Legal help with welfare benefit appeals would be retained under Liberal Democrat amendment to the Legal Aid Bill.

 Campaigners urge last minute emails to MPs

A Liberal Democrat amendment to the Legal Aid, Sentencing, and Punishment of Offenders Bill, which is being debated at Report Stage this Monday 31st October, would see legal help for people appealing or reviewing benefit decisions retained. Under current government plans all welfare benefits advice will be cut from legal aid, along with many other areas of law including much of employment, debt and housing advice. Charities like Citizens Advice, Law Centres, and advice agencies use legal aid to fund much of their work in this area. 

Part of a motion on welfare reform passed at Liberal Democrat conference called on government to "reconsider the exclusion of welfare benefits casework such as this from the scope of legal aid." A group of Liberal Democrat backbenchers have put down the amendment, including Tom Brake MP, Co-Chair of the Home Affairs Parliamentary Party Committee. The other signatories are Stephen Lloyd MP, David Ward MP, and Mike Crockart MP.

Help with appeals is vitally important, particularly at a time when the benefits system is being radically changed. The introduction of Employment and Support Allowance has been beset with bad decision making - 40% of those appealing were successful. Yet in terms of the number of people affected, this will be dwarfed by the estimated 18 million people who will be caught up in the move to Universal Credit.

Campaign group Justice for All is urging people to email their MP urgently to ask them to speak during the debate and vote in favour of the motion. You can do this via their website at www.justice-for-all.org.uk

Justice for All have also produced a pair of videos, highlighting why help with appeals is so important. They feature three women who have had help from local advice agencies in appealing wrong decisions. They are available to embed herehttp://www.youtube.com/user/justice4allcampaign

The amendment is number 149, the full text is available herehttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2010-2012/0235/amend/pbc2352610a.3619-3625.html

We all know someone who could work but doesn't - Don't we?

 By Sue Marsh

Well, there's that Jim at number 27. Have you seen his garden?? Out there all weathers he is. It's like the bleedin Chelsea Flower Show. Now you can't tell me he couldn't work? 


Jim is 62. He has epilepsy. He was born with it and back in the 50s, most people still thought you were possessed or evil if they saw you having a fit. His mother never used to take him out for fear he would have a seizure in public. He's never been able to drive. He gets "warnings" before the 4 or 5 seizures a week he has, allowing him to get inside to somewhere safe. No-one ever sees his disability - he wouldn't dream of talking about it with a neighbour.

He still never leaves his home. The shame he grew up with never really left him. His garden is his life. It gives him joy and purpose. Somewhere beautiful where he never feels lonely or ashamed.

It's just got ridiculous! There's this girl in our village - never done a day's work in her life....and she jogs!! Hours she runs up and down with those earplugs in, round the village, out on the quiet country roads, sometimes she goes out in the morning and she runs til lunchtime!! Why should she get my hard-earned tax money just to do nothing?


Laura is 26. From the age of 6, both her uncle and his friend used to sexually assault her. She never told anyone, they said they would do it to her brother if she did. As she grew up she became more and more withdrawn. Sometimes they hurt her physically and she had to try to hide the bruises away.

She never made any friends and ran away from home when she was 15. Living on the streets, people took advantage of her and she soon became a prostitute with a crack habit.

At 18, she managed to get a place in a hospice and with the amazing help of mental health workers, counsellors and a safe environment, she got clean. She moved away, moved to a nice safe village, kept working on her past and found solace in running. All the time she runs, music pounding in her ears, she can forget. She feels free and alive.

She has managed to start volunteering in a local centre working with other young people who've been through what she went through and hopes that one day, she might be able to make a career of it.

She has never spoken to any of her neighbours, she's still too damaged, and she certainly wouldn't tell them about her childhood.

Do you remember Doreen? She never stops that woman, out at work all hours, looking after the kids, running em here and there. And all her husband ever does is lie around on the sofa watching daytime TV! 16 years it is since he worked! The man must have no shame. 


Karl served in Kosovo. It was brutal time and he lost many good friends. One night, just after midnight, he and his men were taking cover behind an old burnt out coach. A bomb suddenly exploded and every last man but him got blown to pieces. He was taken away and held for days with little food and light. They questioned him at gunpoint until he soiled himself, then left him sitting in the mess. He saw women raped and children left to die at the side of the road, their eyes pleading with him as he marched past.

Since then, he's suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He has terrible periods of depression, flashbacks, sweats and night terrors. He can't sleep and when he does he wakes up screaming. He barely pays attention to his family, and though the television might be on, he never sees the programme. He only sees one programme now, running through his mind every minute of every day.

He makes Doreen promise she won't ever tell anyone what he goes through. She wouldn't dream of talking about it with her neighbours.

*****************

The BBC seems to be running a "Scrounger" season. You are being asked to judge our social security system in a flurry of documentaries, based on anecdote. A GP who "feels" it's unbelievable that we have so many people on sickness benefits, random women in the street who share stories like the ones above.

No evidence, for the evidence is most certainly not with the programme makers. Rather they feed into a stereotype that is being used comfortably by all main political parties and the media to push through welfare reforms. We already have one of the toughest welfare systems in the developed world with the toughest sanctions and among the lowest rates of fraud. But you will never hear that from these documentaries. You almost certainly won't believe it now, but it's true. Pesky evidence.

No. These "documentaries" ask you to ignore the stories that make up the person and simply judge your neighbour.

Nasty eh?

The Hardest Hit - A Week Later, Still Paying The Price

Complaint to the BBC re Humphries #TFSOWWJH by @ClaireOT

Here is the text of my complaint. I am happy for you to cut and paste it in whole or in part in order to submit your own complaint. Let’s share out the spoons…

“Beveridge… helped to create a different sort of monster in its place: the age of entitlement. The battle for his successors is to bring it to an end.” John Humphries, reported in the Mail. What is this evidence for an age of entitlement? It would seem that this is an assertion reported as fact- which is a real failure of investigative journalism in an age when in half an hour I have researched the facts regarding this issue in the UK today.

Humphries visits Cardiff in the documentary, and notes “one in four people of working age in this area are now living on benefits”. (The figure was 24% as of February 2011). He doesn’t mention is it is quite exceptional for such a large share of working age people in an area to be on benefits: this is the case in only 5% of wards in Great Britain. This is a serious error in the form of bias, and a poor choice of case study for inclusion in such a documentary. The implication, that people are “swindling” the system, is offensive to people who are reliant on state support.

Humphries states several times that numbers of claimants of incapacity benefit have grown steadily. He is wrong. In 1999, some 9.5 per cent of wards had 24% or more working age residents on benefits. In 2007, before the recession, this had fallen to 3.7 per cent. This would suggest concentrations of benefit receipt are highly responsive to labour market conditions: the opposite of what is suggested by the ‘welfare dependency’ theory. This is clear evidence of poor research, factual inaccuracy in reportage, and bias in reporting. It is offensive to claimants of welfare support. Humphries visits a GP in the documentary. “What does she think of the statistics that say there are 2.5m people too sick to work? Unbelievable, she says. Literally unbelievable.” We all know how statistics, baldly stated, can mislead us and seduce us into believing our prejudices, our “evidence” from anecdotes are true representatives of fact. They very rarely are. That is why we use research methods to eliminate or account for bias.

52 per cent of people claiming sickness benefit (Incapacity Benefit/Employment Support Allowance) are disabled. We know this because they are also receiving Disability Living Allowance, which we know has a very low rate of fraud (less than 0.5%). Humphries has shown poor choice of question for this participant- one that reflects his bias, and which misrepresents myth and anecdote about claiming benefits for fact. This shows a poor standard of interviewing, bias, and factual misrepresentation. It is offensive to benefit recipients.

Among the rest of the sickness benefit caseload, receipt has been falling for years without the use of tough sanctions on claimants or benefit cuts – the opposite of what the “dependency” theory would lead us to expect. Humphries makes no mention of this very salient fact in his documentary- which shows poor standard of presenting, bias, inaccuracy, and gives offence. Lone parent employment rates fell from 60% at the end of the 1970s to 44% by the mid-1990s and then rose steadily, reaching 58% today. We can see that this has not followed the expected direction of travel were “a dependency culture” to blame. Again, clear evidence of bias, factual misrepresentation, and poor standards of presentation.

“In my decades of reporting politics I have never before seen the sort of political consensus on the benefits system that we seem to be approaching now.” Here, Humphries appears to be delivering a right-wing thesis on an imagined problem of “welfare dependency” within documentary format. It is a very poor reflection of the supposed impartiality and balance of reportage which I would expect from the BBC. In light of this, I demand that disabled people and their representatives, Citizens Advice Bureau staff, or other suitably qualified people are provided with the opportunity to make a point-by-point rebuttal in a similar time slot.

Many figures in this complaint have been taken from: http://www.leftfootforward.org/2011/10/john-humphrys-is-wrong-on-social-security/

edit: To make a complaint, you need to fill out this form on the BBC website.

The Hardest Hit Protest, Leeds

Last Saturday thousands of ill and disabled people, their carers and supporters took to the streets in cities across the UK to protest against the cuts that are unfairly targeting them. This unprecedented event was The Hardest Hit October Action.

It takes a lot to make the disabled community take to the streets, mainly because its so difficult for us. If you had eavesdropped my twitter feed last week you would have seen my conversations and musings dominated by The Hardest Hit as we all shared protest survival strategies. We knew there would be a price to pay in our health for attending but as one of my friends put it, "protesting will hurt me but not protesting will hurt me more". 

For every one of us attending an event there were hundreds who were unable to go because they were too ill or disabled, too poor, too busy caring for someone or just couldn't use our inaccessible public transport. They sent messages of support, they were with us in spirit. 

I'm not an activist or a disability campaigner, I'm just an ordinary person struggling with some pretty serious mental health problems. I am, like most other ill and disabled people, one of the hardest hit by the cuts.
I travelled to Leeds to join the Hardest Hit protest because this Government wants to stop my benefits, remove my services, call me a scrounger and force me from my home. For many of us this protest is personal, we're not just fighting for fairness - we're fighting for survival. 

Over two hundred of us gathered in the sun in Leeds. We marched along The Headrow bringing the city centre to a standstill. Shoppers stood and watched as we marched with our wheelchairs, our Assistance Dogs, our mobility scooters, our carers, our children, our friends and our banners. Speeches were made by disability activists, charity sector workers, trade union members, NUS members, a local MP and ordinary people facing huge challenges. The message from all of them and the people listening was clear - these cuts are unfair, we are afraid and we are angry. 

There is a 'perfect storm' facing ill and disabled people. We are already struggling to survive from day to day. Our NHS services are being cut and the voluntary sector agencies who would offer us support are losing their funding. The benefits of those of us who cannot work are being cut or removed and those of us who do work are losing the practical and financial support necessary to make working possible. The additional cuts proposed in the Welfare Reform Bill will leave us and our carers more impoverished, isolated and vulnerable. On top of this, ill and disabled people are being labelled as scroungers and benefit cheats, vilefied by the media and treated with suspicion by the public. Disability hate crime is increasing, people are facing abuse and harassment on a daily basis and many are afraid to leave their homes. 

This Government has promised to support disabled people who are in genuine need - but only if THEY can define 'support', 'disabled', 'genuine' and 'need'. This is a cynical disability denying ploy to remove support from the people who need it. This Government is merely transferring funds from ill and disabled people and carers to private companies making millions from 'welfare reform'. 

One of the most disturbing things is how badly informed most people still are about this. The public still think that disability benefits are a 'lifestyle choice' and believe we are all driving around in BMWs. Sadly many disabled people and their carers are still unaware of quite how badly the cuts will affect them. The media is not listening to the disabled community, some of the Hardest Hit events attracted over a thousand protesters but there was barely any BBC television or radio coverage. The future for society's most vulnerable is bleak. We are 'all in it together' its just that some of us are deeper in it than others. 

Attending the protest left me with mixed feelings. I was proud to stand in solidarity with the hundreds on the streets of Leeds, the thousands in cities across the UK and the tens of thousands who were there in spirit.

But I was also sad and angry that this country should need an event like The Hardest Hit at all.

Guest Post by Vanessa Teal