Bloody Doctors. According to Stephen Crabb MP, a former Work and Pensions Secretary, they’re too quick to sign people off sick so they become scroungers and risk a lifetime on benefits, when what we really need to focus on is not the fact that people are too unwell to work (all the usual illnesses and disabilities, now with added mental health distress, treatment delays due to underfunding and the pandemic, and long Covid…) but on reducing the spiralling benefits bill.
Once again, people with no lived experience of disability have decided that it would be really easy, if we just… and are focussing on the wrong thing again – how much it costs to meet need, rather than the right thing – the fact that people have needs to be met.
The working-age benefits bill, is now £1.9 billion per week – 52% higher than it was before the pandemic. Of course it is. Ten million of us now live with mental health distress – a fifth of the population. Over two million of us are living with Long Covid – around 4% of us. And according to recent ONS data, a third of the people on NHS elective care waiting lists were Disabled before they started their prolonged waits. We, as a country, are getting sicker. Also, 40% of working people still need Universal Credit benefit top ups. In essence, business doesn’t pay them enough to live on, and Government recognises that.
