DWP trot out excuses for their Access to Work failure

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has insinuated that employers are abusing Access to Work. All so they don’t have to employ further staff or pay for reasonable adjustments.

Top DWP civil servants gave evidence at the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and National Audit Office’s (NAO) joint inquiry into Access to Work. The department has rightly come under scrutiny for completely fucking up the scheme, which is supposed to help disabled people stay in work.

The department came under fire for not only horrendous delays to accessing the scheme, but how much they’re completely stripping away previously agreed support.

DWP blames employers for Access to Work failures

However, this is the DWP, so they had an excuse. And as expected it’s complete fucking bollocks. Instead of admitting that they’re cutting support to save a few quid, they blamed employers.

DWP permanent secretary Peter Schofield said one of the problems was employers expecting Access to Work to provide things that should be covered under reasonable adjustments such as “ergonomic chairs”. Which to be fair, big employers should pay for, but it could also be a hindrance to employ a disabled person for smaller employers.

But then he also made an even worse claim:

The support worker plays a massively important role for so many customers, but we were seeing job aides whose role was not to help level the playing field up for customers with disabilities, but more to do a task that would be something that actually an employer would normally take on an additional employer to do.

So it was sort of misusing the scheme in a way that was inappropriate.

To put it clearly, the DWP is accusing employers of getting government-funded support workers instead of paying an extra employee.

He then explained this more explicitly

You can just imagine in a busy office environment what exactly is your role? I mean, are you doing this really important support work that was described by this customer in this case study, or are you doing something that is actually enabling the employer to avoid having to employ an extra person on the taxpayer’s expense?

And there it is, the reminder that disabled people are scrounging off the taxpayer. This, coupled with comments on the “changing nature of disability” and eligiblity reminds you what the DWP truly thinks of disabled people.

Neil Couling proving he’s still the worst person at the DWP

Of course, Neil Couling couldn’t resist getting in on this. Couling is most recently known for saying the carers allowance was carers own fault, actually.

He made an even wilder claim about employers abusing the system:

I’ve seen applications coming from big employers who, they literally have an access to work department, their job is in funnelling claims to DWP, I mean, at one level, I don’t mind that, if they also have a bigger reasonable adjustments team, they’re looking at what they can do in their own department under the Equalities Act, to do what they should be doing already.

He also attempted to justify why so many are now seeing their funding cut. Couling said:

We were making mistakes on cases in 23, 24, as we attempted to clear that backlog, as Peter suggested, in too much of a hurry,

So those cases are coming up now for renewal, and they are producing lower awards, and people are saying, ‘Why have I got a lower award? Nothing has changed in my life.’

But we’d wrongly gave them a job aide, normally for 100% of the time, and we should have given them about 20% of the time. Because the job aides are not designed to do the work, they’re meant to support, lift the disabled person to the same level of… an employee.

The end of this part here was truly bizarre to watch. Couling seemingly meant ‘nondisabled person’, not employee, but struggled to find the word. I’ve edited it out for clarity in the quote, but he actually said

lift the disabled person to the same level of a, of a, umm yknow, of an an employee.

I can only speculate, but it appeared like his internal monologue was going ‘don’t say normal person, don’t say normal person!’

They just doesn’t care about disabled people

They also couldn’t resist a sly dig at neurodivergent and mental health conditions. Speaking on the subject, Bill Thorpe, DWP director for disability and health support said:

It’s a kind of societal phenomenon that is very challenging. The Department for Health and Social Care are looking at this in their review into prevalence and what’s the best approach to support people.

The review he’s referring to here is Streeting’s obsession with overdiagnosis, which was disproven last week by thirty-two experts. It’s also happening at the same time that the DWP is working to tighten eligibility criteria for PIP.

It’s clear from the DWP’s evidence that they still don’t hold the tiniest shred of guilt or shame over the way they treat disabled people. The DWP don’t actually care about fixing their problems to best support disabled people, they’d much rather make it everyone else’s fault. But they’d especially rather use any way they can to tear down the very people they’re supposed to support

Featured image via the Canary