ON OCTOBER 27, the new Employment and Support Allowance quietly came into being. On a date so close to Halloween, one wonders what dark forces were at play to allow this to happen.
In March this year, Disability Alliance, Citizens Advice and the Child Poverty Action Group recognised what the vast majority of claimants had already suspected – that the main purpose of the ESA was to take money away from the sick and disabled.
Disability Alliance warned that most new claimants would be £1.85 a week worse off under ESA than they would have been under the old system. It argued that: “There will be an increase in the number of disabled people that will be forced into even greater poverty as a direct result of this reduction.”
The CPAG claimed that the rates for ESA were “against the spirit of the parliamentary promise to disabled people”. According to the CPAG: “Some groups will actually be worse off under the new benefit by as much as £400 a year. This reform was never presented as an opportunity to squeeze out savings from the poorest disabled people and it must not be used for that.”
Citizens Advice criticised the fact that the new system is unnecessarily complex, which means that certain ESA claimants could miss out on up to £60 per week of benefits they are entitled to.
The Government pressed ahead with its plans regardless of these warnings and regardless of the real threat that the poor may have to choose whether to heat or eat this winter. Cash payments to help those in fuel poverty were briefly mooted, but quickly abandoned. Transport fares are set to rise and food prices have already gone up by about a quarter since last year.
The weekly allowance for someone too ill to work is now £84.50, compared to £86.35 under the old system. That £1.85 weekly shortfall adds up to £96.20 over the year – money that won’t be available to pay for food and heating bills.
Meanwhile, Atos Healthcare is laughing. In 2005 the company, which is a subsidiary of a French-based computer firm, won a contract worth £500 million over seven years for conducting medical assessments on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. The cost of the new, more complex, ESA examinations is expected to be in the region of a further £200 million up to August 2015.
This is a simple case of redistributing money from the poor to the rich. But while campaign groups were up in arms over big bank bailouts and the lack of taxation on energy giants, no one, apparently, went on the barricades to defend incapacity benefit.
Edmund Burke is supposed to have said: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Of course, no one can say whether protest would have prevented this assault on the poorest, but that isn’t the point.
The ancient Gaels believed that, on Halloween, the boundary between the living and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. Their festivals involved bonfires, costumes and masks to ward off the evil spirits.
It seems that, without a song and dance, the powers that be now find it only too easy to penetrate the fragile boundary around social justice.
Carola Becker
