Russell
Fleet
ALIVE AND KICKING
BEWARE THE BEAN COUNTERS
So British Summer Time has finally started, and along with it, the annual
‘benefit claimant’ bashing season. Back in March we had the same,
tired old mantra: “It’s not fair that there are all these perfectly
healthy gay men with HIV, who all get full Disability Living Allowance (DLA)
for life, having a ball, while the rest of us are dying in the gutter because
we had the bad luck to be assessed after the rules changed in 1995.”
Once again, much reference to ‘these people’ as if ‘they’
are some distinct and identifiable sub-group that ‘we’ can point
to, isolate and eradicate, thus solving the problem for the
rest of ‘us’. Any asylum seeker reading this will know how depressing
that sort of attitude is, and where it can lead.
According to the Department for Work and Pensions
website, there were just over 2.6 million people claiming DLA at all rates
in the UK as of the end of August 2004. How many of those have HIV? Well,
the site lists a range of primary
disabling conditions and Aids is among them, so I guess that’s the shorthand.
The number receiving DLA on that basis is 7,100. I got my calculator out and
did the maths. It comes to 0.27 per cent, just over a quarter of one per cent
of the total.
I’m all for targeting areas of massive unnecessary overspend in any
Government department, so how about we start with the cost of going to war
and maintaining the illegal occupation of another sovereign state which posed
no threat to us?
But if that’s too party political for you, let’s just stick with
who gets DLA. Here’s a breakdown by condition: arthritis has 522,400
claimants; mental health has 334,300 plus a further 252,500 for learning difficulties;
back ailments has 229,200 claimants; and finally, 363,300 claimants for conditions
defined as ‘other’. And that’s by no means a complete list.
If
cutting government waste is important, then it’s important to target
action where it will achieve the most significant results. The small proportion
of the 7,100 people in receipt of HIV-related DLA who get the higher rates
for life might be an easy target for the ill-informed and the jealous. But
in strategic terms they hardly rank up there with Saddam’s palace during
the Battle for Baghdad, do they? And would you want to be the treasury official
that goes in to see Gordon Brown to tell him that, with the resources of an
entire division of Government doctors at your disposal over the last year,
you’ve managed to shave just over a quarter of one per cent off the
social
security budget? You could kiss the MBE goodbye, for sure.
I have no doubt that there are some people in receipt of benefits of whatever
kind who have managed to pull a bit of a fast one, and that understandably
raises a few hackles among the righteous and upstanding citizens of Catflushire.
However, if people are labouring under the misapprehension that once all these
‘benefit bunnies’ and ‘DLA queens’ are flushed out,
the Benefits Agency goose will lay a DLA golden egg and everyone else will
get all they ever wished for, they are sorely mistaken. I know it seems like
common sense to say that there’s only so much money in the pot, so if
some people are getting more then others must be getting less, but in this
case it’s simply not true. The bean counters at the DWP don’t
sit there totting up the difference between claimant A with HIV and claimant
B with HIV and shaving money off one to give to the other. Nor do they shift
money between conditions. So does anyone really want to start taking potshots
at people with chronic conditions other than our own? Anyone know how many
of them are having a ball at the taxpayers’ expense while ‘we’
suffer in poverty? Didn’t think so…
If you want to be radical and stand up for something, why not try this? How
about we all fight together to get what we’re all entitled to? How about
we stop buying into the fallacy that there’s only so much to go round
and anything ‘they’ get means less for ‘us’. How about
we stop attacking each other because of who we sleep with, how long we’ve
been infected, and how much money we get off the government? How about we
get off our arses and take on board the motto Am I Doing Something? And make
it something other than just sniping from the sidelines because ‘we’
feel hard done by – usually on someone else’s behalf? Nice idea
– let’s see if it flies, shall we?
l Download the Department for Work and Pensions’ DLA statistics at www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/asd1/dla/dla_aug04_rounded.xls
