Benefit Changes

I have been a Liberal Democrat supporter for many years but I'm a shamed to tell that to anyone any more that I meet. Once I would have happily put my hand up in a room full people and be proud to say I have voted for them in all but one election since I was eligible to. Today I think what they are doing with the Conservatives is criminal and the both leaders are acting without thought for the people of this country. 

I have a number of friends and people I have known over the years that have been on state benefits because they are disabled in some kind of way.  They depend on these benefits to eat and keep warm and in doing so they live from one payment of incapacity benefit to the next. Without it they wouldn't have places to live or food to put in their mouths. It not that these people don't want to work, it just that they can't work because their conditions stop them from working in a normal sense. 

This Government is under going a massive review of all the people on incapacity benefit at the moment. It is doing this in order to slash the numbers of people claiming this money and moving them onto other benefits that will give them less money to live on and require them to find work. The logic of the move is clear given the mess the Banks have left us in with their greed, however the methods employed to do this are draconian at best.

I can see the need to catch out the cheats but because of the numbers of people they are having access they are not even using Doctors to check these people and their conditions out. Instead they are using nurse practitioners rather than people with experience in the field and advanced diagnostic skills. This is leading to a number of people being incorrectly accessed and losing their benefit and having to go to appeal which takes six months. This is made worse by the way they are stopping the benefits leaving people with no money for weeks on end. What they have been doing is retrospectively stopping people benefits from their last payment and then telling them ten days after that payment was made. 

This stopping of payments retrospectively is causing great hardship these people that live on a hand to mouth existence as it is. They don't have savings and by the time they are told they have lost their benefits are almost out of money and waiting for then next payment. They are told they should immediately claim job seekers allowance, which is all well and good, but with new claims taking around four weeks to process they are left with no money at all to live on. This is leading to a lot of distress for these people some of whom have conditions that make them so anxious and depressed they are unable to even fill out the forms. 

Is this anyway to treat people in the modern age? We created a benefits system in order that people that are disabled are not out begging on the streets, so that all have at least some money to survive from day to day even if it is on the breadline. So why do we all allow that system to fail people by taking away their benefits when they have done nothing wrong and make them suffer? It is the Government that has created this mess because they haven't thought what it does to peoples lives when they take away peoples money in this way. The least they could have done was be fair and have a system in place that gave these people money to live on while they changed benefits, not take money away for weeks and expect people with disabilities to live on nothing.

This Governments duty of care to the people that elected it sucks. The people on benefits and the poor are going to become "Cameron and Clegg's forgotten millions". They are the ones that are going to be made to pay for all the mess created by the greedy Banks.