Personal Independent Payment: Please get your facts right.

So we've moved on - in the space of a week - from discussing the government's removal of £30 pw from those assessed as not currently fit to work but who might work sometime in the future.  

Now the debate is about the realisation that most of the money George Osborne needs to fund his tax cuts for the better off will be funded by reducing the amount of money spent on Personal Independence Payments (PIP).

In the debates and discussions which will happen over the next few days or weeks about the government’s plans for PIP, I’ve got an important request to make of journalists and politicians alike: please get your facts right.

For example, compare these statements by Tory MP, Dominic Raab, on the Daily Politics show on 9th March, with the facts:

He was being questioned by Andrew Neil about the cut of £30 pw to those in the Employment and Support Allowance Work Related Activity Group (ESA WRAG).

“We’re moving to a situation where if you have a disability condition you get your Job Seekers Allowance the same as anyone else and then the entitlement you get for your condition is moved over to what is called Personal Independence Payment - in effect it means that you have a personally tailored uplift bearing in mind the impact your condition has on your work prospects”.

Fact: Personal Independence Payment is nothing to do with whether someone is fit enough to work.  It is an additional costs payment, intended to mitigate the extra costs of daily life which disabled people incur.  PIP is made up of two components, a care element - eligibility for which depends on your need for assistance or equipment to do daily living tasks;  and a mobility element - which depends on your ability to walk or to move around unsupervised.  PIP is not means-tested: you can receive it regardless of your employment status or your income.  It is similar to child benefit, which is paid in recognition of the additional costs of bringing up a child and until recently was also not means-tested at all.

Another Fact: The higher rate for those on ESA, in comparison with Job Seekers Allowance, is in recognition that the great majority will be out of work for far longer than those on JSA, partly because they have been assessed as not being currently fit enough to seek work, partly because of the barriers they face to employment even if they are fit enough.  The longer a person is out of work, the bigger impact that has on their daily living costs (savings are depleted, repairs are required to household appliances, insurance has to be paid, etc etc). The removal of £30pw so that those in the ESA WRA Group only receive the same amount as those on JSA is a removal of the recognition of the financial costs of longer-term unemployment.

Andrew Neil asked Dominic Raab whether this £30 cut wasn’t rather cruel.  Raab replied:

“What is happening is it’s not a straight cut, that element is shifted into a personally tailored assessment of what actual need is so it’s not just a tick box exercise”

Fact: It is a straight cut. About half of people on ESA WRAG already get PIP.  The rest could be getting it if they were eligible. (So we might ask was Dominic Raab lying or is he just uninformed/misinformed?)

Another Fact: The assessment for PIP is a ‘tick box’ exercise.  The need to use particular equipment, or the ability to walk, is a proxy indicator of levels of impairment. It’s a much cruder measure than the assessment for Disability Living Allowance which was replaced by PIP.

Andrew Neil probed some more about the ESA WRAG cut, asking whether some people wouldn’t still be economically disadvantaged.

Dominic Raab responded:

“And that’s precisely why the Personal Independence Payment should make sure that doesn’t happen and it’s a far more accurate, personally tailored assessment of what their real personal needs are.”

Fact: He’s either lying or is uninformed/misinformed. See above.  Currently, about half of those in the ESA WRA group already receive PIP.  Future claimants of ESA, placed in the Work Related Activity Group, will receive £30 less per week - regardless of whether they qualify for PIP or not.  The government’s justification for reducing the payment to the same level as JSA was that the cut would be a financial incentive to seek work - although these are people who have been assessed as currently not fit to work.

Other misleading statements about the proposed change in eligibility criteria for PIP.

George Osborne: 

“On welfare, last week my Right Hon Friend the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions set out changes that will ensure that within the rising disability budget, support is better targeted at those who need it most.”

Fact: When the Coalition government came in they attempted to cut the budget spent on helping with additional costs of disability by replacing Disability Living Allowance with Personal Independence Payment.  The aim was to reduce the budget by 20%.  They failed to do this and the budget continued to rise but the change still meant that many, many individuals have seen a reduction in the help they receive.  For example, in order to lease a car or a wheelchair using the Motability scheme, someone has to receive the enhanced rate of the mobility component of PIP.  So far 45% of Motability users (13,900) who previously received the higher mobility rate of DLA have been re-assessed for PIP and have lost their Motability-leased car or wheelchair as a result. 

The consequences for some people are life-changing - and life-ruining. Kate Rae, told the Guardian how, six days into a new job, she got a letter calling her for a reassessment as part of the replacement of DLA with PIP. Because she was assessed as capable of walking between 20 and 50 metres she lost the enhanced mobility rate, no longer qualified for her Motability leased car which she used to get to work.  She was forced to give up her job and, last night, on the BBC local TV news she was interviewed while she packed up her flat in order to move back to live with her mother. So much for ‘personal independence’ - and it’s only one example of how thousands of people’s lives are being ruined as a result of the ideologically driven aim of reducing the size of the state.   (See also this article by Frances Ryan)

Justin Tomlinson (Minister for Disabled People): 

“This is not a financial measure”.

Fact: It is. The replacement of DLA with PIP did not produce the 20% budget reduction that the government intended.  This is not surprising because the motivation for the change was solely driven by financial considerations - the government’s desire to reduce public expenditure - and bore little relation to the reality of disabled people’s lives. The government assumed a lower proportion of new claimants and people transferring from DLA would qualify for PIP than has turned out to be the case.  

As the reduction in the PIP budget is such a significant part of the savings to be made by 2019/20 in order to fund tax cuts for the better off, we can only assume that financial motivations were paramount in order to deliver the government’s political priorities.

Various Ministers: 

We’ve consulted on these changes and are following independent advice that the current assessment isn’t working well.

Fact: The government is ignoring the majority of organisations and individuals who responded to the consultation and has distorted the findings of the review it commissioned from an ex-DWP civil servant. 

281 responses were received to the consultation.  Only 11 (all individuals) supported the changes. The DWP recognised that the majority strenuously opposed them, summarising that:

• Respondents felt that reliance on aids and appliances is a good indicator of additional costs.
• Respondents questioned the effectiveness and accuracy of the PIP assessment, both in terms of the policy underpinning it and the application of the policy.
• Respondents were concerned that any of the options for change would have a negative impact on the individuals affected.
• Respondents felt that any of the options for change would increase individuals’ needs for support from other public services and could lead to increased PIP expenditure. 

(It’s also worth looking at the ‘Crippling Choices’ report by Spartacus Network - which is more grounded in the reality of people’s lives than any evidence the government has produced )

The ‘independent review’ cited is a 2014 report by Paul Gray, an ex-DWP senior civil servant who reported that:  “Anecdotally, the Review heard from some case managers who felt they saw a higher than expected number of assessment reports where aids and appliances were used in justifications”.  However, he concluded: “Data so far available is insufficient to draw meaningful conclusions about the composition of PIP awards”.  (see also this article which summarises the review’s findings on aids and adaptations )

When journalists and politicians debate these issues they are talking about things which affect many thousands of people's lives.  The least we should expect them to do is to get their facts right. 

Self-determination and citizenship: out of reach for disabled people?

[This is the text of a talk I gave at Norah Fry Research Centre, University of Bristol, on March 10th, 2016]

When I was asked to do this lecture it was suggested I do something about disabled people and citizenship.  Around about the same time, I had a conversation with a hairdresser (as you do) and also listened to a You and Yours phone in (as I try not to do), both about citizenship.

The hairdresser was a young Iranian woman who was applying for British citizenship having been here for five years or so.  I asked her why she wanted to settle in this country, given that all her family were still in Iran.  She said that firstly she felt safe here and secondly, even though things may be improving in Iran, she thought it would be many years before it became really democratic.  I asked her what she meant by ‘democracy’ and she talked about ‘a government that looks after its people’.

The You and Yours phone-in asked people who had come here from other countries and become British citizens, when they first felt like a citizen - and almost everyone who phoned in talked about a feeling of being accepted, and of belonging. 

So together the hairdresser and the You and Yours contributors conjured up a picture of a society where people are accepted for who they are, a community to which you feel you belong, where you feel safe, and where you know that your government will act in your best interests and will not harm you.

I was particularly struck by this because I increasingly feel that more and more disabled people do not feel safe, do not feel accepted for who they are, and where our government seems to be acting in ways which - far from being in our best interests - actually harm us. 

I also thought I would revisit the paper I wrote about citizenship and disabled people in 2005 for the Disability Rights Commission (DRC). That was also the year that the government published a 25 year strategy to improve the life chances of disabled people, setting out the aim that:

“By 2025, disabled people in Britain should have full opportunities and choices to improve their quality of life, and will be respected and included as equal members of society.”

In the DRC report, I argued that there were three aspects of citizenship: self-determination; participation and contribution.  And that self-determination was critical because without self-determination we are held back from both participating and contributing.

So what do I meant by ‘self-determination’?  It’s about making decisions for yourself, what is often called autonomy. For example, in making the case for people with learning disabilities’ rights to citizenship, Simon Duffy states, “Put simply, if you have self-determination then this means you are in charge of your own life. If you do not have self-determination then other people are in charge of you” (Simon Duffy, 2003, Keys to Citizenship, Centre for Welfare Reform, p.5).

Being in charge of your own life - making decisions for yourself - is not a simple matter if you require assistance to go about your daily life, particularly if you need assistance to communicate and to express your preferences. Self determination for disabled people is not only about removing barriers - what people often call ‘negative rights’, a right not to be coerced to do something.  It’s also often about having the right kind of assistance so that your choices can be put into action. So, for example, detaining people with learning disabilities in long-stay hospitals creates a barrier to self-determination but closing down the hospitals is not sufficient to enable them to exercise choice and control over their lives. They may also require support to make choices, set up home, manage their own money, seek employment, and so on. And they won’t be able to make decisions for themselves if their previous accommodation is merely replaced by another form of institution. They will need, instead, to have somewhere to live where they can make the ordinary choices of daily life. Not only that, but the community in which they want to live may need to make some changes themselves because, in many cases, changes in attitudes will be required so that people with learning disabilities are welcomed and accepted.

For disabled people therefore, self-determination cannot be achieved without positive rights - rights to action to be taken by other people, organisations and by society in general.  The UN Human Rights framework recognises these kinds of economic, social and cultural rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People sets out how disabled people require specific action in order to have access to the same life chances as non-disabled people, particularly in Article 19 which concerns independent living.

So how is our society currently doing at promoting such positive rights, rights which are essential if disabled people are to have access to full citizenship?  More specifically, what is our current government doing, on our behalf?

The answer to that question is, unfortunately, that current government policies  are removing the assistance required to promote our self-determination, participation and contribution.  And in the process, people feel less safe, are more likely to live in poverty, are denied opportunities open to others, and in some cases have shortened life expectancy.  Government policy, in other words, far from promoting our citizenship, is actually doing us harm.

I’ll just briefly discuss two policy areas before going on to identify what I think are the fundamental problems underpinning and driving these developments.

“Getting disabled people into work” is currently the main focus of policies which are supposedly intended to enable us to be full citizens, and reduce the risk of living in poverty. Welfare reform is the mechanism to do this, fuelled by the assumption that the primary barrier is - not the attitudes of employers, or even the experience of impairment or illness  - but the motivation and attitudes of disabled people themselves. The most recent example of this is the removal of £1500 per year from people who have been assessed as currently not able to work because of illness and/or impairment, on the grounds that this would improve their motivation to “move closer to the labour market”.

At the same time, policies aimed at providing the assistance that people might need in order to get or retain employment are failing - primarily because they are not based on disabled people’s actual experiences and needs. 

Two examples: The Work Programme - the government’s main programme for helping people to get a job - is only managing to assist about 1 in 9 people on ESA into employment.  The Programme generally has a poor record in enabling sustained employment with only 1 in 4 remaining in employment for 6 months or more.

But it’s not just that the Work Programme isn’t achieving its aims.  It’s also actually harming people.  A survey carried out for Mind found that the majority of disabled people who were put on the Work Programme felt that the experience had worsened their mental health and had made them less likely to gain employment. Almost 20,000 people with mental health difficulties had their benefits stopped as a result of sanctions during 2014/15, an increase of 668% over the last four years. And sanctions mean no money for food, heating, rent.

At the same time, Access to Work funding - intended to pay for the support, equipment or adaptations that people might need in order to work - has been restricted for each individual and this is threatening, amongst others, people who need Sign Language Interpreters. Jenny Sealey, for example, fears that she will no longer be able to work full-time as a theatre Director. There is  also anecdotal evidence that, in general, when people are reassessed their funding is being reduced, although the DWP has refused a Freedom of Information request which would confirm whether this is a common experience.  Although there have been increases in last couple of years to the Access to Work budget, earlier cuts have not been made up and it is still not funding as many people as it was in 2010.

The message that disabled people are getting is summed up by Jenny Sealey when she says:  “I am very curious to know why Deaf and disabled people are considered second-class citizens, why we are ghettoised, discriminated against and deemed worthless”.

These two examples illustrate two key aspects of current government policies: a punitive approach to what we used to call social security but has now been renamed ‘welfare’, which bears very little relationship to people’s actual experiences or needs; and an over-riding aim of cutting public expenditure. The message is that the key to being accepted as a full citizen is to be in paid work; but that there is a limit to which we the government, on behalf of all citizens, is prepared to pay to enable you to enter and retain paid employment.   And what’s more, we think the main barrier is your attitude to work so we will reduce your benefits in order to ‘incentivise’ you to try harder. No wonder many disabled people caught up in the benefit system feel very very insecure. 

The second policy area concerns independent living - two words which sum up what it is to have self-determination, and to have the opportunities to participate and contribute.  But access to independent living has been undermined by cuts to social care budgets.  Although independent living is not just about social care, it is no accident that a protestor at Norfolk County Council’s recent meeting where further cuts of £50m were made to social care, held up a placard saying “No to 2nd Class Citizenship for Disabled People”.

Increasingly people who need support to go about their daily lives are finding that the maximum support available confines them within the four walls of their own home.  Fifteen minute visits three times a day is, for many older disabled people in particular, the maximum help they can expect from their local authority.  Deaths amongst older people have been rising since 2011, having previously fallen since the 1970s, and it is claimed that this is a result of the ‘crisis in social care’. 

The Care Act and the accompanying statutory guidance is full of fine words but the promotion of so-called ‘well-being’ is incompatible with the level of cuts sustained by social care and the proposed 2% increase in council tax is not sufficient to make good the total level of funding cuts since 2010.  The same Norfolk County Council meeting which cut the social care budget also raised its council tax by not 2% but 4% (primarily because they needed to in order to continue to provide statutory children’s services). 

The closure of the Independent Living Fund was a major setback.  It is not just that many people transferring from ILF funding are reporting reductions in the amount of support they receive, and restrictions on how they can use their direct payments, but that there are thousands of people who, since the Fund closed to new applicants in 2010, have never had the opportunities that the ILF had been delivering to people with the highest support needs since 1988.

The largest group of people who received funding from the ILF were people with “severe learning disabilities”.  Will they be more likely in the future to enter institutional provision, for example the new hospital in Northampton on the site of the old Northampton Lunatic Asylum which boasts of being the ‘Europe’s largest mental health facility for young people learning disabilities and/or autism’?

Whatever the government’s intentions set out in its various responses to scandals such as Winterbourne View, American companies have identified lucrative opportunities for moving into the provision of in-patient mental health services, particularly those specialising in secure accommodation for people with learning disabilities and/or autism. Journalists writing about these developments put them down to a ‘rise in NHS outsourcing’.

In 2013, Guardian journalist, Zoe Williams, posed a question to the government we would all like an answer to: “What's your plan for these people whose lives we apparently can't afford?”  She was specifically referring to those affected by the closure of the ILF but there would seem to be an increasing number of disabled and older people who are getting the message that society in general is not willing to allocate sufficient resources to enable them to go about their daily lives in the way that non-disabled people might take for granted. 

I could carry on depressing us all by listing the many many other policies which are undermining disabled people’s self-determination, and failing to deliver full citizenship.  But there are common factors driving these policies and we can’t hope to counter them unless we address these fundamental issues. 

These factors are inter-related and there are many different facets of them but I think they can be divided into two: a belief that public goods and services are best delivered through competition between providers; and a failure to recognise the economic and social value of the common good.

The basic assumption behind the promotion of competition in public service is that accountability is to be achieved via market mechanisms. So, with the NHS, first a so-called ‘internal market’ was introduced in the early 1990s and then competition was opened up to private providers.  The theory is that competition will increase efficiency (by driving down costs) while commissioning for outcomes, together with regulation, will assure quality.  This is not so much privatisation of NHS providers (although there has been a steady increase in private companies gaining NHS contracts) as the marketisation of all healthcare, whether provided by public bodies or not.  

But if markets are supposed to deliver efficiency and quality, why do we get to a position where, to take only a couple of recent examples, our taxes were paying up to £4000 pw for a private company to keep people with learning disabilities - described as needing “extra help to live 'in the community’” - in inhumane conditions.   Or where we were paying an NHS organisation over £3000 pw to provide such negligent care that a young man with learning disabilities and epilepsy drowned in a bath?

Why haven’t those commissioning or regulating these services, on our behalf, prevented this kind of thing happening?  How, for example, can an NHS Trust be found so negligent that it is responsible for the deaths of people in its care, which fails to investigate more than a handful of ‘unexpected deaths’ and yet no-one is held accountable.  Marketisation of NHS services - whether they are outsourced to the private sector or not - has not delivered accountability to its service users. 

The provision of social care was, of course, privatised as a result of the community care reforms in the 1990s.  This was intended, like all privatisations, to deliver choice, quality and efficiency but as things currently stand none of these things have materialised.  Instead, we have a regulator struggling to impose acceptable standards while care homes and homecare agencies go out of business because local authorities won’t pay enough for their services.  The bottom line is that there isn’t enough money going into the social care system. The private insurance industry has not been able to identify sufficient profit making products to provide an alternative to public funding and governments have been increasingly unwilling to provide sufficient resources raised from general taxation to meet the demand for good quality care.

It isn’t just that market mechanisms have proved unable to deliver quality and efficiency, it’s also that we as a society have not valued health and social care enough to be prepared to spend sufficient of our collective resources.  Or rather, we haven’t elected governments who have recognised the full extent of how vital these services are to our common good and who then use our collective resources to make the necessary expenditure.

As philosopher Michael Sandel says: “Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities, so to decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency; we have also to decide how to value the goods in question”. (See ‘What Money Can’t Buy: The moral limits of markets’)

The other policy area that I focussed on - welfare reform - illustrates this second underlying problem. Not only have we as a society failed to value the common good, but an individual’s social value is increasingly defined as being in paid employment. None of the roles that most people fulfil outside their working life are to count as the contribution part of being a citizen. Moreover, paid employment is identified as the over-riding policy aim with no recognition that, for increasing numbers of people, work is bad for their physical and mental health because it is insecure, badly paid, and the working conditions are poor.  Despite this, the recent Mental Health Taskforce strategy identified employment as a “health outcome” outcome. 

This linking of social value with being in paid employment has its logical conclusion with Times journalist’s Matthew Parris’ contention that older and disabled people are “an unproductive overhang” and his belief that in the future it will be seen as ‘selfish’ for older people to refuse to accept assistance to die once they need a certain level of health and social care.

To summarise, citizenship for disabled people is incompatible with the kind of society that we are becoming (or, arguably, have already become).  This is because:

• governments have refused to raise sufficient levels of collective resources to support the social rights necessary to our full citizenship
• public services have been undermined and devalued by subjecting them to marketisation and/or outsourcing/privatising
• attitudes have been promoted which value human beings only according to their productive value.

The result is that disabled people’s ability to contribute and participate is being fundamentally undermined, in particular because the support required to enable self-determination is inadequate and steadily declining.

I hate being so pessimistic so I’ve been trying hard to find ways to be more positive.  And there are a few things we need to hold on to.

While the policies and behaviours of government and organisations can make life very difficult for front-line workers, it is important to hold on to the fact that individual workers do have opportunities to make a real difference to people’s lives - and to help people to make decisions for themselves about their lives.  It’s relationships that matter: for example, recent research, like much previous research, found that people using mental health services saw their relationships with care co-ordinators as being central to their recovery.

Lucy Series, a researcher at Cardiff Law School, writes a blog called The Small Places, the title of which refers to something Eleanor Roosevelt said in 1958:

"Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person... Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."

For all of us, it’s in the small places of our daily interaction with others that we have the opportunity to behave in ways which are kind, which recognise people’s full humanity and which can thereby help contribute - sometimes against heavy odds - to their value as citizens.

Another cause of optimism is the way the awful experiences of individuals have - primarily through social media - been brought out of the private sphere into the public.  In the early days of the disability movement we neglected the experiences of people with long-term health conditions. And although these are the people who arguably have been most affected by welfare reform policies in recent years, they are also the people who have led the campaigns against such policies.  People who cannot leave their house, who cannot engage in more traditional forms of campaigning have made their voices heard through social media.  In addition, those who in the past would have been using the traditional forms of getting their voices heard have also capitalised on the new opportunities for communicating a message.  One key example is the Justice for LB campaign - which included the first ever live tweeting of an inquest into the death of a young man with learning disabilities - and which has used other imaginative and evocative methods combining real world and virtual world methods.  

But all the time we have to recognise what are the fundamental causes of the problems we face.  A denial of the common good; an attack on the idea that we can pool resources to promote the common good; a removal of democratic accountability from government and local government and their replacement by the accountability of the market.  What we need is more democratic accountability not less.  What we need is a recognition that there are some things which we should value as a society and which cannot be efficiently or effectively delivered through financial incentives and self-interest. In particular, what we need is the involvement of people whose lives are affected by the way we use collective resources. If we think that increasing employment opportunities for disabled people is a good thing, then systems and services to achieve that must be designed by disabled people themselves. And if we want to use public money to enable people with learning disabilities, currently shut up in institutions, to lead ordinary lives then it is they, their advocates and their families who should to decide how to use that money. 

Until we address these fundamental causes disabled people will increasingly feel unsafe, as if we do not belong, and as if our government is not acting in our best interests. And, to answer the question posed by my title, self-determination and citizenship will indeed increasingly feel out of reach for disabled people.

Do we have to prove our 'usefulness' in order to be accorded human rights?

“It is one thing to guarantee someone the right to die without suffering or without the use of heroic or extraordinary measures.  It is another thing to require that certain individuals or groups be forcibly destroyed as lives useless to the community - lives not worth living.  The logic in each case is different: in the first, the goal is to provide individual happiness in the final moments of life;in the second, the goal is an economic one - to relieve society of the financial burden of caring for lives considered useless to the community.”

2016 didn’t get off to a good start for those of us who value human life in all its wonderful diversity - or for those approaching the last decades of our lives.  Quite apart from the awful things that humans beings are doing to other human beings in various parts of the world, there are two issues closer to home which make me wonder where we are heading.

We started 2016 no closer to action being taken to reduce the shocking and avoidable early mortality rate amongst people with learning disabilities. Revelations of one NHS Trust’s failure to investigate many ‘unexpected deaths’ has been met by resistance from the Trust concerned; and a response from NHS England, the Care Quality Commission and Monitor which has been criticised as inadequate by Sara Ryan and the #JusticeforLB campaign whose valuable work highlighting this the government has acknowledged. 

And then on January 1st, Matthew Parris, an influential Times columnist, was interviewed by Baroness Jane Campbell on the Today programme defending an article he had written, which was headed “Some day soon we’ll all accept that useless lives should be ended”.  In an audio clip on the same site he had referred to older and disabled people as “an unproductive overhang” and he returned to this argument in a Times opinion piece written on New Year’s day, arguing “that any ageing society will in time question how much those wanting help should demand of those who must pay for it” (the article is behind a paywall but can be viewed for free here).

Of course, people like Matthew Parris are many steps removed from those whose actions or inactions cause someone else’s early death: the carelessness which results in a young man with learning disabilities drowning in a bath; the lack of attention to an older person in hospital who cannot drink or feed themselves without assistance. But people who have the ear of the public and who use their position to influence opinion, help create such carelessness and lack of attention, the casual devaluing of the lives of others. 

This devaluing comes about when we psychologically distance ourselves from others who we see as ‘not like us’.  It is easy to see how this is happening when people (such as those working at Winterbourne View) behave inhumanely towards people with learning disabilities.  Yet when someone considers the life of a very old and frail person and says to themselves, ‘I would rather die early than be like that’, their seeming sense of identification is in fact false and they too are psychologically distancing themselves. Their judgement about the quality of life of someone else is based on their current experience and judgement, not on that person’s or their future self’s actual experience and judgement.

I know this from personal experience.  If someone had said to me the day before I had my accident 33 years ago that, from tomorrow, you will be permanently paralysed for the rest of your life, I would have replied I would rather be dead. And yet, such a thought never occurred to me once it had happened. This is why, although I hope that - should life really become unbearable in the future I would have control over whether I continue living - I will never make a decision on behalf of my future self.  My future self will have different experiences and judgements from my current self and I don’t think I can know what my decisions will be. 

This is also why the only moral basis on which to support ‘assisted dying’ has to have the decision of the individual at the heart of it.  And why any decision has to be uninfluenced by the kind of social attitudes that Matthew Parris says will and should be created amongst older people - the attitude that it would be ‘selfish’ to continue living.  

The Equality and Human Rights Commission has pointed out that a failure to investigate unexpected deaths “could be a breach of the right to life under the Human Rights Act”. This is a timely reminder that encouraging the premature ending of people’s lives is a breach of a fundamental human right which was passed into international law following the Second World War. The point about human rights is that we have them by virtue of the fact that we are human.  To deny such rights to a particular group is to deny us our humanity. 

And now I need to come clean about the source for the quote at the beginning of this blogpost - at the risk of falling foul of Godwin’s Law.  It comes from a detailed study of the role and practice of doctors involved in the ‘euthanasia’ programme instigated by the Third Reich.  This was the  ‘mercy killing’ of 70,000 older and/or disabled people between 1939 and 1941. The programme was then officially stopped as a result of public protest but continued unofficially until 1945 and probably killed more than 200,000. 

I have never before claimed that current attitudes and treatment of disabled people are reminiscent of what happened during the Second World War.  But when an opinion piece by an influential commentator invokes ‘usefulness’ as a qualification for receiving necessary health and social care services, when disabled people die early as a result of neglect and lack of medical treatment, I do think we are entering very dangerous times.  

While disabled and older people could argue convincingly of the contribution we make and have made to our families and friends, our community and to society generally we should resist making such an argument.  Our human rights are rooted in our common humanity and to attach conditions to such rights is to treat us as less than human.

Iain Duncan Smith has a point - but it's not the one he thinks....

Iain Duncan Smith is responsible for replacing child poverty reduction targets based on household income with targets relating to ‘worklessness’ and educational attainment.  The validity of these new targets is based on assumptions that the behaviour of individuals is the major factor determining life chances rather than the wider social and economic circumstances in which they find themselves.

So why do I think he has a point?  (Even if it’s not the one he thinks it is.)

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In 2010, the Child Poverty Act was passed with all Party support, one of the last achievements of Gordon Brown’s government.  It set targets for reducing child poverty through to 2020 and imposed a duty on governments to report every year on progress towards those targets. Four measures of income-related poverty were to be used (relative, combined low income and material deprivation, absolute, and persistent) and the Act also required local government to assess levels of child poverty in their areas and develop strategies to address these.

In 2015, the Conservative government is abolishing the duty to tackle income-related poverty and replacing it with a new duty for the Secretary of State to report annually on “life chances”.  These are to be measured by the proportion of children living in workless households and educational attainment at the age of 16. In addition, the duty on local authorities to develop strategies to address child poverty is abolished, the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission is to be renamed the Social Mobility Commission, and measurement of progress on child poverty is removed from its remit, which is now to be entirely concerned with social mobility.

These radical changes are a result of arguments made by Iain Duncan Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, and the think tank he founded, the Centre for Social Justice. They are made despite widespread criticism, not only from Labour but from almost all academics and voluntary sector organisations working in the field. 

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission concluded “that the numbers of children in both absolute and relative poverty are set to increase significantly over the next few years, with the 2020 targets being missed by a considerable distance. Nothing in the [the government’s child poverty] strategy changes this finding”.  

This of course is the point. The Centre for Social Justice argued that: 

The law that binds us to this measure must now be scrapped before it does serious damage. The legal implications of not hitting the target – or rather of not working towards hitting the target in 2020 – are becoming serious. Legal advice given to the CSJ has suggested that if it looks like the government might not reduce relative income poverty to the requisite level by 2020, judicial review could lead to the courts requiring the government to take steps to do so.

The CSJ and Iain Duncan Smith partly justify their approach with practical arguments about the appropriateness of using 60% of median income to measure poverty - a household may move out of poverty not because their income has increased but because the median level of income has fallen (as happened during the last recession); and it encourages policies which aim to get people just under the median income to move to just above -  the ‘poverty plus a pound’ argument.

However, their more fundamental argument is that poverty is caused by factors such as worklessness, family breakdown, educational failure, addiction and serious personal debt and that these are more appropriate measures of children’s life chances.

This argument is driven more by ideology than by evidence.  The immediately obvious point is that being in work is no protection against a poverty-level income - indeed there are now more children living in poverty in working families than there are children in families where no-one works; and the evidence is that most low paid workers stay on low pay and do not progress onto higher incomes.

A more fundamental problem with the new child poverty targets is that they are predicated on an assumption that it is the source of parents’ income which is more important than how much income they have.  As Iain Duncan Smith argues:

Increase their benefit income – while taking no other proactive action – and you push the family further into dependency, only increasing the chance that their child will follow that same path as an adult. So while income is important we should be clear that the source of that income can have very different effects. Income through benefits maintains people on a low income, whereas income gained through work can transform lives.

So the government ignores the fact that increasing numbers of working parents are earning poverty-level wages and proposes that ‘worklessness’ is an appropriate measure of whether children are adequately housed, clothed, fed.  They also ignore evidence that changes to the social security system since 2010 create conditions which are harmful to children’s life chances.  As a result of lower incomes, many parents struggle to provide the basics of a roof over their head, warmth and food - 7.7 million children live in families adversely affected by the below inflation uprating of child tax credits and child benefits, and one in five of these families have cut back on food and/or cut back on heating because of this.  

In his emphasis on ‘individual responsibility’ and ‘worklessness’, Iain Duncan Smith also ignores the fact that a systematic review of evidence found that money does in itself make a difference to children’s outcomes.

So money does matter to children’s life chances and therefore should be included in any measurement of child poverty.  But so too do other factors - and this is why Iain Duncan Smith and the CSJ have a point.  

Children’s life chances can be improved or damaged, not only by the level of household income, but also by whether they have access to services such as health, education and housing, and to other types of support in their daily lives. 

What Iain Duncan Smith ignores is that, crucially, these are factors which can be improved or diminished by government policies.  This is despite his own admission that these types of services both improve outcomes for children, and should be part of the measurement of child poverty targets.  As he himself said, Health Visitors, for example: 

have been found to play an incredibly important role in helping families to cope and provide a stable environment for young children. Yet, once again, we don’t do enough to assess the impact of this investment on a family’s life in the long run. So I believe that we must look more closely at how we are measuring the impact of these interventions, and continue to push a debate about these wider measures of poverty.

When I was working with the Office for Disability Issues during the period of the last Labour government, we had a discussion with Treasury officials which started with a consideration of whether it would be useful to include access to public services such as a Sure Start Centre, in the measurement of child poverty and life chances.  This discussion didn’t go very far which is unfortunate because it might have opened up the possibility of recognising that universal access to good quality public services is a key part of tackling unequal access to life chances.

The irony - and tragedy - is that, although Iain Duncan Smith and the Centre for Social Justice have a point in their argument that poverty is not entirely about money, this government is creating a society where access to a good outcomes for children is becoming more and more about how much money their parents have.  

Who gets access to housing which enhances the quality of their family’s life?  People who are already economically advantaged (either by virtue of their own earning power or the wealth of their parents).  Who gets forced into housing which damages their and their children’s health and well-being? Families unable to afford decent housing because of the benefit cap and other reductions to their benefits, sanctions imposed by the Job Centre, unemployment caused by ill health and impairment or by wider economic forces beyond their control, the failure of successive governments to control rents and build social housing, and so on. 

Who gets access to good education? Children whose parents can afford to live in or move to an area with good state schools, where parents have enough social capital to start a ‘free school’, or where they can pay for private tuition or private school. Who gets access to good child care?  Parents who can afford to pay for it.

And why is this happening?  Because government policy generally supports markets as the main distribution mechanism for goods and services, whether this is through reducing ‘the size of the state’, encouraging the encroachment of the private sector into public services, or creating pseudo-markets in not-for-profit sectors.  Even when the government attempts to target resources to enable children from poorer families to get better access to public services, their overarching aim of reducing public expenditure can undermine the intended outcomes. This is what is happening with the Pupil Premium for example.  The National Audit Office reports that per pupil funding in the most disadvantaged secondary schools fell between 2010 and 2015, despite the pupil premium, because of other real-term reduction in other types of funding for schools.  

A refusal to recognise the harm to children caused by social and economic disadvantage means that the government and its actions/inactions are let off the hook.  Government policies can harm or enhance people’s lives. George Osborne can talk about a ‘high wage low welfare’ economy but in reality current policies are creating a ‘low wage low welfare’ economy with diminished public services and increasing inequality.   

The result is that children’s lives are being sacrificed to a political party’s aim to reduce public expenditure and collective responsibility, on the grounds that this will create the space for private enterprise and private profit, thereby supposedly fuelling economic growth. While there is no evidence that a ‘smaller state’ creates economic growth, there is plenty of evidence that both low household income and lack of access to good quality housing, healthcare, education and support services damage children’s lives. 

The new child poverty measures are therefore wrong on two counts - not only do they not include income but they also fail to measure access to the public services which, together with income, determine children’s life chances.

'We' and 'People like you": collective responsibility and the common good

I didn’t watch last night’s BBC Question Time (it’s a programme that’s bad for my blood pressure) but Twitter is awash this morning (27th November) with an exchange between an audience member and Matthew Hancock, a Conservative Minister.  

Having described the impact of cuts on her son (who has learning disabilities), she received the following response from Matthew Hancock:

Hold on, if we don't have a country that can live within its means then we can't fund those sorts of public services that people like you rely on.

There’s a revealing use of the words ‘we’ and ‘you’ in this response.  The phrases ‘we can’t fund’ and ‘people like you’ separate the population into two distinct groups - those who pay for and those who use public services. 

The point about public services is that they are (should be) services universally available to those that need them, made possible through the principle of collective responsibility and a progressive taxation system.  Matthew Hancock and his family may have no need at present for the type of services that the audience member was describing, but if that need should arise then the service would be (should be) available to him.

But the phrase ‘if we don’t have a country that can live within its means’ signifies a position adopted by those who have decision-making powers - justified by meaningless rhetoric and which has no room for the notion of the common good. Those who relegate public services for groups like people with learning disabilities to a low political priority do not see themselves as potential beneficiaries of a service, collectively funded, for those who need it.  If they think about it at all, they are likely to assume that they will be able to pay for the support they or their family might need - the idea of a common good is of no relevance to them (unless it’s an NHS emergency service of course, because that’s a service that is not, currently, provided by the private sector).

A separation of ‘we’ from ‘you’ inevitably follows. Those who need specific types of support are separated out from the mainstream by the language used about them, with Ministers (falsely) claiming to be ‘protecting’ the ‘most vulnerable’.  The ‘you’ who are not part of ‘we’.  

Five years ago, the word ‘austerity’ was used to justify a need to cut back on public expenditure because of the fall out from the banking crisis. The common good was sacrificed to the ‘need’ to bail out the banks.  Five years followed of undermining the social security system, the education, health and social care systems on which the majority of us rely at some point in our lives.  We are now in a new phase of an all-out assault on collective responsibility for the common good - now a political aim in its own right. This is illustrated, as I pointed out in a previous blogpost (here), by the decision to reduce the sickness benefit payable to disabled and ill people.  This is part of a long-term aim to replace collectively funded sickness benefit with privately funded insurance.  

Social care has never been properly funded through a progressive taxation system. Previous governments hoped, in vain, that ‘the market’ would develop insurance products to cover the cost of long-term care.  At the same time, the delivery of services have been increasingly privatised over the last 30 years and public funding to pay for these services has fallen further and further behind increasing demand.   Private providers are rapidly reaching the stage where they can only make a profit out of the most well-off self-funders and the insurance industry shows no signs of developing a financially sustainable product which would provide an alternative to public funding - not even to cover the reduced responsibility that individuals would have if ever this government introduces the proposed lifetime cap on care costs.  

The privatisation of sickness benefit is likely to lead to a similar situation as that in social care where there is increasingly unequal and inadequate provision to meet needs which no-one can predict but which can have a disastrous impact on people’s lives.  

This situation will only change if we as a society are prepared to step in to meet such needs on the grounds that it is in all our interests to do so.  But this current government, and the interests it represents, cannot see this because they, as Matthew Hancock so graphically illustrated, separate the ‘we’ of themselves from ‘people like you’, namely ‘us’.