General Chat

Let me be clear, I am against paying benefits, to perfectly fit and healthy individuals who prefer to live of the state instead of working for a living.

We have all probably heard of cases where vulnerable and elderly people have been denied benefits as a result of the harsh and stressful tests they were subjected to, by organisations working on behalf of the Department of Work & Pensions (DWP) and we are probably aware that the government keeps telling us they have no money and that the benefits bill has to be reduced - fair enough you might say, and to that I would say, why does it always seem to be the vulnerable and elderly that get punished - while those who abuse the system seem to be allowed to flourish?

Today there is a report that the DWP has failed to deal with abuses of the Housing Benefit system, they have failed to deal with £900 million of overpayments due to claimant error, £340 million due to fraud, and £150 million due to errors by officials, if you add to that lot say £145 million written of for failed IT systems procured by the DWP - that is a staggering £1.5 billion that Iain Duncan Smith and the officials in his department, the DWP, has failed to control - this is the man who says he needs to control the benefits bill :-S

Heads should roll and the first should be the head of Iain Duncan Smith :-|

Yeah it sounds easy. If you have ever had to run a large budget ( £ 10 M pa min. ) it is anything but easy.

Although there is always room for improvement the DWP does pretty well at running its budget. A stars performer at wasting large sums is the MoD which itself is eclipsed by the NHS. And then there is Tesco, Blackberry, Microsoft ...

I am having collywobbles at the thought of filling in a claim for attendance allowance for OH

Am told its a minefield and you have to over egg the replies .not lie of course but be over the top in your info given

My problem is I want to be very honest whilst trying to get across OH problems. I nearly missed getting his disabled parking badge because I didnt over enforcise

It seems a shame that genuine claimants may miss out when con artists know how to work the system

You will be very well advised to contact one of the social organisations which deal with DWP forms and fill them out for you with an interview usually in your home. The charge is about £ 20. The DWP is quite used to dealing with forms filled out in this way.

It is essential that you keep a copy of the form as sent to DWP.

Whilst some of the figures quoted in the OP are clearly large to you or I, in the context of the overall DWP budget it is only around 1%.

I remember attending a course some years ago looking at ways of improving efficiency, controls, accuracy, reducing wastage etc where it was shown that to achieve an efficiency level of over 95% was quite an achievement. To achieve even better levels can, of course, be done but it comes at a cost which tends to rise at an alarming rate for each percentage point you try to improve matters.

That isn't to say you should ignore wastage but there does come a point for each additional pound saved, the bill is an extra two pounds.

Claiming Attendance Allowance and Carers Benefit eight years ago was a walk in the park compared to what we are going through now.

The doctor has recognized just how badly I have been affected by the experience of the last seven years and the hoops I have been made to jump through to get benefits for the year until I claim my pension and he has put me on sick certificates so, now, I have to fill in a questionnaire to tell them how my incapacity will affect my ability to work.

If I don't get that right they will stop the benefits they were so loathe to give us initially.

At the moment I am just feeling that they can be very cruel.

A nightmare for you Sharron, and things like this can affect the way you grieve over your loss, even if you don't recognise that. it's a disgrace that benefits like Attendance allowance etc are so difficult to access. I helped a neighbour fill in some forms when her hubby was diagnosed with dementia, and they were so hard to do.

Best of luck to you and to Shirley too and all trying to get what is their right to have.


Lizx

There are about 150 elderly residents in the sheltered housing scheme where I live, many of them have health and mobility problems. I know of several cases, where you would not believe, the hoops they had to go through to get any help from the DWP - it can best be described as a nightmare, likewise when trying to get any assistance from the local authority :-(

The whole system of benefits and care for the elderly and vulnerable in this country is a national disgrace, the government should be ashamed of how the impact of their cuts in benefits and cuts to local authority funding - have affected the well being of those in most need :-|

Our housing association provides an advisor, to help people in our scheme complete these forms, several residents have said that she told them, what they had to remember was, that the forms and assessments are designed, to minimise the chances of anyone getting help - they were not designed to ensure you get the help you needed and are entitled to :-(

My OH has been picking up bits of merchandizing and mystery shopping work because distance learning is such an oddly unstructured way to deliver training that it has an awful lot of companies coming and going that you never really know where you are.

Most of the companies operate zero hours contracts and one even required him to set up as a limited company that sub-contracted to them. He did all that and still never received any work from them ( may as well have given them the bum's rush in the first place but that is not how he operates, bless him!)

However, because he had this limited company, the DWP decided he was spending ten hours a week finding work for a company that had never traded and that it was taking him above the hours he was allowed to work.

Being new to this claiming business, not knowing how long a claim took to be processed, we tightened our belts, lived on dried beans and waited, doing all that was required of us to maintain the claim.

After five weeks of daily searching and signing weekly, we rung the DWP who said the claim had been disallowed and that they would look at it that day. Nice of them to have let us know!

Cruel or what?

I went through a local disabled charity, after my first application for mobility was turned down.

Because I stated that I could walk round the supermarket, but only with a trolley, for support and standing in a queue was nigh on impossible.

The DWP told me I could walk unaided!!!!!

Took 6 months of letters to and fro (copies of everything kept), them saying they had written to my doctor who told them I could walk. Yet when I went to the doctor they had NO record of the DWP contacting them and wrote me a letter to add to my letters/records for the DWP showing that they had blatantly lied. That I got my money, and it was backdated to the date of my original claim.

So never say you can do something when in fact you cannot easily do it. It is not lying, but they will bend the truth to suit their refusal.

GOOD LUCK

When I read about some of the decisions made by or on behalf of the DWP, they are probably the reason why, every time I hear Iain Duncan Smith defending his department and those organisations who carry out these assessments on behalf of the DWP, I immediately picture an image of - General von Klinkerhoffen from the television series Allo Allo, who is always threatening to have French peasants shot when the Résistance attacks the Germans ;-)

Unfortunately the threats of von Klinkerhoffen were all too real.

http://www.oradour.info/

In making reference to General von Klinkerhoffen from the television series Allo Allo, it was never my intention, to make light of any atrocities committed in areas occupied by German forces during the Second World War.

I think we all knew that OFTG except Rollo ob viously.

Nothing about von Klinkerhoffen was real.

He was an imaginary person.

I feel for you Sharron because after getting attendance allowance for 8 years they suddenly forgot about YOU when it was no longer appropriate. You couldn´t claim because you hadn´t worked :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 :-0 what had you done for the previous 8 yrs ? No they don´t pay stamps for you staying at home and looking after a relative but they should take it into account.

I appreciate that the DWP need and should jump up and down on some people unfortunately it appears that they jump on those who most vulnerable, most in need and most entitled. The others know their way around the system :-(

Yes, I am sure there are some who do know what to say and do, including some of their employees I think.

They have to say that there is plenty of work but I just feel that something called a Jobcentre Plus should be the place you go to find one.

After all, of you want or need toys you go to Toys R Us because it has the word 'toys' in it's title!

Sharron I also would be angry, I don+t know what you are gong thro´ but I know it´s not easy

Take care

UzziInSunshine - slightly of topic, but in response to your comment - they jump on those who are most vulnerable - that is probably because it is easier and cheaper than trying to track down and jump up and down on those who abuse the system.

I had a friend from my school days, he was a senior compliance officer for HMRC, when I asked him why HMRC vigorously pursued those who declared their income but did not vigorously pursue those working for cash and did not declare their earnings. His answer was our policy is to pursue only those whose earnings we know about, it would cost to much time and money to try and track down the majority of the cash in hand merchants - so we stick to the easy options.

The point I am trying to make is, that I think that mindset is epidermic in, all government departments & agencies, involved in payment of benefits and collection
of taxes.