Category Archives: disability
Benefit reforms ‘will hit disabled’
Low-income families and the disabled will be among the hardest hit by the pending abolition of housing benefit, a report has claimed.
Social tenants will “lose hundreds of millions of pounds” as a result of the UK Government’s welfare reforms, according to the Scottish Federation of Housing Associations (SFHA).
Housing benefit will be phased out from April 2013 and substituted with the new universal credit, a single payment which will replace the current range of working age benefits. But the new order could result in “significant financial losses” to tenants on low incomes living in housing association and co-operative properties, the SFHA said.
The heartbreak of sending our disabled child to residential school
Lacking support, we have no choice but to send our daughter away for schooling, but stories of institutional abuse haunt me
The horror and revulsion of watching the abuse meted out to patients at the private hospital Winterbourne View was a far more visceral experience for me than for Panorama viewers last year who don’t have a family member with a learning disability. The pain was far deeper because I felt like I was watching my daughter’s future being played in front of me.
Emily is 15 now and her inner torment of the hormonal battle of adolescence, which screams out for her to detach, is coupled with her neurology of autism and learning disability that limits that detachment.
So she suffers her torment as best she can and attempts self-restraint because she’s a person of decency and inherent kindness. She’s just a teenager. How much easier for her if she could tell me to fuck off, but she can’t.
Disability tests ‘sending sick and disabled back to work’
People deemed too sick or disabled to work are being refused their benefits because the current assessment is inadequate, according to the expert appointed to review it.
By Andrew Hough
12:00AM BST 30 Jul 2012
Prof Malcolm Harrington, the government appointed adviser on testing welfare claimants, admitted the work fitness test was “patchy”.
He said that as a result of the flaws in the 13 week assessment, which tests physical fitness as well as mental skills, some claimants who were genuinely unable to work, have suffered.
He made the comments during an investigation into the system, introduced by the last Labour government, by the BBC’s Panorama programme.
“There are certainly areas where it’s still not working and I am sorry there are people going through a system which I think still needs improvement,” he said.
The programme, which airs on Monday night, features the story of one man who suffered from heart failure and died 39 days after being declared fit for work.
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