The student protests have dominated the political agenda, but there is a hidden suffering in this country that we must not forget. The work capability assessment (WCA) has been widely condemned for its inhumanity and poor decision making. The coalition hopes that the recent review by Professor Malcolm Harrington will kick it into touch. It won't. Welfare reform is going to be a political fight for the essential character of our country.
The WCA follows the same callous logic as the 1834 Poor Law Reform which divided the poor into helpless paupers who were confined to the workhouse and free labourers who must earn their living by working for a wage. Unemployment was a stark choice between the workhouse or the risk of starvation. If the WCA deems you incapable of work, you're parked in the support group. If you are considered capable of working, you're put in the work related activities group where you face sanctions for failing to conform to the regime. If you live with a partner in work, your benefit will last one year only.
The test is a harsher version of the earlier personal capability assessment (PCA), which the OECD described as being one of the toughest in the world. It's not just tough, it's not fit for purpose. The French/Dutch company, Atos Origin, runs the system at a cost of £500m. Complex and fluctuating medical conditions are measured by a computer, which allocates points. For example: "has no voluntary control over the evacuation of the bowel, 15 points"; "cannot see at all, 15 points"; "cannot cope with very minor, expected changes in routine, 15 points". The system means that staff often miss what's relevant and clearance time targets can make their decisions even more unreliable.
Appeals quadrupled, rising to 126,800 in one year. 40% that reached a hearing were successful; thousands more were resolved beforehand. And that's just those who managed to organise an appeal for themselves. Welfare reform has been a policy failure that has created an army of suffering at a staggering cost to the taxpayer.
And yet only a quarter of the Harrington recommendations will come into effect by April when 10,000 incapacity benefit customers a week are migrated on to ESA. To test this rollout, the unreformed WCA, is being used in two pilot projects in Burnley and Aberdeen. These pilots do not test the system's capacity to deal with the colossal extra workload. Nor will they be testing the still untried software, nor the impact of a combination of 84,000 staff cuts and the forecasted increase of 300,000 claims for jobseeker's allowance from those denied ESA.
There is a crisis in our country but it's not a crisis of welfare dependency. It's a crisis of mass chronic ill health and a broken economy that has left millions leading a precarious existence with either no work or poorly paid, insecure work. In the past three decades Britain has suffered the calamity of deindustrialisation, which has devastated the ways of life of millions of people. The 2008 General Lifestyle Survey estimates 5 million people of working age have a "limiting long-term illness", peaking just before Labour was elected. Areas with high rates, particularly those classified as "coalfields" and "ports and industries", have the highest rates of IB claimants.
And yet successive ministers claim that 1 million people receiving incapacity benefit are fit to work. Social policy expert Steve Griffiths has traced the source of this figure back to research by Sheffield Hallam University. It reached the figure by arguing that any levels of incapacity benefit claiming above the level of the south-east is evidence of people who are fit to work. This simplistic methodology takes no account of the regional inequalities in health, but it served its political purpose.
Economic crisis encourages a search for scapegoats among the poor and dispossessed. A punitive welfare system is a consequence. We must start addressing the real issues, which are a political economy that cannot sustain our population in decent jobs, pensions and homes, and a massive problem of chronic illness caused by poor social conditions.
There is no "lifestyle choice" here. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation's December 2010 review of benefit sanctions has shown that many claimants have only a limited understanding of the penalties they face and the evidence suggests that sanctions do little to change motivation to work. We need to change the terms of debate on welfare in this country or we will head down a dangerous path toward hate politics and social conflict.