Today, Helen Whately will set out her plans to address the purported problem of 150,000 people in receipt of sickness benefits worth £5,000 annually when the Government had no idea why, since there had supposedly been no diagnosis and there was no evidence on file, with the DWP just handing out £770 million of public money every year.
Try it. Try getting five grand like that. I'll wait. If the DWP has lost the paperwork, then that is not the claimant's fault. But there certainly had to have been paperwork, and a very great deal of it. The assessment is not of specific conditions, but of specific needs, so 150,000 people might have no listed specific condition, such as only a doctor could diagnose, but unless they had jumped through endless hoops to prove their needs, then they would not be receiving a penny. And it can never be said too many times that PIP is an in-work benefit, without which large numbers of disabled people would be unable to work.
Ask a psychiatrist, as I have. There is no such thing as "mild depression" or "mild anxiety", and politicians or journalists, as such, are not qualified to judge these things. Every condition with which you had been diagnosed would be on your forms, but you cannot get benefits for constipation, or tennis elbow, or whatever. Again, try it.
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