Squeeze till the Pips squeak

The new Personal Independence Payment is a cynical money-saving ploy, says Peter White, and it’s likely to have a real impact on our quality of life

If you decided in advance what answer you want to a question, it’s axiomatic that you have to design the question accordingly.

Now the Government has been absolutely clear: it wants to reduce the cost of Disability Living Allowance (DLA) by “at least 20 per cent”, a statement of fact given me by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for my own In Touch radio programme.

There are only three ways to achieve that: by reducing the number of people who get the benefit, by reducing the amount those who get it are paid, or both. I’ve not seen any discussion of payment levels yet, but the initial draft criteria, put out by the DWP in May, suggests that many people who have been given the help of DLA by meeting its criteria quite legitimately, will no longer get Personal Independence Payments, or PIPs, which are scheduled to be introduced in 2013.

Other suggestions of how they might still qualify involve resorting to the kind of points system used (and I would say discredited) in assessing eligibility for Incapacity Benefit; or suggesting that “aids and appliances” used to help people perform daily living skills should be taken into consideration.

I find this depressing. The introduction of DLA in 1992 was one of the most liberat­ing actions ever for disabled people. It was brought in not by the party usually associated with handouts for the disadvantaged but by John Major’s Tories on what was their genuine conviction that it was right.

The problem is, need is hard to assess, and govern­ments of all colours still accept an almost totally medical picture of disability. To make things worse, the Government now says it wants to channel what money there is to those with the severest needs, implying that money will be taken from those whose need is recognised but isn’t considered severe enough.

By the way, this isn’t a party political issue. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that plans very like the ones the Government is seeking to introduce were in place well before 2010, and the general election, hence the deafening silence from Opposition benches.

And yet there’s something tawdry about a system to take money from disabled people because of the behaviour of a banking system left largely untouched, and nodded through by a Parliament both sides of which have been found guilty of cheating on their expenses.

I’m reminded of Denis Healey’s old, unfulfilled promise to “tax the rich till the pips squeak”. It looks as if the rich have now introduced their own pips, to make the rest of us squeak.