Organised The Unorganisable

John McTernan writes:

The government is currently losing a war – a long slow war of attrition. I don’t mean the constant flow of voters, councillors, members and activists from the Tories to Ukip.

It’s a far less publicised struggle, and one that is far more damaging for the Tories – their battle with the disability movement.

In all his fanfare about “welfare reform”, Iain Duncan Smith has lost connection with reality.

Universal credit is his flagship programme. When he announced it in 2011 he promised that by the beginning of September 2.5 million people would be on it, receiving “universal credit in place of jobseeker’s allowance, employment support allowance, housing benefit, working tax credit and child tax credit”.

The actual figure? It’s 8,500. At this rate, it would take 3,000 years to transfer the entire caseload.

What is astonishing is neither the brass neck of Duncan Smith nor his sheer incompetence, but the fact that this is nowhere close to the biggest Department for Work and Pensions failure.

For that we must turn to the key disability benefits – employment and support allowance (ESA) and personal independence payment (PIP). The first is merely a disaster, the second is a tragedy for claimants.

ESA – the successor to invalidity benefit and incapacity benefit – has long been a target of cross-party reform.

Reform that worked because its focus was getting people into work by diverting them before they landed on the benefit itself.

This was successful and as the flow of new claimants fell, the pool of current claimants gradually fell too.

Successful change in social security is always slow and gradual. Duncan Smith thought otherwise – he decided to test every single ESA claimant and, in effect, drive them off the benefit or into work.

Knowing DWP civil servants didn’t have the capacity to execute his plans, he adopted his characteristic approach. He gave an impossible task to the private sector.

Atos was the mug that took on the project – one it has been unable to deliver, ultimately because of the policy – which is why, sensibly, it is handing back the keys to the DWP.

No one can do the job Duncan Smith wants done because the disability movement has got his number.

Essentially, the Tories have organised the unorganisable.

People who are long-term sick and disabled have never before had unity or solidarity. Those with physical disabilities or mental health problems have, but not the claimants with the lingering ailments that have kept them out of work.

But faced with the new tests, they have fought back.

Talk to frontline Atos workers, or to the Atos doctors, and one message comes through strongly – claimants know the system, the tests and the questions better than they do.

The result? A “reform” designed to drive down numbers claiming ESA has led to the first increase in numbers for a decade. Some reform. And it has left around 700,000 people waiting for an ESA assessment.

But even that’s not the worst failure.

The government’s replacement for disability living allowance (DLA) – PIP – was introduced in April last year. Since then, only 84,000 of 349,000 new claims have had a decision made.

Not surprising when you investigate.

DLA was an excellent benefit – brought in by the Tory minister Tony Newton – designed to meet, only partially, the additional costs of disability.

It’s paid to you whether you are in work or not because the additional costs of disability are always there.

PIP’s purpose – explicitly stated by the coalition – is to cut spend by 20%. No argument that the need is illusory. No pretence that there’s cheating. Just a cut – plain and simple.

This cannot hold.

Over a quarter of a million claimants are getting nothing because their claims haven’t been assessed – a number equivalent to the population of Derby.

Add to that the ESA backlog and you get nearly a million – a city almost as big as Birmingham.

That’s the number of people locked out of their rights, with more to come – the Tories want to tackle all DLA claimants after the next election.

The first casualty has been Atos and Duncan Smith wants it to take the blame.

But the people cutting disability benefits are the government, not the hired help.

And it’s the government that the disability movement has in its sights.

The question is – will mainstream politics notice?