Carer Watch have received the following answers to questions we asked of these groups.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you with the answers to the questions. These are the answers from both charities and do come back to us with any questions.
1. Do you believe CA should be kept seperate from the main benefit system?
We believe that carers’ benefits should be raised, that more carers should be eligible for benefits and that more effort should be made to increase uptake of carers’ benefits. We also think that more should be done to help carers who wish to find and maintain work alongside smaller, more manageable caring roles and we would like to see more flexibility in the benefits system so that carers were not penalised when they take up part time work. When any proposals are made to change the benefit system that might affect carers, we consult with our networks of Carers’ Centres and Crossroads Care schemes to gain the opinions of carers and base our response on that. We have not canvassed opinion on the issue of whether CA should remain separate, but we know that any changes that risk lowering rather than raising carers’ benefits would be very unpopular with the hundreds of thousands of carers to whom we offer support.
2. What are your thoughts about the proposal that was deferred, of moving carers to a modified version of JSA?
We campaigned against that proposal which was part of the Department of Work & Pensions Green Paper July 08 – ‘No one written off’. We put our objections to the then Secretary of State James Purnell MP at a meeting with him just a few days before he announced that the proposals would be dropped from the White Paper published December 2008.
3. The govt has mentioned in the Green paper for Social Care that ‘some’ disability benefits ‘may’ move to local authorities to help fund care, Do you see this as a step forward or a negative move for those needing care, if such a proposal became a reality.
We have not finished our consultation with carers and our Networks on the Green Paper yet. We know that some Carers’ Centres and Crossroads Care schemes are still holding meetings with local carers. However, many carers have made their objections to these proposals known and we would include this in our official response to Government.
We do think that Attendance Allowance, for instance, offers the type of freedom and control that the Government is trying to encourage through personal budgets and we are concerned that the Attendance Allowance budget would not be moved to provide other kinds of early intervention and preventative support for those who do not meet high eligibility thresholds, but might instead disappear into councils’ budgets. We are also concerned that social care packages are lower if there is a carer, those pepole with carers would not receive an increase in social care support equivalent to what they had lost in AA value.
4. Do you believe that the option of funding social care in the future through General taxation should have been left on the table to ensure a true debate took place?.
Yes. The social care funding ‘gap’ is a fraction of the money spent on other policy areas, including the NHS. We recognise that in consultations the public have been keen on the idea of fully funded social care but reluctant to see taxes raised, but we would have preferred this option to have been fully part of the debate.
Gordon
Joint Policy & Parliamentary Officer
The Princess Royal Trust for Carers and Crossroads Care
9 November 2009 at 12:35 |
The following comment was made by
Alan Wheatley, Green Party (http://www.greenparty.org.uk/) Disability Spokesperson Says: October 30th, 2009 at 10:45 am
In relation to qn4:
Taxation is a means of people putting money back into the system. Yet many disadvantaged people who do not put money back into the system contribute to society through the savings that their volunteering makes to public spending. I know people aged 60+ who can barely read but would have progressed to greater independence had there been sufficient investment in lifelong learning. Since I attended a govt-funded audio-typing course in 1980, I have observed diminishing per person spending on undergraduate finance and govt-funded training courses for people on state-benefits.
There are huge differences between the quality of education the current government got when at university and what undergraduates face these days. Exacerbating the problem, vast numbers of undergraduates get into huge debt while govt-policy emphasises ‘low unemployment’ at the expense of true consideration for undergraduates.
This was emphasised for me when a govt-funded training provider with ‘Positive About Disabled People’ award status [from govt] responded to my objection in year 2000 that with my learning difficulty, I would not be able to complete the course in six weeks with no guarantee of a work placement. Micro-Tech responded that I had passed the entry test for the course, and the course length had been 12 weeks until the govt insisted that the training provider halve the length of the course “to double the numbers of throughput from the dole queue.” (Course participants would not feature in the numbers of people ‘unemployed and signing on’.)
I am deeply concerned that there may well be links between the inadequate levels of statutory support in education, etc may well contribute to the rise in early-onset dementia that has been reported in Community Care magazine. And now we have increased ‘conditionality’ for ESA and JSA claimants while the assessors of individual need are underqualified and motivated by bonuses and/or ’savings to the public purse’. (Many local authorities skew the number and level of children’s need assessments according to their budgets, it has been argued.)
Also, the WEEKLY ‘earnings disregard’ for single people age 25+ now less than the HOURLY national minimum wage. (It has remained at £5 per week since 1988, while earnings disregards for Incapacity Benefit have risen to boost the incentive for IB claimants to develop greater employment prospects.) Consequently, with under-staffing in JSA admin offices, many workers whose gross income is less than the JSA level endure the discomfort of waiting weeks for their benefit top-up levels to be calculated. When expenses of working are taken into consideration, volunteers are better treated than JSA claimants doing such important work as adult social care.
And although the ‘earnings disregard’ for claimants of Carers Allowance are greater than for JSA claimants, Carers Allowance is shockingly low.
By contrast, consider the earnings of someone like Simon Cowell or Jonathan Ross. (Especially as the latter’s income is funded largely through TV licence payments.) Even after paying tax and national insurance, do they really need what is left of their income in a vastly unequal society?