500,000 'FIT TO WORK' SICK PAY CLAIMANTS WILL BE FORCED INTO

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500,000 'fit to work' sick pay claimants will be forced back into employment as Government bids to save £4bn with benefits crackdown


By Daily Mail Reporter
11th October 2010

Iain Duncan Smith believes 23% of those claiming will be ready for work immediately


Almost 500,000 people claiming long-term sick pay will be forced to work or risk losing their benefit, it was revealed today.
The move comes as Iain Duncan Smith introduces medical assessment tests on people receiving incapacity benefit.

The Work And Pensions Secretary is seeking to slash £4billion from his department's costs.

Mr Duncan Smith made the announcement in an article in The Times today, in which he revealed 'shocking' figures showing that £135billion has been spent on more than 2million people who are or have been 'on the sick' over the last ten years.
'This is not about forcing sick and disabled people who cannot work into employment, but about giving thousands of people the opportunity and support to move from the margins of society into mainstream employment,' said Mr Duncan Smith.

'While taxpayers rightly bemoan the wasted money, which they worked so hard to earn, the human tragedy is the lost potential of so many people who have been dumped to languish at the bottom of society.
'We estimate we will find around 23 per cent of people fit for work immediately, with more needing just a bit of extra support to get into a position where they can look for a job.

The failure to tackle incapacity benefit has trapped whole communities in dependency; it has robbed people of their dignity and left them feeling like second-class citizens.
'As the former Labour Work And Pensions Secretary Alan Hutton once said, after two years on IB [incapacity benefit], you're more likely to die than ever move into work.'


His programme of cuts has already begun with new medical assessments beginning today, in Burnley and Aberdeen, to determine who among the people currently receiving incapacity benefit are fit for work.
By re-drawing the boundaries on who is fit to work via the new Work Capability Assessment, Mr Duncan Smith expects to save half of his target, around £2 billion a year.
People who pass the medical tests and prove fit for work will either move straight into work or will be shifted from incapacity benefit onto Job Seekers Allowance, saving the Government around £1,500 per year per claimant.
To save the other half of his £4billion target, Mr Duncan Smith has outlined a series of measures.
Those who are prove too sick or disabled to work face having a time-limit imposed on their benefits, allowing them to claim for six months or a year only.

The better-off are likely to have their benefits removed altogether, while others will switch to means-tested benefits, further reducing the amount the government has to pay out.


Ministers said the most severely disabled and people who were terminally ill will not be expected to look for work and will get extra help through Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).
Employment Minister Chris Grayling said: 'It's nothing short of a scandal that so many people were simply cast aside to a lifetime on benefits, wasting their talents and potential and costing the taxpayer almost £135billion.
'While some of these people will be genuinely too sick to work, there will be others who through no fault of their own were told by the state that they were better off on the sick and then left behind - this stops now.


'We are taking immediate action by starting the process of reassessing everyone on incapacity benefit to see if they can work, and for those that can we will be bringing in new support to get them into jobs.'
But one charity voiced concern that the new assessment tests are not able to adequately establish whether mental health can affect someone's ability to work.
Mental health charity Mind called for a revision of the test before it is rolled out to over 1.5million claimants nationwide.
Sophie Corlett, Mind's director of external relations, said: 'The benefit test being used in the pilots starting today has a fundamental problem when it comes to people with mental health problems - it does not do what it's set up for, which is to distinguish accurately which people can work and which people can't.
'Over half of all benefit claimants have a mental health problem, so it should go without saying that any fitness to work test should thoroughly assess mental health and whether it presents a barrier to work and coping in the workplace.
'However, many people with mental health issues have found that the impact of their condition on their ability to work is barely recognised.'
The revelation on sick pay comes a week after Chancellor George Osborne sparked outrage with plans to scrap child benefit for millions of middle-class families in order to fund the biggest shake-up of welfare in 60 years.
The payments to parents, worth £1,055, are to be axed for all higher-rate taxpayers from 2013 and benefits payouts will be capped for every family for the first time ever to ensure it pays more to work than to stay at home.
When he made the speech at the Conservative conference last week, Mr Osborne told delegates there would be 'no more open-ended cheque book... no family on out-of-work benefits will get more than the average family gets by going out to work'.


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