessment process, and we launched an online forum so people could submit their stories that way too. The response was overwhelming: nearly 4,000 individual submissions, the most ever received by a select committee inquiry, by an order of magnitude.

The Work & Pensions Committee have published their report on PIPs assements. Here it is below:

The unprecedented response was also remarkable in the consistency of the themes that emerged through the honest and often distressing accounts from thousands of people navigating the claims process, alongside, of course, managing their disability and mental health issues.

We were so impressed and moved by the response we are today publishing a collection of just a few of the thousands of stories claimants shared with us. The stories cover the process from beginning to end, from organising and attending the medical assessments to final appeal at the Tribunal, where people have gone that far.  Since 2013 there have been 170,000 PIP appeals taken to the Tribunal: Claimants won in 108,000 cases - 63%. In the same time, there have been 53,000 ESA appeals. Claimants won in 32,000 - or 60% - of those cases.

One theme that emerged was claimants going through this process, by their accounts often arduous and stressful, only to receive a report that bore little or no relation to their circumstances or what had occurred during the assessment. After reading her report, Nikki told us: “Apparently I walk my dog daily, which was baffling because I can barely walk and I do not have a dog!”

Mary told us that her assessor wrote in her report that “I ‘arose from the chair without any difficulty’. I was in bed the whole time (she let herself in) and I only have the one chair in the room and she was sitting in it. She said that I had no difficulty reading with my glasses yet I do not wear glasses to read.”

How did you catch Down’s Syndrome?

Another common theme was the apparent ignorance of assessors about the conditions claimants were living with. People with Down’s Syndrome - a widely recognised congenital disorder with associated learning disability - were asked how long they’d had the condition, or when they’d “caught” it. Chad, who lives with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, told us “The assessor stated in her report ‘no signs of sore hands’ ‘no signs of repeated washing’ ‘was well groomed’ ‘was well dressed’. Anyone with a brain cell knows mental health isn’t always visible, and OCD isn’t all about excessive washing of the hands! OCD is known as a secretive disorder at the best of times and people in that profession should know better when it comes to mental health.”

A great many of the stories we heard were harrowing, in some cases just an account of trying to complete the forms to begin the process. One person told us “For the twelve days we took considering and writing on the form, my mother refused to eat, drink, or sleep save the smallest amount. She began to self-harm from the stress and cry in the despair of admitting how she is limited, how she is constantly in pain, how she cannot complete simple tasks—‘how her disability affects her’: the very name of the form.”

Next Wednesday we will be publishing the final report of this inquiry, with our recommendations to Government on changes to the process. We are enormously grateful to the thousands of people who shared their stories with us, to inform the report, and we hope the Government will take heed of this enormous response and act on our recommendations. In its response to this first report, we have called on Government to acknowledge explicitly that it recognises each of the concerns and problems we have set out, and tell us what, if anything, it is doing to monitor and resolve them.  

ABC Note: Below is the report: 

The government has launched a crackdown on unpaid internships according to the Guardian, sending more than 550 warning letters to companies and setting up enforcement teams to tackle repeat offenders.

HM Revenue & Customs is expected to target sectors such as media, the performing arts and law and accountancy firms, which have a reputation for using unpaid interns.

About 70,000 internships are offered each year in the UK, according to the Sutton Trust social mobility charity. It estimates that of 10,000 graduates who are in internships six months after they leave university, a fifth are unpaid. It has calculated the cost of doing an unpaid internship as more than £1,000 a month in London and £827 in Manchester, putting valuable work experience beyond the reach of those from families on low and middle incomes.

Although minimum-wage legislation makes many unpaid internships illegal, the government recently admitted that there had been no prosecutions. 

Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning, Eluned Morgan this week visited the Noddfa Centre in Caernarfon to see how the Welsh Government’s Communities for Work and Parents,  Childcare and Employment (PaCE) schemes are helping people into work.

Image: Minister for Welsh Language and Lifelong Learning. 

The Minister met with the delivery teams of both programmes and local residents who have benefitted from the schemes. Both programmes are supported by the EU and will operate until 2020. Combined, they will provide over £83 million in employment services across Wales.

Delivered in partnership with the Department of Work and Pensions through Job Centre Plus, Communities for Work is a community based advisory service, supported by the European Social Fund. It works with people in the most deprived communities across Wales to increase the employability of 16-24-year olds who are not in education, employment or training (NEET), and economically inactive and long-term unemployed adults who have complex barriers to employment. The programme has so far supported over 13,000 people and helped almost 4000into work up to December 2017

PaCE helps economically inactive parents into work by covering the cost of childcare while parents undertake training to gain the skills they need to get a job. Across Wales, 43 PaCE advisers work in community settings to help people find a variety of solutions to overcome childcare barriers so that they can move towards and into sustainable employment.  Jointly delivered by the Welsh Government and the Department for Work and Pensions, the programme builds upon services offered via Flying Start and Families First and complements other projects such as Communities for Work. The scheme has helped over 750 parents into work so far.

Social Democrats co-leader Róisín Shortall will bring the party's Parental Leave (Amendment) Bill 2017 to the Dáil on Thursday 8th February 2018.

The Bill extends unpaid parental leave for working parents from 18 weeks to 26 weeks. The government has indicated that it will not oppose the Bill.

Image: Róisín Shortall TD

Work and Pensions Committee

Wednesday 7 February 2018 Meeting started at 9.30am

AGENDA

Subject: Support for carers

Witnesses: Nikki Kimber, Carer , Olga Budimir, Carer , Liz Abrahams, Carer , Katie O’Shaughnessy, Carer , and Bethan Pound, Carer

Witnesses: Sally Wilson, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Employment Studies Sarah Newton MP, Minister of State for Disabled People, Health and Work

The management team of construction firm Carillion faced a grilling from MPs yesterday as the Work and Pensions Committee probed the reasons for its collapse.

Former chairman Philip Green said he takes the blame for the failure, admitting his responsibility is “full and complete, total - no question in my mind about that. Not necessarily culpability but full responsibility".

Also at the hearing was former chief executive Richard Howson, who ran the firm until he resigned due to a profit warning. He explained that towards the end of his time in charge he “felt like a bailiff” trying to collect money.

Committee co-chairs Rachel Reeves and Frank Field were not impressed with the evidence. In a joint statement, they said “Everything we have seen points the fingers in another direction – to the people who built a giant company on sand in a desperate dash for cash”.
 
Carillion employed 20,000 people around the UK. This month alone, more than 800 redundancies have been announced.