CCR-PUBLICSECTOR CCR-PS We will work quickly to implement
these changes and base our social security system on how best to support people and tackle inequalities and not on crude opportunities to save money. We uncovered depression caused
by an investigation into stopped ESA payments after care package payments were wrongly interpreted as personal savings. One respondent said: “I felt like I was a criminal, I was really depressed for a while, and really paranoid, the fact that they had looked into my bank accounts and I didn’t even know, I thought well what else are they doing, am I [under surveillance]? “I am ok now, but at the time I was
just really stressed, and I did not deal with it very well, and I was just hating my disability, and hating the fact that I was on benefits.” There were also mistakes with
transitions between benefits causing gaps in payments. A respondent said: “We were not told that ESA had been successful, we did not know what was happening at all... then all of a sudden we went and there was no money in our bank account, so we phoned them and asked why there was no money in our account... and they said the Incapacity Benefit claim was closed. We were given a number to phone for some centre, who were a bit snooty and cheeky about it, and they said you
should have received a letter, but the first we knew about it was when there was no money in the account.” There was uncertainty about timing of
future changes: “It is always in the back of your mind that it is coming, and it is going to have to be dealt with. And the
know how it would work. I have been called in to have these back-to-work meetings and the woman I got last time said I do not know why we are even reviewing you. I said you find me a job that can work around [daughter’s needs], and she kind of laughed. Fair
The UK government’s austerity agenda and benefit cuts are having a very damaging effect on people in Scotland
constant moving, I wish when they said they were doing it two years ago they just got on with it, rather than drag it out and keep moving it and moving it. Who the hell knows when it is coming? But it is been a constant hassle for people all this time. Very unfair. “You cannot say, well, if I do this I will
be ok for the next year, you cannot know that, because things are changing so often, which makes it hard to relax.” And an incompatibility of caring for
a disabled child and employment, and burden of participating in work preparation activity was found. A respondent said: “Let them get up during the night and all the rest of it and barely have a night’s sleep, and see if they do not think that is an actual job. We have got it into a routine now and it works, but if [husband] went back to work or I went back to work, I do not
enough I know it is my responsibility to look after my child, but it is hard going, and when you have got the pressures of the unemployment calling you in, and I have got to go 30 odd miles there and back, and then hospital appointments back and forth, and then you have got the added stress of being called into stupid meetings like that... I think for the work we do, we deserve that sixty pounds.” The Scottish Government commissioned
Edinburgh Napier University to carry out the Welfare Reform Tracking Study, with interviews with participants carried out between September 2013 and March 2015. CCR-PS
Alex Neil is Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Communities and Pensioners’ Rights
Alex.Neil.msp@
scottish.parliament.uk
June 2015
www.CCR-PublicSector.com
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