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| TX: 07.10.05 - Incapacity Benefit - Interview with David Blunkett PRESENTER: WINIFRED ROBINSON AND PETER WHITE |
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| Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 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 BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. ROBINSON On Monday David Blunkett will announce his vision for welfare reform. It's expected to reinforce the values of self-reliance and the idea of the welfare state as a ladder by which people can escape poverty, rather than as a safety net. So to what extent will this change in direction be reflected in the plans to reform incapacity benefit which are expected to provoke one of the most bitter debates in the coming session of Parliament? Over two and a half million people are on incapacity benefit and David Blunkett, the minister in charge, wants to cut that number drastically. Well Peter's been talking to David Blunkett about his plans for reform. Peter, who exactly is on incapacity benefit and what for and what does it cost? WHITE Well it's a benefit for people who are deemed not to be able to work because they're ill or disabled. It covers a wide range of conditions but the majority of claimants are perhaps not exactly what you'd expect - just over a third have psychological conditions such as depression and stress, about a fifth have back and neck related conditions and 1 in 10 have heart and respiratory problems like angina or bronchitis. Now the benefit costs the taxpayer just under £7 billion a year, this figure rose dramatically during the '80s and '90s when it was called invalidity benefit, this was a time of heavy job losses in industrial areas and in spite of efforts by successive governments it's proved very hard and stubborn to get down. ROBINSON So what do you have to do to prove that you're entitled to it? WHITE Well you have to undergo a pretty stringent medical examination, which you might not think from the people who say well anyone can get on it, that's not true. The examination is meant to establish your physical or your psychological ability to work and it's a kind of point system. But the government still believes that there are many still claiming the benefit who could be working with better support. Now last February the government published a five year plan to deal with incapacity benefit and that suggested distinguishing between those people who can work with the right support and rehabilitation and those for whom the severity of their disability or illness meant they wouldn't work again, or probably wouldn't work again. Now the first group would be invited to attend what would be known as work focused interviews - WFIs - they'd be face to face and they'd be designed to help them find work. However, the sting in the tail - refusal to cooperate with those would mean you'd simply get benefit at around the level of job seekers allowance, which comes in at around £57 a week. People too ill to work though would receive benefit which would actually be higher than the current incapacity benefit rate. ROBINSON And where does incapacity benefit fit into the benefit structure overall? WHITE Right, well about £12 billion a year, that's the spend on incapacity benefits - and that means that's IB, what I've been talking about, and sickness allowance - that comes to about the same as the spend on housing benefit but it's dwarfed by the cost of old age pensions, which come in at £50 billion a year, but it's still about 10% of the total welfare budget of £110 billion a year. So you can see why this government, and David Blunkett in particular, is desperate to reform it. BLUNKETT It failed because the concept - and this really developed alongside the welfare state from the Second World War - was that if people fell out of a job then we propped them up - we looked after them. And that was fine, I mean if people were working down a pit and they had an accident the chances of them getting another job down the pit were negligible, getting another job in their locality was negligible. The world's transformed, the nature of work's transformed and medical science has improved dramatically, the ability to actually support people is there. And I'm visiting today one of the Pathways to Work programmes, we've got seven running across the country, and we're about to put another 14 in place, so a third of the country will be covered by next year, all of which are saying look we won't just give you money anymore, we'll give you the backing, the support, the medical help, the therapy to actually be able to get yourself back into a job part time. WHITE So how many people are you saying could be got back to work if the appropriate help was on offer? BLUNKETT Well there's almost 2.8 million people on incapacity benefit, it used to be called invalidity, that's four times as many as 25 years ago, even though the world has improved dramatically for them. So we're aiming to get a million plus back into work. WHITE You say the world has changed and indeed the people who are on incapacity benefit now it's a very different kind of person to those who were on benefit before but nonetheless the testing is very rigorous, Alan Johnson's described it in the past as the most rigorous in the world and people have been trying to get this benefit down for 10 years or more, doesn't it suggest there's something about actually modern stress rates and the kind of work that we do that is causing a problem? It's not - you can't just try to sort of shoehorn people back into work. BLUNKETT Well stress and skeletal problems - to the rest of us that's backache and similar issues - are the main problems that people face and they go on to benefit. My answer to that is that these things are manageable, that people will actually have depression if they're out of work, out of society, isolated, they're more likely to be able to recover if we can reconnect them. WHITE What we saw in the five year plan was the idea that people would be divided between those who could get back to work with support and rehabilitation and those who it was thought possibly were too ill or too disabled or too demoralised to work - is that the kind of structure we're likely to see in the green paper? BLUNKETT Well I'm taking the five year plan as the baseline and I'm building on it because there'd be no point in saying that's the definitive general answer, let's leave it at that. So the paper will be not only more extensive but it actually will try and address the issue of benefits generally. There are 29 different benefits, over 270 elements - to be honest with you the more I looked at it, and I've been around a very long time, including having been the chairman of social services a long time ago for four years in my own locality, I didn't realise what a nightmare of a system has been put together over the last 60 years - we've put sticking plaster on sticking plaster. And so the paper won't just be about incapacity benefit, it will set the, if you like, the stepping stones to actually trying to sort the system out more generally. WHITE Of course to get people back to work there have got to be the jobs for them to go into and what many people say to us - Anne McLennon, for instance, who when we did this before, was that they don't get the help on the ground, they hear the government rhetoric, they know you want to get these figures down and more people back to work but when they go for interviews there is a feeling that there aren't jobs available and that there are a lot of employers who aren't very responsive to them. BLUNKETT Well two separate issues there. Firstly, it depends of course entirely which locality you're in but there are something like 600,000 vacancies across the country. The economy requires us to ... WHITE Do they fit the people we're talking about though? BLUNKETT Absolutely, so you've got to not only get people into a fit state medically or in terms of overcoming a disability, you've actually also got to give people the right skill to be able to fill the job, you've got to give them the adaptations and the equipment through the Access to Work programme, you've got to give them personal advice and follow through on that. One of the things we learnt from the New Deal programme for the young unemployed was that the personal advice that people got, the mentoring if you like, was absolutely crucial. And one of the other issues that has not yet been addressed is not only when you get a job but to stay in a job you need continuing support and that is something that I shall also be looking at. WHITE This is not a cheap option is it, you want to get people back to work, that's going to take support, that takes a good deal of labour effort. In your own department there are pretty savage cuts in the numbers of people. This won't fit will it? BLUNKETT Well we've ring fenced the money for the Pathways to Work programme. At the moment we've got £140 million for the 21 programmes across the country and that money will not be touched. Secondly, of course we have an issue of a substantial further investment to make if we're going to get this right but it is what we call in the jargon "spend to save" because there are enormous down the line savings, not simply - because we're not talking about the issue of suddenly slashing people's benefit but actually the minute people come off benefit and they start paying taxes and national insurance there's a win/win - there's a two way gain. WHITE But you do need to save money on this don't you, the perception is that it's very high and you need this money for other things and the Prime Minister said last year at the conference he had his eye on incapacity - savings from incapacity benefit to solve the pensions problem, which is another thing you have to deal with. However you cut this you've got to save money haven't you? BLUNKETT Yeah but it's not a transfer from incapacity benefit to pension, it's actually about people who are earning their own living being able to save, being able to put away for retirement, being able to actually earn the retirement income that they aspire to. In the past people got the income to stay at home, to languish permanently often in their 30s and 40s for the rest of their adult life actually on benefit. What we're saying is we'll give you the financial support but actually we'll provide for the first time a way out of being dependent on benefits. WHITE Some people have wondered why you and your predecessors have had your eye so much on this pot - the fraud level in this area is less than half a percent. Aren't there far more savings to be made in things like - on income support and housing benefit where there's almost certainly a good deal more fraud and where you spend just as much money, more perhaps? BLUNKETT Yes we're about to publish a paper on a further anti-fraud drive, literally within the next two weeks. So you've hit on something that is very close to my heart. There's also a much broader level of inactivity across the economy, not just those on incapacity benefit. And our Welfare to Work paper will actually be addressing that as well. So yes there are much broader issues here and we need to tackle all of them. WHITE There's a fear of whatever you say that you're going to take a draconian line, that your job is to get this money down, that that's what the Prime Minister wants and that's what you're there to do. What would you say to people who are worrying about that at the moment? BLUNKETT This is the very opposite of having a go and being draconian, this is about liberating people who honestly if you put to them in their own home is there a way in which we can help you, and are you prepared to take that help, they will say yes. If you say to people - we're prepared to pay you simply to stay at home and that's the only thing on offer, it's not surprising that people have simply taken that easy way out. WHITE Secretary of State for Work and Pensions David Blunkett. And we're told that the green paper is imminent, it will be published in the autumn and he's promised to come back and discuss that with You and Yours and our listeners when it comes out. ROBINSON Thanks Peter. Back to the You and Yours homepage The BBC is not responsible for external websites |
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