There are now just two weeks left until the Independent Living Fund closes. What a shambles this closure is.
The ILF is a fund that severely disabled people use to pay for the extra carer hours they need to live independent lives. But never mind that: the government will close the ILF on 30 June – a monumentally unpopular and unnecessary decision which disabled campaigners have fought since the closure was announced in 2012. With just two weeks to go, the thing is in meltdown. Some ILF recipients in England still don’t know if their councils will pay for the care that the ILF covered, especially in an ongoing way (ILF funding in England will be devolved to local authorities for just a year). You can imagine the distress this is causing disabled people and their families. You can read about that here and here.
This 30 June closure was a coalition government decision out of the DWP, but you can forget about that lot taking responsibility for the distress and the mess. Government and the DWP have already washed their hands of it. The official line is that any problems with the ILF closure in England – and there are plenty, as I say – belong firmly to councils. We may as well note this for the record.
I asked the DWP about support it could offer to people who still hadn’t alternative care packages in place by 30 June, or who still didn’t know what would happen to their care when the ILF closed. The DWP didn’t quite say Don’t Bore Us With That, but it might as well have: from 30 June, the department said, “sole responsibility” in England for “former-ILF user” care lay with councils. No point making calls to the department in the meantime, either: “Any ILF user who has concerns about future funding from their local authority should contact the local authority directly.” Not Our Problem, in other words. Government has left the building. Disabled people and councils have been left to fight it out.
Disabled People Against Cuts and supporters will lobby MPs about the ILF closure on 24 June. Details here.
Video: Corrie stars back the Independent Living Fund:
Video: Disabled campaigners occupy Westminster Abbey in June 2014 to protest government plans to close the Independent Living Fund:
Picture: police stand on tents to stop disabled people setting up a Save The Independent Living Fund protest camp at Westminster Abbey last year.
Video: Independent Living Fund recipient Gabriel Pepper explains why he needs the extra carer hours that the ILF pays for. Gabriel has had three brain tumours. He is one of the ILF recipients who still isn’t sure if his council will meet all his care needs after 30 June.
Disgracefully there has not been a single word of protest from Labour over the ILF closure. If these are not the people they are supposed to be protecting, then what use is the Labour Party ?
They still don’t get it, even after one of the worst defeats in history, they are still playing Tory 2.
A Labour party that has now given up any pretence to social democracy.
Still thinking they can slipstream the Tories up to 2020 without doing anything controversial. Then shoot out and pass just before the winning line, like a Formula 1 racer.
In 2020, with the economic books ‘balanced’ by Osbourne’s brutal cuts programme. With the public sector decimated, and what remains of the welfare state all but destroyed. With virtually no unemployment , under a Universal Credit, where working 2 hours a week will be classified as ’employed’.
Well then, what use will the Labour Party be ?
Bloody hopeless innit. Even in the weeks before the election, the party was wafting on in a very non-specific way about really needing to stop-gap this ILF closure somehow until the advent of Burnham’s integrated health and social care plan…which of course will never come to pass now, if it was ever going to:
http://www.katebelgrave.com/2015/03/videos-from-labour-conference-see-these-attempts-to-get-answers-on-disability-funding-cuts/
I doubt very much that the tattered remains of the party will be in a position to slipstream anyone or anything in 2020 somehow… I think that was supposed to be the big plan for the 2015 election. Kind of yielded thin results.
Hi, Kate
As you infer with the transfer of responsibility from DWP to local authorities in service delivery, maybe we should ask whether government and civil service have learned anything from past DWP staffing cuts? Many ‘key decision-makers’ such as IDS and top civil servants were in office when ‘the shit hit the fan’ in year 2004-5 when 44% of calls to the Jobcentre Plus network went unanswered. That was 21 million calls.
In November 2006 author, trainer and consultant on welfare rights issues wrote of that debacle in advance of implementation of a further 30,000 job cuts as “concern [had] been growing in the social care and welfare rights fields about the deteriorating standards of service provided by JCP.” Community Care article Jobcentre Plus: Poor service continues. I know from previous experience as a disabled jobseeker of continuation of such ‘service delivery problems’ especially for people on JSA who submitted part-time earnings forms that indicated fluctuating weekly work times and payments, and yet the emphasis of the consultation questions in Labour’s 2008 Welfare Reform Green Paper ‘No-one written off: reforming welfare to reward responsibility’ was on rewarding the ‘welfare to work’ industry and zero references to protecting claimants.
So, while, as the DWP says of claimant suicides, suicides have complex causes, I guess we can say regarding ‘lessons learned’ from previous DWP practice failures and the subsequent emergence of burgeoning sanctions, that the key decision makers love ‘passing the buck’ by making the system ever more punitive. Yet another question might be how much the scrapping of ILF has been influenced by American health insurance company Unum ‘advising’ successive UK governments on ‘welfare reform’ since 1994 — when it was Unum Provident — despite Unum Provident’s conviction for fraud and running ‘disability denial factories’?
I think they wish we would just shut up and go away and quietly die somewhere. But we are not we are fighting for our rights. Now when you call the DWP they can cut you off after a time if you are on hold as the free phone number costs them not us, but they still advertise the local call rates on the letters, not the 0800 number. ATOS still provide the software for the WCA’s and the health professionals were just transferred to them when ATOS quit, so yes it’s still the same old shit, there is just another name on the paperwork that’s all.
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