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 | You and Yours - Transcript ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio 4 |
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| TX: 13.05.04 – ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE CLAIMING INCAPACITY BENEFIT? PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON |
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| THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE ´óÏó´«Ã½ CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY ROBINSON The latest jobless figures revealed last month show unemployment in the UK at its lowest for 20 years. Today's papers carry details of an announcement by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, of new training projects to get even more people off benefit and into work. But how accurate a reflection of the jobless total are these official figures? While 1.4 million people are officially counted as jobless almost twice as many - 2.7 million - are claiming incapacity benefit and they are classed as too sick to seek work. So what exactly is going on? Ruth Lea, of the Centre for Policy Studies, gave us her personal view. LEA The Chancellor of the Exchequer boasts about the economy's performance and one of his proudest boasts is that unemployment has fallen to levels not seen since the mid-1970s. The number unemployed, as measured by the number claiming the Job Seeker's allowance is well down since he entered the Treasury in May 1997. It is now around 930,000, compared with 1.6 million in 1997. There is no question that most of the fall has occurred because of job creation, with many of the new jobs in the public sector funded by the taxpayer. However, since 2000 some of the fall in unemployment reflects the curious increase in the number of claimants of incapacity benefit. I say curious because this at a time when people's health is on the whole improving and life expectancy rates are increasing. At the beginning of 2000 the number of people who were claiming incapacity benefit had slipped to two and a quarter million, following Conservative reforms to tighten up the system. But by the end of last year a cool 150,000 had been added to the claimants' list. Official figures show that many claimants stay on benefit for a considerable period of time. Indeed nearly half have been claiming for over five years. Many, including some of the reported 150,000 claimants who are under 25, will never get back into work, they have, in effect, been locked out of the labour market. Employers are quite understandably reluctant to employ people who have a patchy employment record, especially when it is now so difficult to dismiss their employees. And people who have been on incapacity benefit for some time can find themselves without the employment experience they need to be attractive to employers - a vicious circle develops and they find it ever harder to get into regular employment. It is worth noting at this stage that survey evidence shows that employed people are better off, happier, more fulfilled, have better self-esteem than those who are not. And this is despite all the anti-work propaganda perpetrated by the anti-business left. The benefit system can be utterly counterproductive. But why is the number of people on incapacity benefit rising? Why do doctors seem to be increasingly willing to assess people as incapable for work? Of course they are right to assess the genuine incapables as incapable but why the rising number? I will suggest two possible explanations. Firstly, some doctors have sympathy for people with few skills, poor career prospects and low potential earnings and are moreover increasingly likely to agree that such people should receive incapacity benefit. The patient is real whilst the taxpayer who foots the bill is invisible. And secondly, there's an increasing tendency to medicalise and classify the normal ups and downs of life as the illnesses of stress or depression. And this can be exploited, if not abused, by patients. And I'm not referring to genuine depressive illnesses here which can be utterly devastating. I suspect that both of these explanations contain some truth and assuming that this is the case there are then two ways of tackling the increasing number of claimants. Firstly, the sympathy factor. Some doctors, not all by any means but some, should be reminded that taxpayers do foot the bill - public money is taxpayers' hard earned money. And the poorest 20% of earners actually pay the highest proportion of their income in tax. And if individual doctors still find it difficult to resist the sympathy factor then they should be replaced by independent panels. And secondly, the medicalisation of normal ups and downs of life factor. If only this could be shown to be the nonsense that it is and stopped. But I suspect that water will run uphill first. ROBINSON Ruth Lea from the Centre for Policy Studies with her personal take on incapacity benefit. Well listening to that was Professor Steve Fothergill from SheffieldHallamUniversity, he's in our Sheffield studio. I know that you have done a lot of research into incapacity benefit - how have the figures changed over recent years? FOTHERGILL Well there's quite a lot of truth in what Ruth Lea is saying but there's also quite a lot of misunderstanding. If we take a long-term perspective it's undoubtedly true that we've seen a huge increase in the numbers on incapacity benefit or invalidity benefit - as it used to be called. If we look at the numbers of long-term claimants, for example, who've been on this benefit for more than six months it's gone up from just over half a million at the start of the 1980s, to something like 2.1 million long-term claimants now. And it's impossible to explain that large increase in terms of any underlying deterioration in the health of the population. Indeed, if anything, health trends have gone the other way - we're healthier than we've ever been. But it's crucial to look at the geography of all of this because it's not simply the case that everywhere across the country we're getting large numbers on incapacity benefit, what's actually happening is where the economy is very strong in large parts of the South, for example, there are very few on incapacity benefit, but where there continues to be local economic difficulties in the old industrial areas of the North, that's where we're parking huge numbers of men and women out of the labour market on sickness related benefits. ROBINSON Well you say we are parking them, of course you could argue that they are parking themselves and that in areas where unemployment is high people have learned how to play the system by claiming to be sick they know they can get at least £20 a week more. FOTHERGILL Let me say here that I've never argued, and our research has never suggested, that the claims are fraudulent. Indeed after six months on incapacity benefit you've got to go to a panel of doctors appointed by the Benefits Agency, so there is some independent testing beyond the individual's GP. ROBINSON So it's just an idea you've never even considered? FOTHERGILL Well no, I mean we've certainly looked and asked the question of the data - is there fraudulent claiming in here? What's undoubtedly going on is there is ill health quite widely spread in the workforce. The Government's own statistics show that - they show that 7 million people of working age have some long-term work limiting illness or disability. But actually where there are plentiful jobs large numbers of those people do work, in fact 3½ million of those 7 million people do work. But where the labour market is difficult people in ill health find themselves at the back of the queue for jobs. ROBINSON Okay, let me bring Lorna Reith from the Disability Alliance into this discussion. Is that your take then on incapacity benefit - that in parts of the country where the economy is buoyant people carry on working even though perhaps they have depression because it's easier for them to do so? REITH I think there's certainly some truth that where people have had to maybe come out of one kind of job because of a health condition if there is a buoyant labour market they may well be able to move into another kind of job because that job is there. But I think the question of regional variations and the prevalence of disability is incredibly important. There was a major government survey done back in 1999 called Disability in Great Britain and that found quite significant regional variations with very high prevalence of disability in the North and the North West and in Wales … ROBINSON Why should that be? REITH Well what they were looking at was mortality and morbidity - they weren't looking at who was on incapacity benefit, they were actually looking at people's health. And severe disability was actually twice as high in Wales as it was in the South East of England outside London. Now they didn't come up with a single reason, they suggested a number of things that would vary from individual lifestyle things like smoking through industrial pollution, the kind of jobs people have done, the poverty people live in, the poverty that their parents may have lived in, genetic factors - probably a mix of all of those things. ROBINSON Do you accept though that most people claiming this benefit have, as Ruth Lea said in her column, conditions which are easily faked - back pain, depression? REITH I wouldn't accept that at all. The Department for Work and Pensions has quite a major anti-fraud programme, they run random testing across all benefits, and over the years they've particularly targeted incapacity benefit - they haven't found any major fraud. I think that people who have depression or arthritis have very real difficulties. ROBINSON It's not a major fraud though, is it, it's lots of individuals, it's not a major fraud in the sense of organised crime like you get with some benefit frauds, it's lots of individuals who maybe have a difficult time finding work who might be tempted to say I've got a bad back because they feel they desperately need the extra £20 a week - wouldn't that be just human nature? REITH Well there may be some people who do that but what you're forgetting is that there's a proper testing system that people have to go through. It isn't the case that you just go along to your doctor and get a note. Most people when they come off - and we all have had time off work sick, we've all had flu or something like that - and we don't expect to go to an independent medical panel immediately, we expect to be able to go to our doctor and get a medical certificate. When someone's off work for longer then they have to go through a proper independent test system, called the personal capability assessment, which is carried out by doctors under contract to the Department for Work and Pensions. ROBINSON Well one charity - the Wise Group - is helping people to get off incapacity benefit and back into employment and their director is David Nicholl - how do you do it? NICHOLL We really do it through a mixture of measures based on each individual's needs. But I guess the underlying principle is that we have a belief that most people can actually work and most people want to work and if you give them the right level of support then they can get into the labour market. About three quarters of the people we see have moderate to mild conditions and moderate to mild levels of incapacity and it is possible to actually overcome these benefits. And one of the things that was mentioned earlier was the issue of alternatives and I think it is about providing people with alternatives to their condition. ROBINSON Okay let's hear from someone who's benefited from your programme. Jean Ness from Glasgow was made redundant then her husband and her mother died within days of each other. Mrs Ness takes up her story. NESS My doctor put me on to antidepressants until eventually I was put on to incapacity benefit. I didn't want to see people, I went out when I had to and then it was just a case of keeping my head down so that I didn't catch anyone's eye, I didn't have to speak to anyone, just go and do what I had to do and get home again. And to be honest at that time I really didn't think I'd be working again. Seven or eight months down the line there was a leaflet dropped through the door and it was explaining it was for long-term sick and they could help me to get back to work at your pace - no pressure. So I thought right okay, phoned the number, met with my advisor who was called Morag. The job that I had been made redundant from was in a computer factory and it was on the shop floor basically - manufacturing level. And when I met Morag I had intended just looking for the same type of work again but Morag had different ideas for me. She was suggesting heading more towards offices that had administration work. I hadn't done it and I didn't have experience, I didn't really fancy my chances at getting in. But she knew of an agency within the Wise Group at the time for a trainee position, she put me forward for it, got me an interview and I got started as a trainee and I just seem to have found my niche really. I'm now the full-time project administrator for the recycling plant and all in all with the trainee-ship and my now permanent job I've been off incapacity since September 2002 and I really don't see me ever looking back and going back. ROBINSON Jean Ness. Maria Eagle, the Government minister for disabled people with responsibility for incapacity benefit, joins us now. Do you think that more should be being done to encourage people off this benefit and back into work? EAGLE Yes, in the past previous governments have done nothing to try and help people like Jean and I think that Jean's story shows how easy it is to get stuck on sickness and incapacity benefit if you don't get help that can get you back into work. So what we're doing, as a government, is to try and design programmes that will do that across a range - across the country - and across a range of sickness conditions and health conditions. ROBINSON So you're looking at setting up lots of programmes like the one that we've just heard about that's run by the Wise Group? EAGLE Indeed. We've got a programme called Pathways to Work which is looking at interventions which might help. It's a combination of intensive personal advice for individuals about their particular situation from Job Centre Plus staff, combined with the financial incentive to go back to work - the return to work credit of £40 a week. Along with condition management programmes, which help people who have the sort of conditions that you've been mentioning - depression, back pain - learn to deal with those conditions so that they have the confidence to realise they can go back to work, which is what many of them want to do of course, 90% of people coming on to incapacity benefit want to go back to work and expect to do so. ROBINSON How do you account for the fact though, as Ruth Lea pointed out, that against all the trends on health and employment this group is growing? EAGLE Well it's partly because once people get on to the benefit they find it hard to get off and in fact the big increase in people going on to sickness and incapacity benefits happened in the '80s and '90s. The number of people going on to the benefit has fallen by a third in the last - since the mid '90s. ROBINSON Except we've just had this 150,000 added on since 2000, as Ruth Lea pointed out. EAGLE Well at the same time we've got a huge number of new jobs - 1.9 million more jobs - the highest percentage of working age people ever in work, so what's happening is that there are more jobs, more people doing jobs but that once you get on to incapacity benefit without help and advice, which people haven't had in the past, it's hard to get off. So we now have to concentrate on helping people like Jean to get back to work, to work that's suitable for them, following their stint on incapacity benefit and we're confident that we can do that. ROBINSON Lorna Reith, what would you do if you could do a single thing to try to reduce the numbers on incapacity benefit? REITH I think there should be a focus on job retention. All the people we're talking about on incapacity benefit once had a job, they wouldn't be getting incapacity benefit if they hadn't had a job because it's a contributory benefit. And we need to find a way of getting to people before they actually lose their job - so that's helping employers and trade unions know what help there is out there, what their responsibilities are to offer people what's called reasonable adjustments and changing their working conditions to enable them to stay in work. And I think tied in with that would be advertising the Government's Access to Work scheme which as Maria knows has been very successful and is very popular. It's a scheme whereby employers and employees get money to help them pay for adaptations, special equipment, even fares to work if somebody can't use public transport and that's an enormous help in ensuring that employers aren't scared at having a disabled person in the workplace is going to cost them a lot of money. ROBINSON So Maria Eagle would you take those suggestions on board? EAGLE Absolutely, it's got to be a combination of help for the individual plus government programmes that will provide assistance, along with improving disability civil rights, to raise awareness amongst employers and the rest of us that disabled people really can work and they shouldn't just be written off. ROBINSON You say that you're looking at all these things now, you've had rather a long time to think about it. EAGLE Well as I've said, in the past governments have just now helped people, once they've gone on to … ROBINSON Including your own. EAGLE …incapacity benefit that's been it. Well we've been dealing with unemployment, now that unemployment is at a historical low it enables us to concentrate on people who are on inactive benefits, we are doing that. We are leading the world in designing these programmes but nobody quite knows what works yet - that's what we've got to find out. ROBINSON Maria Eagle, David Nicholl, Steve Fothergill and Lorna Reith thank you all very much. Back to the You and Yours homepage The ´óÏó´«Ã½ is not responsible for external websites |
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