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| TX: 17.01.06 - Incapacity Benefit - The History PRESENTER: JOHN WAITE |
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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. WAITE Yesterday's speech by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions gave a strong hint of things to come in next week's expected Green Paper on benefit reform by stating yet again that people were not trying hard enough to find work. John Hutton was just the latest salvo in this long running battle by successive governments to bring down the numbers of people on incapacity benefit in particular, which currently costs the taxpayer around £7 billion a year. In fact as Tanya Burchard, a benefits specialist from the London School of Economics, explains it's been a hot political potato for decades. BURCHARD The idea of disability benefits goes right back to the foundations of the welfare state with William Beveridge. And the principle that if people were unable to work through sickness then they should be entitled to some help with the family income. It's gone through a number of reforms since then, as one might expect, but the basic idea of people paying into a system through their national insurance contributes, building up an entitlement to support if they become unable to work through sickness or disability is still part of what we have today in the form of incapacity benefit. HOUSE OF COMMONS SPEECH I'm especially proud of our massive increase in help for disabled people. We spend five times more than under Labour. This government is determined to enable disabled people to play an ever fuller role in our society. The proportion of the working age population claiming benefits was rising gradually through the 1970s, through to the mid-1980s. And then began to rise quite steeply in the second half of the 1980s and continued to do so through to the mid-1990s. Now that was of course a period of economic recession but unlike the figures for unemployment benefit the proportion of people on incapacity benefit didn't decline again once the economy began to recover. HOME OF COMMONS SPEECH My Right Honourable friend the Secretary of State for Social Security also plans a significant reform of the current regime for invalidity benefit. In 1995 the Conservative government introduced a key reform, it changed what was then invalidity benefit into what we have now, incapacity benefit. HOUSE OF COMMONS SPEECH For those who are disabled and incapable of work invalidity benefit is important and necessary. But the astonishing growth in the numbers receiving the benefit in recent years indicates it's now being claimed by many people who are not genuine invalids. Previously the test had been related to whether you could continue to do the kind of work that you had been doing previously. The '95 reforms introduced the all work test, which meant that people had to show that they were incapable of doing any work at all. HOUSE OF COMMONS SPEECH The new benefit will involve a tighter and a more objective medical test. The Labour government was, of course, elected in 1997 and shortly afterwards in 1999 they brought out a package of welfare reforms, including some very controversial reforms to incapacity benefit. HOUSE OF COMMONS SPEECH Madam Speaker, as for disability groups I think that they have welcomed what is in the Green Paper, I think they've welcomed it because they know that there is necessary reform, they know that it is right, for example, that we make changes to incapacity benefit and they welcome also the fact that we are going to consult with them as to how to proceed. NEWS CLIP Modernising the welfare state was one of New Labour's central goals when it came to power. Tonight, no fewer than 12 charities and disability groups resigned from the government's own consultative body in protest. They say the government has broken its promises to the disabled and has ignored detailed and constructive proposals during the consultation process, instead trying merely to cut the benefits bill. The reforms were quite piecemeal, a number of different provisions. One which raised considerable debate at the time was the introduction of a degree of means testing to incapacity benefit, specifically tied to people who were also in receipt of an occupational or personal pension. This was in response to concerns that incapacity benefit was being used as a form of early retirement. NEWS CLIP To reduce the prospect of another large scale Commons rebellion this week the Social Security Secretary has made two concessions on incapacity benefit. He has relaxed the means test for those claimants who have retired early and draw an occupational pension. They'll now be able to receive up to £85 a week from their pension before losing any incapacity benefit, instead of £50 as was originally proposed. Mr Darling has also relaxed the condition which meant claimants had to have worked in the past two years, that will now be extended to three years. But all this is unlikely to satisfy his critics, including Stephen Winyard of the Royal National Institute for the Blind. It's completely wrong to take money away from disabled people who are on a low income, to give money to those who are on a very low income because this is what we're talking about, we're not talking about rich people here, people on less than half average earnings will start to lose their benefits. So that was one of the key reforms in 1999. Another one was the merging of the severe disablement allowance and incapacity benefit. Severe disablement allowance was for people who did not have a sufficient national insurance contribution record to qualify for incapacity benefit. So it was the old health wise pension. HOUSE OF COMMONS SPEECH But we cannot do the good things, the things that get help to those people in need unless we take the tough decisions to reform the system. And at the same time we want to make sure that work pays and to move off benefit and into work those who can work. The third key element of the reforms were a tightening of the link between the payment of national insurance contributions and entitlement to incapacity benefit. So it made the period of time in which you had to have paid your national insurance contributions shorter and tied it more closely to the time at which you made your claim for incapacity benefit. HOUSE OF COMMONS SPEECH I appeal to everybody, this is a massive area of social policy, there are real issues about how we lift people out of dependence, generational dependence on the state. Let's have a really rational sensible debate. In some ways it is a bit of a puzzle that incapacity benefit reform should have come so high up the political agenda at the moment because since '95 the number of people claiming has flattened out, expenditure has fallen quite rapidly and the proportion of disabled people in work has risen. On the other hand what we have seen of course is a steady fall in unemployment but we haven't seen a comparable fall in the proportion of people claiming incapacity benefit. WAITE Tanya Burchard from the London School of Economics. Well qualifying for incapacity benefit has been described as among the toughest gateways to any benefit anywhere in the world and tomorrow we examine the role of the doctors who act as the gatekeepers to those payments. 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