BBC reports "...most claimants should be looking for workFewer than a third of the 2.7 million or so people claiming incapacity benefit are legitimate claimants, a government welfare adviser has said. David Freud, an investment banker hired by Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell, said up to 185,000 claimants work illegally while on the benefit. He told the Daily Telegraph it was "ludicrous" that medical checks were carried out by a claimant's own GP. The system was "a recipe for getting people on to IB", he said. Mr Freud, whose report on welfare last year was highly influential on the reforms set out by Mr Purnell on Monday, has recommended that private firms be paid "bounties" to get claimants off incapacity benefit and into jobs. He said there was a "classic conflict of interest" embodied in the system of GPs carrying out claimants' medical checks, saying: "They're frightened of legal action."
He said that, compared with unemployment benefit, incapacity claimants received more money and did not get "hassled". "The system we have at the moment sends 2.64 million people into a form of economic house arrest and encourages them to stay at home and watch daytime TV. We're doing nothing for these people," he told the paper.
Since the 1980s, there have been claims that successive governments have allowed the IB roll to grow in order to keep down the more politically sensitive count of the unemployed. "When the whole rot started in the 1980s we had 700,000 (claimants). I suspect that's much closer to the real figure than the one we have now, Mr Freud said.
Recent figures showed that more than 500,000 young people under 35 are now claiming incapacity benefit. About 40% of recipients are claiming for mental health problems, some 250,000 because of stress-related illness, while others cite alcoholism, obesity or eating disorders. Mr Freud said a new system, with private firms and voluntary organisations paid by results in getting claimants into lasting jobs and those who refuse to co-operate having benefits docked, could be in place within five years. He told the paper it would be "economically rational" to pay as much as £62,000 to a company which managed to place an incapacity benefit claimant in a job which lasted three years or more. Incapacity benefit costs the Treasury about £12bn a year. "
No. It costs me the tax payer. Welcome though it is there is no tackling the roots of dependency culture in the thousands of civil servants whose jobs depend on it and who may encourage people to be dependent.
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2 comments:
Sadly your prejudices are wrong and there is a general concensus that Freud is right about needing to engage lots with incapacity benefit claimants (and sanction them if they don't engage). However his analysis of the market (he believes the market will bare all of the risk for an untested model) and the 64k figure is shoddy. Also he seems to have forgotton that the medical test is not conducted by the claimant's own doctor - it's carried out against objective criteria by an independent medical professional (working for Atos Origin) - and 90% of customers will have a 2 hour face to face test from October. Such ignorance (having done a "review" of the system for the Government) is unforgivable.
I too was surprised to hear about GPs assessing. But on what basis do you say I am prejudiced? I have experience of those encouraged in dependency by public sector employees whose jobs are part of it.
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