25 October 2023 , 14:52
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This week I wanted to start by telling you about Claire. She’s currently in receipt of Employment and Support Allowance and a member of the North East disability charity Difference North. On the morning of the local consultation on the proposed changes to the Work Capability Assessment, Claire did a job search for working-from-home jobs on the DWP website.
She found 6,188 “home working” jobs, but when she filtered this by disability-confident employers it went down to 1,531. She then set the location to North East (where I’m also from) as many of these jobs were hybrid with days in office - it went down to 78 jobs. Claire then selected part-time and was left with just 14 jobs. Nine of them were personal assistant roles - working in someone's home - and the rest were working in care homes. It seems “home working” on the government’s job search website means working in a home not working from your own. This meant there were zero suitable jobs for Claire and other disabled people in the north east who required part time home working.
DWP minister Mel Stride told the Commons at the beginning of September “The Work Capability Assessment doesn’t reflect how someone with a disability or health condition might be able to work from home, yet we know many disabled people do just that”. So why, when the DWP’s own jobcentre website doesn’t have any suitable working-from-home jobs, are they pushing the rubbish that working from home means more disabled people can get jobs now?
Although the pandemic was of course devastating to disabled people, from a professional point of view it was when my career actually took off. It’s just a shame that it took a deadly virus for me to be allowed to do jobs I previously had been told had to be done in an office (usually) in London.
However, Covid denial and “getting back to normal” have meant that employers are taking away working from home or making it hybrid working, which often means being required to work in inaccessible overstimulating environments at least one of two days a week.
8 money changes coming in February including Universal Credit and passport fees
The evidence the DWP are using to justify these proposed reforms is that 20% of people in the Support Group or on LCWA element said they “would like to work at some point in the future”. However, that's ignoring the 80% who said they wouldn’t or can’t. There's also the fact that just 4% of people said they felt they would be able to work now if the right job and the right support were available.
There’s also the fact that many disabled people can’t work from home or do jobs that are more likely to be WFH. These jobs are much more popular in sectors where jobs require higher education and senior roles, roles made for people who went to Oxbridge and will never even qualify for UC some might say. By comparison, lower-paying, less skilled roles are much less likely to be compatible with working from home. You also have to factor in that many disabled and lower-income people can’t use or don’t have access to computers. 1 in 5 households in the UK earning under 25k have no internet access at all, this rises to 1 in 3 for disabled people and then 32% of disabled people don't have basic computer literacy.
This week the Joseph Rowntree Foundation revealed that approximately 3.8 million people experienced destitution in 2022. This has doubled since 2017 and nearly tripled for children at one million. The charity found that nearly three-quarters of destitute people received welfare benefits.
So why, when we are using words like “destitute”, are the government trying to force long-term disabled people who are deemed to have a “low capability for work” off these already meagre benefits and into unsuitable work that could likely kill them?
Of course this is also all happening whilst the government are casually blaming disabled and unemployed people for the cost of living crisis via their incessant rhetoric that we cost taxpayers billions are year. Though we must let bankers off and let them have as big a bonus as they can. They’re the true victims after all, not the two million people on universal credit who will be forced to find work or left to starve if they don’t.
But then it’s much easier to turn a population against those who can’t fight back than those with all the power.
The DWP consultation on the WCA ends on 30th October, DPAC have created a template to help reduce how energy consuming it is which you can find here. Please fill it in if you can, whether you’re disabled or not. We need your voices.