Incapable

I have been arguing for Universal Credit since I cannot remember when. There should be a single form of payment, called and providing Social Security, and fixed permanently at half median earnings, however much that happened to be from financial year to financial year. It would cost next to nothing to administer. Like, for example, free public transport. Or free prescriptions, free eye and dental treatment, and free hospital parking.

But the Government has not only set an entirely non-clinical weekly target for the number of people to be taken off Incapacity Benefit, as everyone still calls it. It has also engaged a private company to handle the matter (one of several the public funding of whose lavishly remunerated CEOs is practically limitless), and fifty per cent of its rulings are already overturned on appeal, with that figure rising to eighty per cent where there is proper assistance from the CAB or some such. It would be one hundred per cent if the process had not physically and mentally exhausted most of those who were subject to it.

IB-as-was is seriously hard to get, and DLA is almost impossible. Anyone who manages it really does need it. Anyone who didn't would long before have given up trying, as in fact does many a person who needs it but is too ill to carry on with the process. If anyone is shocked that quite so many people are now on these things, then they need to ask why quite so many people are now that ill.

I would be stunned if a thousand people lost entitlement at the end of all of this, shocked if five hundred did, surprised if one hundred did, and entirely unsurprised if the effects of the new procedures actually caused the number to go up. The question is why that many people are now that ill. How has Britain changed since the Seventies? And whose fault is that?

Meanwhile, the clearance of the working poor out of city centres and out of the entire South East is to go ahead after all. How green with envy must Tony Blair and David Miliband be.