Disability campaigners have slammed £2bn cuts to sickness benefits announced today by chancellor George Osborne as part of the comprehensive spending review.
In future, many recipients of employment and support allowance - the replacement for incapacity benefit - will only be able to claim it for a year before being moved onto the lower paying jobseeker's allowance, which is worth at least £25 a week less.
Disability Alliance director of policy Neil Coyle said: "It's very concerning." He said the work capability assessment, which determines eligiblity for ESA, was "universally seen as too tough", meaning people claiming ESA were those with significant disabilities.
The time limit will apply to people who receive ESA on the basis of past national insurance contributions and are placed in the "work-related activity group", which means that they are deemed to have some future prospect of returning to the labour market. It will not apply to people who are so severely disabled that they are deemed unable to work or to claimants who have limited savings.
There was also criticism for proposals to remove the mobility component of disability living allowance from claimants living in residential care, a move that will save £135m a year.
"This is a fundamentally unfair change that would have a hugely detrimental impact on thousands of disabled people, leaving many effectively trapped in their homes, unable to afford to go out," said Guy Parckar acting director of policy and campaigns at Leonard Cheshire Disability. "Many people in residential care already have their income capped at £20 a week once their care has been paid for and rely on this benefit to be more independent. This change will hit one of the most vulnerable groups in society and we urge the government to reconsider.”
Overall, £7bn is to be saved from the welfare bill, in what Osborne has claimed will be "the greatest reform to our welfare state for a generation".
The chancellor confirmed that a new universal credit would replace benefits and tax credits over the next two parliaments.
"The guiding rule will be this: it will always pay to work. Those who get work will be better off than those who don't," Osborne said.
People on disability living allowance will be excluded from the new benefit cap which will prevent those on benefits from receiving more than the average income of working families.
Further details of the universal credit will be set out in a Department for Work and Pensions White Paper.
The reform will be complemented by a new work programme, in which private and third sector providers would be paid for helping people back to work on the basis of the savings they create for the taxpayer.
The Treasury said savings from withdrawing child benefit from higher-rate taxpayers would fund above-inflation increases in child tax credit, ensuring that "the overall impact of the spending review will have no measurable impact on child poverty in the next two years".
Osborne said benefit bills had risen by 45% under the previous government, with welfare totalling one-third of public spending.
Carole Cochrane, chief executive of the Princess Royal Trust for Carers, warned that the benefit changes could nullify the additional £2bn announced for adult social care in the CSR.
"We feel there is a real risk that support provided by social care will be wiped out by the loss of the family household income through benefit reductions," she said.
"Our latest research revealed the perilous financial situation that carers are already in; with one in three carers not wanting to wake up in the morning because of their dire financial circumstances. Carers and their families can't afford to lose any more."
http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/10/20/115625/disability-gro...
PDF version Care services minister Paul Burstow has told councils that they have no excuse to cut adult social care despite yesterday's spending review delivering cuts of 26% to councils over the next four years.
Burstow pointed to the extra £2bn in annual funding for adult care identified by chancellor George Osborne as providing councils with the resources to maintain care services at current levels.
“There is no justification for local authorities to slash and burn or for local authorities to tighten eligibility as far as the settlement goes.”
None of the £2bn is ring-fenced. Half of it has been rolled up into councils' overall grant funding from government, which is being cut by 26% from 2011-15 in real terms; the other half has been given to the NHS to spend on social care services such as reablement. But there is no indication as yet that NHS commissioners will be mandated to spend the money on these services.
Social care leaders broadly welcomed the funding announced yesterday but have warned that it is unlikely to help councils manage the cuts or cope with demographic pressures that are estimated to add 4% a year to social care costs over the coming years.
However, Burstow said the extra money would provide councils with "the wherewithal to meet the demographic pressures".
His comments follow his attack on councils for announcing cuts to social care before the spending review, a move defended by the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services as being in line with ministers' projections about the spending review.
http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/10/21/115632/Paul-Burstow-C...
The government's £2bn grant for early intervention will not be enough to save many early intervention and prevention services from cuts, council leaders have warned.
The Department for Education has confirmed that the grant announced in yesterday's spending review would not be ring-fenced. The grant also includes previously nationally distributed funds for teenage pregnancy, substance misuse/alcohol misuse, young people at risk of not being in education, employment or training, or of committing antisocial behaviour.
"These will be rolled into the early intervention grant, details of which will be announced in due course. This will allow local areas to fund activities and services that meet the needs of their young people. Funding will be used only on the most effective programmes that work," a Department for Education spokeswoman said.
Stephen Jones, head of finance at the Local Government Association, told Community Care the early intervention grant was "likely to be integrated into community budgets because the first early intervention work is going to be directed at working with families with complex needs".
However, he said he was unable to say exactly what the early intervention grant would pay for.
Marion Davis, president of the Association of Children's Services, said the scale of the cuts to council budgets announced in yesterday's comprehensive spending review meant "there is no doubt there will be fewer services on offer than before".
"The protection of the schools budget and the pupil premium is, of course, welcome and councils will want to work with local schools to help them to support the most vulnerable children to achieve their potential. Directors of children's services, as part of the corporate management team, will have to argue strongly for investment in early intervention and prevention services as well as funding to meet their responsibilities to children at risk of harm given the removal of the ringfencing around funding for services for children."
She added that councils would have an even greater responsibility around child poverty given the reductions in welfare and benefits payments the Treasury had announced.
Graham Allen, Labour MP and head of the government's Early Intervention Commission, said although the grant was unlikely to be enough, he felt it was a significant shift by the government to acknowledge the need to fund early intervention.
"We all knew it was going to be carnage yesterday. I keep saying this is a battlefield and in that battlefield we're the poppy and it's my job to try and protect that poppy from the buffeting around it and yesterday I felt there was a hopeful message around early intervention.
"I'm not naive - it's not the most enormous pot of money nor is it ring-fenced. But the symbolism is important I feel and I'm hoping this will be the beginning of something new for government and I hope my review will nudge it in that direction even more."
He said the challenge would now be to ensure the money was used for early intervention. "There's a lot of people fighting very hard now to protect their projects and services and we have to be careful that we're not hijacked by everyone who will try to claim their service represents early intervention. Teenage pregnancy, for example, I would not class as an early intervention measure. It's very important but it's part of good health services and prevention services; it's not early intervention."
http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/10/21/115641/1632bn-early-i...
Local government budget cuts of 28% threaten to cancel out the extra money found by the government for social care.
Chancellor George Osborne admitted he was giving councils a tough settlement but insisted that he would give them new powers to make it easier to choose where they could make cuts.
"For local government, the deficit we have inherited means an unavoidably challenging settlement," he said. "There will be overall savings in funding to councils of 7.1% a year for four years.
"But to help councils, we propose a massive devolution of financial control."
Although the government promised £2bn extra for social care, the Department for Communities and Local Government will receive £5.6bn less each year. The majority of this would have been passed on to councils.
"This spending review will hit councils and the residents they serve very hard and will inevitably lead to cuts at the frontline," said Baroness Eaton, chairman of the Local Government Association.
"Town halls will now face extremely tough choices about which services they can keep on running. These cuts will cause real pain and anxiety for millions of people who use the services councils provide, from keeping children safe to ensuring that streets are clean."
Councils will be free to spend most of their cash how they please, rather than how the government stipulates, allowing them to decide the extent to which they prioritise care.
Ring-fencing for all revenue grants paid to councils will end next April. The number of core grants received by councils will fall from 90 to fewer than 10.
"I suspect most councils cannot afford to ring-fence social care across their organisation and cut elsewhere," said Chris Buttress, local government partner at consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Social care, despite the extra funding, will still have challenging issues to address."
Buttress said councils had gained flexibility, but there had been "political finessing" at work with the government, leaving local leaders with painful decisions on what to cut.
He said children's services would be badly hit by the overall local government spending cuts, with no headline announcement on extra money to be spent solely in the sector. However, Buttress predicted the pupil premium, given to encourage the best schools to take children from difficult backgrounds, could result in benefits to children's social care.
Andy Sawford, chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, said: "The cuts to local government budgets are huge and unprecedented. They will fundamentally alter the way that councils work and the work that councils do."
The Treasury claims local government services that protect the vulnerable will be "relatively protected", with disabled facilities grants rising with inflation and £6bn of funding for the Supported People programme over the next four years.
However, council capital projects face cuts of 45%.
http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/10/20/115629/council-budget...