Category Archives: disability

The sick and carers fear the benefit changes

April 4, 2013   Carers, disability, ukcuts

Change to disability benefits appeals process could leave people penniless

A double whammy of a revised appeals process and the abolition of legal aid threatens to deny benefits to vulnerable claimants

 

Disability campaigners fear that jobcentre staff will be ill-equipped to make judgments about people’s work capability.

Amid the avalanche of welfare reforms being implemented by a government intent on reducing the benefits bill by £18bn, one controversial measure that seems to have fallen below the radar is a change to the appeals process for welfare benefit claimants.

There are fears that the change, which will deny people the right to appeal decisions about sickness and disability benefits until the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has first reconsidered their case, could leave claimants penniless. Moreover, its introduction, just as legal aid is abolished for many welfare benefit cases, could leave thousands of vulnerable people unable to access the law to secure the income they are entitled to. The double whammy has been attacked as “a disgrace and a scandal”.

The revised appeals process, called “mandatory reconsideration”, will be applied to anyone who, from October, fails the controversial work capability assessment (WCA) and wants to challenge the decision to deny them sickness benefits.

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‘Equal Lives ‘new name for Norfolk Disability group

April 3, 2013   Carers, disability, Norfolk, Uncategorized

“This government has torn up the rule book and targeted disabled people” says chief executive of relaunched Norfolk disabled rights group

By DAVID FREEZER Wednesday, April 3, 2013
6:30 AM

 Anna Abraham, who spoke at the Time for Equal Lives event at the Forum, Norwich. Photo: Steve Adams
Anna Abraham, who spoke at the Time for Equal Lives event at the Forum, Norwich. Photo: Steve Adams

Rights for disabled people were the main topic of conversation at the Forum in Norwich as the Norfolk Coalition of Disabled People was relaunched with a new name, Equal Lives.

 

The group’s new identity and services were unveiled yesterday with a presentation of upcoming plans and priorities in The Curve digital theatre, which was attended by around 250 people.

There was also a series of stalls with information, advice and activities from Equal Lives and its member groups.

Chief executive, Mark Harrison, said: “Over the last 25 years consecutive governments of whatever colour talked to people and acted on what was said, or at least tried to.

“The Disability Discrimination Act was brought in under the last Conservative government but this government has torn up the rule book and targeted disabled people in a completely unfair way for some of the sharpest cuts.

“So the demand for our information and welfare rights services are going up as our funding is reducing.”

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Care in Japan

April 1, 2013   Carers, disability, Older care

Artwork made by Japanese patients in care comes to London

Much of the work on show at Wellcome Collection, including an embroidered suit, was produced in therapy classes

 

An artwork by 17-year-old Japanese artist Norimitsu Kokubo, Shanghai Disneyland of the Future.

Works of art made of scraps of thread, off-cuts of paper, and cardboard boxes salvaged from a care home’s kitchen and carefully smoothed flat have gone on display at the Wellcome Collection in London, in the first exhibition in the UK of Japanese “outsider art”.

When curator Shamita Sharmacharja visited Japan to speak to the artists who made the works she found them slightly surprised that their work was considered art. To them it was just what they do, often in almost all their waking hours.

“In Japan, the concept of outsider art does not really exist,” she said. “It is something they are learning about from European interest in it.”

Outsider art was coined as a term to describe art created beyond mainstream culture, such as in mental health institutions, although it now more generally defines work made by artists without art school training and outside the market. In the Wellcome show all the work has been made in institutions or day care centres.

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